Philosophical Arguments (WritePhilosophy Guide)

A philosophy paper consists of an argument for a thesis. The quality of your paper will be judged primarily on how well your argument supports your thesis. But what is a thesis? How specific should it be? How do we construct arguments, breaking them down into a series of premises and a conclusion? What makes an argument persuasive?

Validity and Soundness (WritePhilosophy Guide)

We laid out two criteria for a persuasive argument: that the conclusion follows from the premises, and that the premises are all true. But what does it mean for a conclusion to “follow from” the premises? In deductive inference, we want to know whether an argument is valid and whether it is sound. What do these terms mean and how are they used?