Studying This Will Improve Your Debate Skills Tenfold

When trying to improve your debating skills, you probably reach for things like YouTube, topic analyses and drills, or maybe you go for your trusted newsletter which supplies you with constant strategies and advice like The Forensic Funnel (That’s definitely a good choice), however there is an area you could study right now that will help you more. It’s not studying national champions, putting in more time with your coaches, or doing more mock debates with your peers, although these all do help.

This area is far more fundamental than all of those and it is certainly something that you are intimately familiar with by virtue of being a debater but also in general by virtue of being human. Did you guess it? It’s logic. But it’s probably not the notion of logic that you have in your head right now. Let’s explain.

So, What Actually is Logic?

Logic is notoriously hard to define in an exact and substantive way, but typically logic is defined as the study of arguments (structured groups of statements). Logic helps us distinguish good arguments from bad ones.

Formal logic is especially helpful for this given its numerous inference rules and schemas. Logic usually focuses on declarative statements which are sentences with a truth value which just means they are either true or false.

For example, the statement “Water boils at 5 degrees Fahrenheit” is a statement that can be true or false (and it is namely false) things that don’t count as declarative statements are things like questions, imperatives, and commands so statements like “Is it raining?”* or “Close the door!” are not declarative statements

*Note: Some utterances in declarative form (e.g., “I’ll meet you at 5”) function as promises rather than assertions; we’ll set those aside as non-declarative sentences despite some controversy about whether they are.

With that in mind let’s not waste any more time, we’ll show you how you can study logic and why it’ll be your gamechanger

Table of Contents

• So, What Actually is Logic?

  • Conclusion Indicators:

  • Premise Indicators:

• Validity

• Soundness

  • Deductive arguments

  • Inductive arguments

  • Conclusion and next up

The Fundamentals

Our biggest focus here will be arguments which are a group of statements with a structure:

• Premise(s): Give reasons or evidence.

• Conclusion: The statement the premises are intended to support.

A classic example is as follows:

1. All men are mortal

2. Socrates is a man

3. Socrates is mortal

The first two statements are the premises and the final statement (Socrates is mortal) is the conclusion. We often rely on indicator words to distinguish between premises and conclusions.

Conclusion Indicators:

Premise Indicators:

Knowing that, the next biggest important thing is that what are the standards of good arguments and what exactly makes an argument correct as opposed to non-correct strictly according to logic. There are two major things: Soundness and validity.

Validity

An argument is called valid when the premises will entail the conclusion (in other words if all the premises are true, then the conclusion will be true as well). For example:

1. The person writing this is awesome
2. The person reading this is a little less awesome than the person writing this
3. Therefore, the person writing this is more awesome than the person reading this

This argument is valid because premise 3 will follow from 1 and 2, do note that validity is more about form, so the premises can be untrue (which is likely the case with this argument) but that would not affect the argument’s validity. For example:

1. The moon is made of pepperoni
2. pepperoni is delicious
3. Therefore, the moon is delicious

The argument is valid even despite all of the premises and the conclusion being false (yes all of the premises).

Soundness

An argument is called sound when it is valid and has all true premises A classic example of this is what is called modus ponens (an inference rule in logic) which goes like:

1. If P, then Q
2. P
3. Therefore Q

Where P and Q could be nearly anything. e.g.

1. If I am mortal, then at one point I will stop living
2. I am mortal
3. Therefore, I will at one point stop living

All of the premises are true along with the conclusion and the conclusion follows from the premises. That’s the gist of it.

Now of course, it is going to be notoriously hard to always make sound arguments, alas it may not even be possible, but you always want to make sure that every argument you make in debate is at the very least valid, or you are going to run into serious issues.

Okay with the standards of good arguments out of the way, let’s looks at two main types of arguments, namely, deductive and inductive arguments

Deductive arguments

A deductive argument aims to necessitate the truth of its conclusion, that is, if the argument is true then the conclusion must be true as a result. Like the Socrates syllogism from before. Deductive arguments are what most debaters seem to go for on average, so keep in mind that you should always be on the lookout for issues with validity that may come up (which we will talk about more in depth later in the article) and not just the truth of their premises as many debaters tend to focus on. This is because if the conclusion is not necessary as a result of the argument, then the argument will fail.

Inductive arguments

Inductive arguments, by contrast, are probabilistic and aim to make their conclusion probable or more likely. There are many types of inductive arguments and evaluations of inductive arguments out there, but for our purposes we’ll set them aside for brevity's sake

An inductive argument would look like:

1. Most Americans like Burgers

2. Alex is an American

3. Alex probably likes burgers

The conclusion here is made more likely but it is not a necessary result of the argument, you should also take good note of the qualifiers/quantifiers used thus far. Like “Most”, “All”, “Some”, etc.

Those are important, because they let you know the scope the argument is covering and are typically nice indicators for whether an argument may be inductive or deductive

Conclusion and next up

Those are the basics that you need to know for now. Trust that there will be much more to get you started on our Logic 101 series that will aid your entire debate career and as a thinker. You’ve got this if you put your mind to it, just remember that. Think about what happens when the proper standards aren’t met, fallacies happen, dropped points happen, losses happen. You don’t want any of that, so stay steadfast in your learning

Right after this post you’ll have practice that you can do based on the contents of this article to put your learning in action and then move on to the next part of the series, we’re excited and we hope you are too

Stay brilliant,

The Forensic Funnel Team