The Principles of Argumentation Author:George Pierce Baker Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. Analysis. Three Conditions Necessary For Successful Argumentation. IN order to argue clearly three conditions are absolutely necessary: to ... more »know (1) What the question means; (2) What you believe about it, and why; (3) How you are to state your case so that (a) you shall convince, and (b) persuade. To know what the question to be discussed means has two significations : to know just what is the point in dispute, the idea about which the essential difference of opinion arises; and to know what is the work to be done, what ideas must be proved true, if a conclusion in favor of one side or the other is to be reached. Analysis, The First Great Division Of Argumentative Composition. To find out what the real point in dispute is, we must carefully examine the material we can collect in regard to the subject, and by placing on one side all the ideas upon which our opponent admits his readiness to agree with us; by excluding bit by bit all ideas that must be admitted to be irrelevant; by subordinating what is less important to what is more so; reach the pivotal idea or ideas. That is, to find just what is the question, we must analyze carefully, for analysis is a " process of exclusion for a centralidea" or ideas. If, too, we are to decide what is the work to be done in order to establish one side or the other of the question as true, we must decide, after we have separated the disputable matter essential to the discussion from what is admitted by both sides and from what is extraneous, just the relation that the facts of this remaining material bear to one another. Doing this, we shall see what subordinate ideas must be established as true before main ideas may be accepted as trustworthy, before by use of these main ideas we can show that the chief idea of all i...« less