The structure of an argument is the relationship between the premises and conclusion, though this is not always clear. Some premises may either not be clearly stated or only tacitly assumed due to a given context. For instance, consider the following argument:
If philosophy is argumentative and you need to understand philosophical prose, then you should learn to recognize and analyze arguments.
Therefore, you should learn to recognize and analyze arguments.
The first sentence (the premise) is a conditional statement.
One way to understand a conditional is as a statement where the truth of the first part (preceded by the word 'if' and called the antecedent) is a sufficient condition for the truth of the second part (preceded by the word 'then' and called the consequent), assuming the entire conditional statement itself is true. That is, when the antecedent is found to be true, then one should understand that the consequent must also be true, given that the conditional statement itself is true. An example of a false conditional statement would be "If humans exist, then the moon is made of cheese." The antecedent is clearly true, but I hope we can agree that the consequent is clearly false. Any conditional statement with a true antecedent and a false consequent is a false conditional statement. (One should study the philosophical discipline of Logic to fully appreciate how inadequate this explanation of a conditional statement actually is.)
The second sentence is a conclusion, alleged to follow from the first.
However, the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise. There are at least two unstated assumptions. (If you think the conclusion clearly follows, you probably already agree with the unstated assumptions.) In the first paragraph I stated that philosophy is argumentative. You should recognize that statement as part of the context of this discussion - it was tacitly assumed in my simple argument - and, at least for now, accept that statement as true. Further, ask yourself whether you need to understand philosophic prose; for example, do you need to pass an introduction to philosophy course and does this need require you to understand philosophical prose? Given that your answer is yes (as I assumed since you are reading this document), we can now add those two unstated assumptions as additional premises to the argument. We have now established the truth of the antecedent and this should establish the truth of the consequent. Notice that the consequent of the conditional statement just is the conclusion of our simple argument. Thus, if the above conditional is true and the antecedent of that conditional is true, the conclusion of the argument must also be true.
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