Unit 3 IA1: The Examination - Extended Response in Philosophy and Reason
What the task demands
The IA1 extended response asks you to construct and defend a sustained philosophical argument under timed conditions. You are not being tested on memorising a canon of names; you are being tested on whether you can identify a philosophical problem, take a defensible position, support it with reasons, and answer the strongest objection to it. The concepts you must have at your fingertips are: premise and conclusion, validity versus soundness, deductive versus inductive support, necessary and sufficient conditions, counterexample, thought experiment, and conceptual analysis. You should also be able to distinguish a normative claim (what ought to be) from a descriptive claim (what is the case), and to notice when an argument slides between them.
Traps in the questions
The commonest trap is the word evaluate: a question that says "evaluate the claim that..." is not asking you to summarise both sides and conclude that "the truth lies somewhere in between". It is asking for a judgement and the reasoning that supports it. A second trap is the strawman objection - attacking a weaker version of the opposing view because it is easier to defeat. A third is circularity: offering as a premise the very thing you are trying to prove. A fourth is confusing an explanation of why someone holds a belief with a justification of the belief itself.
Rule of thumb
Use the PEC structure for every extended response: Position (state your thesis in one sentence), Evidence and argument (two or three premises with explicit links), Counterargument and reply (state the best objection fairly, then answer it). If you cannot state the opposing view in a form its defender would accept, you have not yet earned the right to reject it. A worked example: to argue that a rule is unjust, do not merely assert unfairness - specify the criterion of justice you are invoking, show that the rule fails it, and then consider whether a defender could show the criterion itself is inappropriate.
Budget roughly a fifth of your time for planning the structure and a tenth for checking that each paragraph advances the thesis rather than merely restating it.