Critical Thinking
Across the
Curriculum Project
Critical Thinking Core Concepts
Contributed by: Lauren Miller and Michael Connelly, Longview Community College

Inference Indicators

With luck, we will discover in our persuasion raw material certain words or phrases that provide a clue as to which statements are premises and which conclusions. These can be premise indicators, such as : and many others, which signal that an upcoming statement is to serve as a premise in support of another statement in the immediate vicinity.

Or we might find conclusion indicators, such as:

and many others, which signal that an upcoming statement is to be seen as a conclusion, relative to some premise statement in the immediate vicinity. Although few inference-indicating phrases are completely unambiguous (and could therefore lead us to things which are not part of an argument), they remain the best single clue as to the structure of a latent argument. Accordingly, your best first move in reconstructing raw material is to scan it for such indicators, and from them project your initial reconstruction of the argument therein.

Things become a bit trickier when there are no premise indicators at all. Then there are two possible strategies. Probably the best strategy is to find a statement to function as the conclusion of the presentation's as-yet latent argument. Sometimes such a statement (or rhetorical equivalent thereof) can be found among the sentences explicitly included in the presentation. If so, use it. If not, you'll have to construct one of your own. Either way, such an enterprise will require some interpretation. You will want to check out the notes on Techniques for simplifying/paraphrasing arguments.

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Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum Project
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Last modified: 03/02/04