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| Goal of Exercise Title |
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To encourage students to see the various parts of the argument (claim, data, and warrant) and to use those parts in order to evaluate arguments.
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| Method of Exercise Title |
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Present students with arguments which you either create, or find in local newspapers, and have them identify the claim data and warrant. For example, if you presented the argument “the lesson today was very difficult, so I’m sure we learned a lot” then students could identify that the claim is “we learned a lot,” while the data is “the lesson today was very difficult,” so the implied warrant is “difficulty causes us to learn.” Alternately, consider the quotation from a Karl Popper Internet debate:
“Terrorist groups and similar phenomena can use the Internet in many ways...Terrorist groups can also make propaganda on the Internet. In anybody wants to doubt it, I would recommend that they read the propaganda on http://burn.ucsd.edu/%7Eats/mrta.htm the Web Site pages of Tupaka Amarua, a terrorist organization responsible for recent events in Lima as well as for many bomb attacks throughout the whole of Peru and Bolivia.”
Using this example, students could identify the claim as “terrorist groups use the internet,” the data as “the Tupaka Amarua group uses the internet” and the implied warrant that “the Tupaka Amarua group is a representative example of other terrorist groups who use the Internet. The usefulness of performing this kind of analysis is to identify the potential weakness of an argument, often contained in the warrant. Is “difficulty” enough for us to conclude that a lesson was educational? Is the named site for Tupaka Amarua really representative of other groups? Analysis is the first step of criticism. |
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