Unit 3 IA2: The Analytical Essay - Reconstructing and Assessing Arguments
What the task demands
The IA2 analytical essay is a close-reading exercise. Rather than defending your own thesis, you reconstruct an argument - usually from a short passage or a stated position - in standard form, then assess it. The concepts you must command are: standard-form reconstruction, implicit premise (suppressed premise), enthymeme, logical form (modus ponens, modus tollens, disjunctive syllogism, hypothetical syllogism), formal and informal fallacy, ambiguity and equivocation, counterexample, and reflective equilibrium as a method for testing principles against considered judgements.
Traps in the questions
The central trap is charitable reconstruction. Students routinely reconstruct an argument so that it is obviously invalid, then declare it invalid - but the fault was in the reconstruction, not the original. You must supply the missing premise that the author would plausibly accept, and only then test the argument. A second trap is naming fallacies instead of explaining them: writing "this commits a strawman" without showing precisely where the distortion occurs earns little credit. A third is confusing invalid with false: a conclusion can be true while the argument for it is worthless. A fourth is treating a counterexample as a refutation when it only shows the principle needs qualification rather than abandonment.
Rule of thumb
Apply the steel-man test: write the reconstruction, then ask whether the original author would sign it. If not, revise. Then apply the counterexample test to any general principle: can you describe a case that satisfies the stated conditions but produces the opposite verdict? A worked example: from "If a promise was coerced, it is not binding" and "This promise was coerced", the valid conclusion is "This promise is not binding" (modus ponens). If the passage instead concludes "All promises are unreliable", the argument has illicitly generalised from a single case - and your essay should name the specific move, not merely label it.
Keep your reconstruction numbered, keep your assessment tied line by line to those numbers, and reserve your conclusion for whether the argument succeeds as stated.