Philosophy Paper - Kelly Jacobs only.

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Writing a Good Philosophy Paper

A good paper will:

1) Make a single clear argument

2) Be organized by the structure of that argument

3) Support the main argument with sub-arguments and evidence

4) Not include superfluous information

5) Include substantial objections to the main argument and responses to those objections

6) Have proper grammar, spelling, sourcing, etc…

The single most important part of a good paper in any discipline, but especially in philosophy, is the quality of the argument. The evaluation of a paper orients around an evaluation of the argument and the ability of the paper to support and defend that argument. This means that in order to write a good paper, you need to know what an argument is – in the technical sense – and you need to know how arguments are structured in order to organize the paper around that argument.

What is an Argument?

Most of the time when people say “argument”, what they mean is two people disagreeing about something or maybe someone yelling at someone else. But it is important to understand that this is not what philosophers mean when they use the term argument. In a technical sense, an argument is a set of statements, one of which is mean to be supported by the others.

Consider the following two examples:

Example 1: You should never rinse chicken in water before cooking it. The FDA says that chicken is properly prepared to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria. The FDA also warns that any bacteria present will be killed in the cooking process, but that rinsing the chicken first is likely to spread that bacteria around the kitchen.

Example 2: Rinsing raw chicken spreads bacteria when water splashes against the meat and throws the bacteria around the sink. Often tiny invisible droplets of water carry even further spreading bacteria to the counters around the sink.

Example 1 is an argument but Example 2 is not. Example 1 tries to convince you that you should never rinse chicken before cooking it. Example 2, however, is only trying to explain how bacteria spread, but it is not trying to convince you that bacteria are spread. Arguments are things that try to convince you to believe that some claim is true.

Recall the distinction between “believing that” and “believing in”. Arguments are things that try to give you reasons to “believe that” some claim is true. Anything that does not try to convince you to believe that some claim is true, is not an argument. When you are writing a paper, you should always be trying to convince your reader to believe that some statement is true. This is what it means to say that your paper is making an argument. This is the most important feature of your paper.

How are Arguments Structured?

Arguments – sets of statements that try to convince you that some claim is true – rely on a certain kind of structure which will help you to organize your paper in a way that makes it very readable, and more importantly, very convincing for your reader. Remember that arguments are made up of “sets of statements”. Specifically, there are two kinds of statements. There is the statement that you are meant to be convinced is true, this is called the conclusion . Then there are all the statements that are meant to support the conclusion. That is to say, there are all the statements that are meant to convince you that the conclusion is true. These supporting (or convincing) statements are called the premises .

To show how arguments are organized into premises and conclusions, philosophers use what is called “standard form” or “premise-conclusion form”. This involves taking all of the statements in an argument and putting them into a numbered list. The premises are listed first and then the conclusion is listed last, usually alongside the word ‘Therefore’ in order to indicate that you should now thing that “THEREFORE, the conclusion is true”. Understanding how this organization works is very important to understanding how you should structure your paper. Let’s use the argument about rinsing chicken to see how this works.

In normal paragraph form, like you’d write in a paper, the argument looks like this:

You should never rinse chicken in water before cooking it. The FDA says that chicken is properly prepared to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria. The FDA also warns that any bacteria present will be killed in the cooking process, but that rinsing the chicken first is likely to spread that bacteria around the kitchen.

To put that same argument in premise-conclusion form, we need to make a numbered list of each of the statements in the argument. That would look like this:

1) You should never rinse chicken in water before cooking it.

2) The FDA says that chicken is properly prepared to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria.

3) The FDA also warns that any bacteria present will be killed in the cooking process

4) The FDA says that rinsing chicken first is likely to spread that bacteria around the kitchen.

We should notice that the third sentence of the paragraph actually contains two separate statements. The first is about bacteria being killed in the cooking process. The second is about bacteria being spread around the kitchen. Even though it appears as a single sentence in the paragraph, when putting the argument in premise-conclusion form, we should separate them. This gives us a complete numbered list of all of the statements in the argument.

The next step, is to identify which of the statements in the conclusion. That is to say, which of the statements are supposed to be convinced is true because of what the other statements say. In this argument, the conclusion appears first. It is statement 1 in the list above. Because the FDA tells us the information in statements 2, 3, and 4, we are meant to be convinced that statement 1 is true. Now that we know which statement is the conclusion, we know that all of the other statements are premises. Now we can reorder the list so the premises come first and the conclusion comes last. The complete argument in premise-conclusion form looks like this:

1) The FDA says that chicken is properly prepared to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria.

2) The FDA also warns that any bacteria present will be killed in the cooking process

3) The FDA says that rinsing chicken first is likely to spread that bacteria around the kitchen. x

4) Therefore, you should never rinse chicken in water before cooking it.

How Should You Organize Your Paper?

Now that we see how arguments are structured, we can understand how we should organize our paper. Normally a paper is organized into three major parts – the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. Often your English professors will ask for a paper outline which demonstrates this structure for your paper. We’ll use that same outline, but we’ll use the argument to tell us what goes in each section of the paper. Let’s start with a basic paper outline like this:

A. Introduction

B. Body

C. Conclusion

In philosophy, like in many other disciplines, the introduction to the paper just tells us what the subject matter of the paper is and what the main argument is that you are making about that subject matter. The conclusion of the paper just gives a summary of the main argument and sometimes tries to draw important real-world implications. So, we could start filling out the structure of our paper by filling in our outline like this:

A. Introduction

i. Rinsing chicken is important because we are concerned about the spread of bacteria

ii. Statement of the main argument

B. Body

C. Conclusion

i. Restatement of the main argument

ii. Application to home cooking – more dangerous to rinse chicken than to not rinse it

Our outline is already well on its way to giving us a good organizational structure for our paper.

Of course, the most interesting work in a paper is done in the body. But now that we have an argument clearly outlined, the body of our paper is very easy to organize. We need a section of the paper for each premise and the conclusion. So, our paper will be outlined a bit like this:

A. Introduction

i. Rinsing chicken is important because we are concerned about the spread of bacteria

ii. Statement of the main argument

B. Body

i. Premise 1 – FDA says chicken is properly prepared to prevent bacteria growth

ii. Premise 2 – FDA says any bacteria will be killed in cooking process

iii. Premise 3 – FDA says rinsing chicken could spread bacteria around the kitchen

iv. Conclusion – You should not rinse chicken before cooking it

C. Conclusion

i. Restatement of the main argument

ii. Application to home cooking – more dangerous to rinse chicken than to not rinse it

At this point, we just need to know what should be said in each section of the body. That part is actually pretty simple. Remember the goal of an argument is to convince your reader that the conclusion is true. You do that, by giving them reasons in the form of premises. So, you just need to convince your reader that your premises are true and then explain to them why that means that your conclusion is true. But, how do you convince your reader that your premises are true?

To convince your reader that your premises are true, you need to use sub-arguments. That is, smaller arguments which convince your reader that the premises are true. This could be done by providing evidence from outside sources or by constructing argument just like we did above, but which have the premise as the conclusion. In our paper on rinsing chicken before cooking it, we might include evidence from the FDA’s website, or perhaps from scientific research on the spread of bacteria, etc… So, our outline might look something like this:

A. Introduction

i. Rinsing chicken is important because we are concerned about the spread of bacteria

ii. Statement of the main argument

B. Body

i. Premise 1 – FDA says chicken is properly prepared to prevent bacteria growth

a) FDA monitors standards of meat production

b) FDA reported research on the presence of bacteria in raw meat

ii. Premise 2 – FDA says any bacteria will be killed in cooking process

a) FDA pamphlet on poultry preparation explain why it should be cooked to a certain internal temperature

b) FDA reports research on temperatures at which bacteria can survive

iii. Premise 3 – FDA says rinsing chicken could spread bacteria around the kitchen

a) Research in the UK demonstrates bacteria is spread when raw meat is rinsed

b) FDA pamphlets report supporting research with the same results

iv. Conclusion – You should not rinse chicken before cooking it

C. Conclusion

i. Restatement of the main argument

ii. Application to home cooking – more dangerous to rinse chicken than to not rinse it

But what about the conclusion? What should we say about that? Well, again, remember that the goal of the main argument is to convince us that the conclusion is true. So what we need to do is to explain why the premises being true should convince us that the conclusion is true. We answer the question, “Why does premise 1 being true mean that the conclusion is true?” and we repeat that for each premise. For our paper, we would ask, “Why does the FDA saying chicken is prepared to prevent bacteria growth mean that we should not rinse chicken before cooking it?” Well, the answer is, rinsing it would be a waste of time if there is nothing that needs to be rinsed off. We repeat that process for each premise and add it to our outline like this: