The Fundamentals of Argument Analysis

Richard L. Epstein
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This series of books, Essays on Logic as The Art of Reasoning well, presents the fundamentals of logic in a style accessible to both students and scholars. The text of each essay presents a story, the main line of development of the ideas, while the notes and appendices place the research within a larger scholarly context. The essays overlap, forming a unified analysis of logic as the art of reasoning well, yet each essay is designed so that it may be read independently.

The question addressed in The Fundamentals of Argument Analysis is how we can justify our beliefs through reasoning. The first essay, "Arguments," investigates what it is that we call true or false and how we reason toward truths through arguments. A general theory of argument analysis is set out on the basis of what we can assume about those with whom we reason. The next essay, "Fallacies," explains how the classification of an argument as a fallacy can be used within that general approach. In contrast, there is no agreement on what the terms "induction" and "deduction" mean, and they are not useful in evaluating arguments, as shown in "Induction and Deduction."

In reasoning to truths, in the end we must take some claims as basic, not requiring any justification for accepting them. How we choose those claims and how they affect our reasoning is examined in "Base Claims" ... Essays in "Base Claims" include "Analogies", "Subjective Claims", "Generalizing",  "Probabilities", and "Rationality,".

This volume is meant to give a clearer idea of how to reason well, setting out methods of evaluation that are motivated in terms of our abilities and interests. At the ground of our reasoning, though, are metaphysical assumptions, too basic and too much needed in our reasoning for us to justify them through reasoning. But we can try to uncover those assumptions to see how they are important and what depends on them, which is a major them of this volume.

Other volumes in the series Essays on Logic as The Art of Reasoning Well include:
Cause and Effect, Conditionals, Explanations
Prescriptive Reasoning
Reasoning in Science and Mathematics