Every so often I come across an article and I find it useful to formalize the argument being made so I an better understand the point the author is getting at. 'How the War on Terror is a War of Terror' is not one of those articles, but the author makes it a point that he is making three arguments, and he says this in a way that insinuates he means logical argumentation. However, when he seems to be summarizing his arguments in the begining it appears he is only stating his conclusions. Here is his first argument:
"The near consensus that terrorism is an act of violence by non-state actors to enact political change through fear is not only dubious and historically untenable it is also unethical as it unqualifyingly legitimises the state violence/terrorism which is responsible for killing far more number of people than those killed by terrorists. "
The statements seem to be these:
- The near consensus that terrorism is an act of violence by non-state actors to enact political change through fear (C) is dubious (D)
- C is historically untenable (H)
- C is legitimizing state violence/terrorism (L)
There does not seem to be a way to arrange these statements into an argument. The first two statements seem to be dealing with semantic issues, but there seems like there are some implied premises backing up 'C is L.' My stab is:
-C is legitimizing state violence
-Violence is bad
--------------------------
-C is bad
Badness is not a very clear component of a statement. Any thoughts on how this can be done? Maybe without referring to 'bad.'
Quite the run-on sentence, if you quoted it accurately!
ReplyDeleteI think you are right that the author is simply stating conclusions here, as one often does in an introduction. The reasoning in support of them will have to be teased out of the body of the article.