Explication

Summary

An explication is a brief, yet detailed outline that summarizes an argument from one of the authors in our course. I assign an explication by assigning one of our author's conclusions. You find the author's argument for that conclusion and summarize it in outline format, where each premise is presented as a numbered list. It should meet this test of clarity: your explication should provide genuine help to a baffled student from class. Finding and explicating arguments is an important skill we must cultivate.

Detailed Account

• The task of an explication
  
  
  • to restate one of the author's positions with its supporting argument.
  • to summarize with astonishing clarity and succinctness (but without over-simplifying)
  
  
• Explications provide an accurate and illuminating reconstruction of the argument (reasons, grounds, support) that the author used to justify a conclusion.
  

  Arguments in their natural habitat are often hard to understand. .

• Explications summarize without judging.
• If the original argument is weak, an explication will expose it.
• If the original is strong but draws on premises scattered over a large area, then the explication
• drops the claims irrelevant to that argument
• gathers all the relevant premises together
• makes them explicit
• restates them with new clarity
• puts them in logical order
Doing so presents the argument in crystalline purity.
• The point of explicating arguments is that arguments are much easier to understand and assess when laid out in this way than when they lie camouflaged in their natural habitat.


• You need not agree with an argument to explicate it well.
• In fact, you should always explicate an argument before you decide whether you ought to accept it, indeed, as part of the decision whether to accept it.
• The test of success is not whether a specialist on the author's works could tell after two readings that your explication somehow addressed the author's position. The test is whether one of your peers from class, baffled by the author's text, would
• recognize that your explication presents an argument
• recognize that it presents the author's very own argument, and
• leap to her feet after a single reading, wave your paper high over head, and shout, "Aha! Now I understand!"
• You can be clearer than the author in several ways.
• The author's order of exposition may differ from the order of inference (the logical order).
• Since you will use the logical order, your version of the argument will already be clearer as an argument.
• If the author's language is obscure, you can put it in more familiar terms even if it takes more words.
• Cite, but do not quote.
• Cite the text for each proposition attributed to the author, either as premise or conclusion.
• If a necessary premise was unstated in the text but clearly presupposed or taken for granted, then
  
  • reconstruct it
  • indicate that it was not explicit in the text
  • if apparent, cite the passages suggesting to you that the author assumed it.
  
  
• Do not quote whole phrases or sentences.
• You should be more explicit than the author and reconstruct the premises that he or she left tacit or implicit.
• Be more complete than the author, omitting no premises that the author thought could safely be taken for granted. Include every premise that is logically required for the conclusion (given the author's approach), not just those premises that the author historically thought it necessary to expound.
• You will be more rigorous than the author, making the arguments explicit and complete as arguments , perhaps for the first time.
• State the premises and conclusion in a list, not in regular paragraph prose. Give each premise a number to enable cross-reference and to show structure.


• If a proposition follows from earlier propositions in the explication, cite them by number (as you would in a logic proof). This will help your reader more than a simple "therefore..." or "it follows that...".


• Limit each numbered entry to a single proposition. This will help you and your baffled reader see whether the argument has any gaps or weak links.


• Use subordination and indentation in this way:
• If one of the propositions you find yourself recording is obscure or controversial, then provide an indented sub-explication for it. (Without this, the baffled reader will learn only that the author's argument depends on a certain difficult premise, not what that premise means or why the author thought that we should accept it.)
• For example, if an argument has five premises, then number them so that we (your audience) can read 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 to get the skeleton of the argument. Your comments on those premises, or sub-explications of those premises, should be subordinated and indented so that we can skip them when we want to read just the argument itself.
• Each premise in the leftmost list should be necessary for the conclusion .
• A premise is necessary for the conclusion when rejecting it prevents the argument from establishing the conclusion. 
• Conversely, the leftmost list of your explication is successful when accepting every proposition on the list requires us to accept the conclusion.
• Don't do this:
• omit some premises from the argument
• decide that the author didn't include a premise that he or she did include
• include more than one proposition in a numbered entry
• list a lot of assertions instead of reconstructing an argument
• quote instead of using your own language
• include claims important to the author but not relevant to the particular argument being explicated
• focus on one passage in the text instead of all the places where premises are actually asserted
• write a little essay instead of an outline reconstructing one argument proposition by proposition
• fail to improve on the author's text in clarity, precision, explicitness, completeness, or rigor.
• You should supply all the necessary premises even if the author omitted one or more of them. (Even if some premises you end up listing are false or implausible.)
• That will typically convert an invalid argument to a valid one. That does not distort our analysis of the author's position for two reasons.
• We are supposing that the author really relied on the unstated premises anyway. We are only making them explicit.
• This method will not make a bad argument good. At most it will convert the flaw in the argument from bad reasoning to false premises (or in logic terminology, from invalidity to unsoundness).
• When making implicit premises explicit, you will not be able to cite page numbers in the usual way.
• If there are textual clues that the author relied on such premises, however, supply those clues and give their page numbers.
• If you cannot fill a page, then you probably have not reached a fine enough level of detail.


• If you cannot limit yourself to a page, then you probably have not finished reaching clarity.