Chapter 4

Chapter 4 in Everything's an Argument talked about arguments based on facts and reason. Aristotle was the first to divide arguments bases on fact and reason into two different kinds. One being hard evidence. This is what most court rooms will use in cases, the smoking gun is what the evidence is sometimes called. Examples of this would be anything not artistic, such as statistics, facts, testimonies etc. In my opinion even though it is hard evidence it doesn't always make the argument true. For example the book describes how numbers can be presented in a way for a person to give the message that they want. They can do this by leaving some things out or comparing them to other numbers. Another problem with hard evidence is that sometime multiple people will see an accident but have completely different responses when asked how it happened or who caused it. Hard evidence isn't always crystal clear so its important to know that you can trust the source where you're getting these so called "facts" from before passing it on to someone else.

The other kind that Aristotle talked about was arguments based on reason and common sense. These are all the artistic appeals. This is used usually in the absence of hard evidence and can also be called logic. Most people use informal logic. This is logic based on assumptions that we already made in our culture. An example of this is called an enthymeme, or any sentence that has both a claim and a reason. "We'd better dance the picnic because it's going to rain." The speaker doesn't have to go on to explain that he/she got their information from the weather bureau or explain that a picnic is outside and vulnerable to rain. These are assumption already made. That is the difference between formal and informal reasoning and it too can also be effective in an argument.