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Because evaluative claims are the most common, and, some may say, the most interesting, this chapter will focus exclusively on those kinds of claims. The next section will discuss two of the means by which evaluative claims are supported.
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3.4 Claims and Supporting Material
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To be an argument, the claim needs some kind of support. A statement without any kind of support is merely an assertion. When support for the claim is added to the claim itself, it becomes an argument. As stated earlier and as will be further developed in later chapters, many different kinds of materials can be used to support claims. In this chapter, a few examples are presented to clarify the ways that supporting material can be tied to a claim to create an argument.
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3.4.1 Claim Supported by Evidence
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The simplest way to think of an argument is that it involves a claim supported by evidence. Evidence is supporting material that has been observed or is potentially observable. The following diagram illustrates a claim supported by evidence:
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The above argument consists of evidence and a claim. The evidence is about observed data regarding the fossil record. The debater making this argument probably did not observe this data directly but read about the observation that was made by others, probably scientists.
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3.4.2 Claim Supported by Explanation
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Explanation is another way to support an argument. Sometimes an explanation is offered to reveal why the claim is a correct one. The following diagram illustrates this kind of claim:
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The claim that “Robert is afraid of snakes” becomes more believable when an explanation is offered to answer the question “Why is Robert afraid of snakes?”
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3.4.3 Claim Supported by Analogy
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An analogy is a form of supporting material where an advocate begins with an object or concept for which the audience already has a positive (or negative) evaluation, then compares that object or concept to another for which the audience has no such existing evaluation. The diagram below illustrates this kind of argument:
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In the above argument, the advocate presumes that the audience has a positive evaluation of Mahatma Gandhi. In particular, the advocate presumes that the audience considers Mahatma Gandhi one of India’s greatest leaders. Then the advocate makes an explicit comparison of Mahatma Gandhi and Narendra Modi. By making this comparison, the advocate creates an analogy that becomes supporting material for the claim that Narendra Modi is one of India’s greatest leaders.
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3.4.4 Claim Supported by Other Claims
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Frequently, claims are supported by other claims. Chapter 20 of this text will describe in greater depth the process of combining claims coherently to support other claims. This chapter will introduce the process of using claims to support other claims. The diagram below illustrates the basic process of using two claims to support a third:
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As this text will discuss more fully in Chapter 20, a frequent pattern of using claims to support other claims involves combining a descriptive claim with an associational claim to support an evaluative claim. The diagram below illustrates this basic pattern:
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