PHIL 2015 – Essay Guidelines Pt II
Research and Dialectical Essays

Index
Research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
Critiquing Arguments. . . . 3

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Research

Your quotes and references should come from reputable sources. On most essays these sources
will be scholarly books and journal articles. Many disciplines have a special database that
enables you to find these sources. For example, the main database for philosophical sources is
called the Philosopher’s Index. The Philosopher’s Index lists every book or article that has been
written on a philosophical topic since 1940 along with an abstract that gives you an overview of
the text. If you don’t know whether your disciple has a similar database, ask your professor or
TA. Because many databases are set up in a similar manner, I provide information about how to
use the Philosopher’s Index below.

Because our essay deals with local issues, you won’t be able to find scholarly books and articles
on these specific topics. However, you might be able to find books or articles on topics that are
related to the essay questions. For, example, many of the essay questions concern freedom of
speech or freedom of religion, and there have been many books and articles written on these
topics.

Because these essays deal with local issues, you will probably have to look for unconventional
sources such as newspaper articles, online interviews, websites, reddit posts, tweets, etc.
Although these would not be appropriate sources for most essays, they can be acceptable for this
paper. Of course, some unconventional sources are better than others.

Using the Philosopher’s Index
If you want to use a scholarly database like the Philosopher’s Index, you will probably have to
access it through the York library website. I don’t know how databases for other disciplines
work, but it is probably similar to how the Philosopher’s Index works.

You can access the Philosopher’s Index by going to the York library homepage, typing
“Philosopher’s Index” in the search window and then clicking on the entry that says “available
online”

Scholarly sources are typically books, articles or collections of articles. If you have time to read
them, books can be an excellent source of information. But books are usually long, they often
deal with topics that lie outside the scope of your paper, and they are often written for specialists.

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They are usually not the best resource for students writing undergraduate essays.

Articles are an excellent resource. They are usually short (typically under 20 pages) and have a
narrow focus. Although many articles are very technical, it is usually possible to find articles that
are accessible for undergraduate students. The problem with articles is that they can be difficult
to find. If you are looking for a philosophical article, you must use the Philosopher’s Index. Once
you enter the search parameters on the Philosopher’s Index, you will get a list of references to
texts that deal with that topic. Here is an example of a reference to a journal article on the
Philosopher’s Index that came up when I typed “Plato” and “soul”:

Internalization and the Philosopher’s Best Interests in Plato’s Republic
Strabbing, Jada Twedt. Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science Vol 51, Iss 2,
(2018): 147-170

This reference tells you that this article was written by Jada Strabbing and published in 2018 in a
journal called Apeiron. If you’re lucky, the reference in the Philosopher’s Index will contain a
hyperlink that takes you directly to the article. If it doesn’t, then you will have to go back to the
York library homepage, type “Apeiron” under “eResources” and then click on the link that takes
you to the Apeiron website. You can then use the information provided in the reference to find
and access this article.

In addition to books and individual articles, there are also collections of articles published
together in a single book. These collections can be very useful. The articles in a collection are
usually very high quality, deal with a narrow topic or range of topics, and frequently address
claims made by other articles in the same collection. However, there aren’t always collections of
articles on your topic.

Bibliographies
Your bibliography should be organized alphabetically by the author’s last name. Here is the
bibliographical reference for a book:

Irwin, T. Aristotle’s First Principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Here is an example of an article:

Strabbing, Jada Twedt. 2018. “Internalization and the Philosopher’s Best Interests in Plato’s
Republic” in Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 51 (2): 147-170.

Here is an example of a work from a collection of articles:

Owen, G.E.L. “Logic and Metaphysics in Some Early Works of Aristotle” in Aristotle and Plato
in the Mid-Fourth Century. Edit by I Düring et al. Gotenborg: Almqvist and Wiksel,
1960.

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General Comments about Critiquing Arguments

The information in this section is an overview of the ARG system that we discussed in class. A
cogent argument is one that has premisses which are:

Acceptable
Relevant to the conclusion
Provide sufficient Grounds for accepting the conclusion

You can attack an argument by showing that it fails one or more of these conditions.

Acceptability:
In some ways acceptability is the easiest condition to grasp and the hardest to attack. Most people
recognize that if a premiss is not acceptable, then the argument is flawed. However, many
students find it difficult to show that a claim is unacceptable. They sometimes assume that,
because they don’t accept it, it must be wrong. One way to understand acceptability is in terms of
controversy. A premiss should be something that is uncontroversial: if it is controversial, it
should have been backed up with a sub-argument. So consider the following argument:

P1. At the moment of conception god puts a soul into the zygote (fetus)
P2. It is wrong to destroy anything that has a soul
C3. It is wrong to abort a fetus

This is not a good argument because P1 is not acceptable. It is a bad argument even if you
happen to agree with P1. P1 is a very controversial claim — there are a lot of people who
disagree with it. If someone wanted to argue in this way, they should have included a sub-
argument for this premiss.

So if you can show that there is widespread or authoritative disagreement about a certain premiss,
then you have grounds for rejecting that claim. Please note that widespread or authoritative
disagreement only allows you to reject an unsupported premiss. This is not grounds for rejecting
a conclusion. So, even though C3 is also controversial, I cannot reject it for this reason. If I reject
C3, it is because there is a problem with the argument that supports it.

Relevance
There are two kinds of relevance: internal and contextual. Internal relevance concerns the
relationship between the premisses and the conclusion of an argument. An argument that fails on
internal relevance is one where the truth of the premiss does not count towards the truth
of the conclusion, for example:

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P1. Cats hate dogs
C2. God exists

Although P1 is true, its truth doesn’t count towards the truth of the conclusion (it also doesn’t
count against it). Most fallacies (ad hominem, ad populem, etc.) are fallacies of internal
relevance

Contextual relevance concerns the relationship between an argument as a whole and its ostensive
purpose. The strawman and red herring fallacies are fallacies of contextual relevance. When a
person attacks a weaker version of someone else’s argument, then there is a disconnect between
the argument (which refutes the strawman) and its ostensive purpose (refuting the real “man”).
The strawman fallacy is particularly dangerous on dialectical essays. If you attack someone else’s
argument, make sure that you have represented that argument correctly.

Sufficient Grounds
The idea behind this condition can be illustrated quite easily with an example like the following:

P1. This piece of paper is white
C2. All pieces of paper are white

The premiss is acceptable, and the truth of the premiss counts towards the truth of the conclusion.
But the premiss doesn’t give us enough of a reason to accept the conclusion.

Unfortunately, although the principle behind the G condition is fairly easy to grasp, applying this
principle to actual cases is difficult for students who do not have much training in argument. The
difficulty is compounded by the fact that different types of argument have different standards of
sufficiency. Perhaps the best way to deal with this condition is to ask yourself if there are any
grounds for a rational person to accept the premisses and believe that the premisses are relevant
to the conclusion, without accepting the conclusion. In the case of the paper example, we can see
that using a sample of 1 to make a general statement about the billions of pieces of paper in the
world is too small of a sample to accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion happened to be
true, this argument does not provide enough of a reason to believe it.

Concluding Remarks
Your counter-argument probably won’t fail all three conditions (unless it’s really bad). But an
argument only has to fail one of these conditions to be flawed. In your discussion of the counter-
argument focus on where the argument goes wrong and why.

There are other ways to attack an argument, such as by using a refutation by analogy or a reductio
ad absurdum argument. If you know how to use them, feel free to use these instead of the ARG
conditions.

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