Let's practice!

I want to share some “exercises” and general suggestions to get you started on the main aspects of argumentation.

These exercise are just hints for your personal reflection and consolidation of some concepts. They are optional and not graded.

Please note that you can can perform these exercises on a notebook or a pepar. If not specified otherwise, you don't need to post your answers in the course forum.

EXERCISE 1: “MARY DYED HER HAIR GREEN”

Take the “Mary dyed her hair green” dialogue and try to identify the arguments used in it and the “hidden assumptions” the enthymemes at work in it are based on. Then, try to come up with further ways to reply to those arguments.

Decide which side you want to support and fight for that! You may want to share in the course’s forum, to get your peers’ feedback.

EXERCISE 2: "THE TITANIC DILEMMA”

Imagine you are safely on board one of the Titanic’s life-boats, watching as the ship sinks. You are discussing with the other people on the boat: shall we go back and try to save more lives or shall we keep “safe” where we are? Brainstorm about arguments in favor of both stands (in turn: 15 minutes in favor of one, 15 minutes in favor of the other).

If you can find someone willing to do this exercise with you, take one position and ask the other person to play the “opponent”. This a small debate exercise, focused on invention.

EXERCISE 3: “IT IS AS IF”

Take a claim you would like to support and try to find arguments by analogy (the “it is as if” way).

EXERCISE 4: “ARGUMENTS’ REVERSE ENGINEERING”

Take a scientific paper and try to identify if there is any “argument” embedded in it (by analogy, of the more or less likely, of contrary, of authority…).

Exercise 5: “the going backward dialogue”

In order to train yourself to identify the major premises of enthymemes, you can perform the “going backward dialogue”. Number one: select a victim (a good friend of yours, your mother…). Start a dialogue on whatever topic you want (“How can we save humanity?” or “What should we eat for dinner?”).

Instead of moving on in the dialogue, identify the major premises of what the interlocutor says and put them into question, thus “going backward” instead of cooperating (“moving forward”). This is quite annoying for the interlocutor so I strongly suggest to stop after a while and apologize. Apart from training yourself into the identification of hidden premises (which is always useful), you will come up with interesting discoveries on what people base their everyday reasonings on (I call it their “metaphysics”)…

Discuss your findings in the forum.