A222 - Exploring Philosophy : Revised Essay Plan

Luckily bellatrix left a comment on the post about the TMA06 Essay Plan pointing out that the assignment guide points out (if read properly) that you have to concentrate on one aspect of the argument - NOT BOTH.

The assignment guide says,

This question asks you to evaluate an argument. The argument has two premises and a conclusion. For the argument to be sound, the premises need to both be true and the inference from them to the conclusion needs to be valid.

You cannot possibly discuss every aspect of the argument in the space you have available. 

This final assignment is calling for you to give a focused discussion of one or two aspects of an argument and to explain the overall implications of your discussion for that argument. How you choose to focus is up to you. Here are two possibilities, for illustration:

1. You may choose to argue that the first premise is false: citizens are sometimes obliged even to states that are broadly unjust. That by itself would be enough to show that the argument is unsound, so you would not need to discuss the second premise or the validity of the inference.
2. You may think the argument is sound, but even then you don’t need to defend all parts of the argument in detail. You could, for example, pass quite quickly over the validity question and the first premise in order to focus on responding to a possible weakness in the second premise.

But as well as focusing on one or two specific aspects of the argument you must explain the implications of your discussion for the soundness of the argument as a whole. You should do this as you go along and in a separate ‘upshot’ paragraph at or near the end of your essay. In the two examples above, your upshot paragraph might include sentences like:

1. ‘I have focused on trying to show that the first premise is false. If I am right, this is enough to show that the argument as a whole is unsound.’
2. ‘I have used the space available to argue that an apparently quite strong objection to the second premise fails. A more substantial defence of the argument would need to consider other possible objections to this or the other premise, and to defend the validity of the inference from these premises to the conclusion.’

So, I need a revised essay plan.
As I don't really think I can argue against Premise 1, and I actually disagree with Premise 2, I guess I will be concentrating on arguing that Premise 2 is False and therefore the argument is Not Sound.


Perhaps this was something that may have been discussed at the tutorial I missed, oh well, thanks to bellatrix I should be on the right track now.