Unit 4 IA3: The Analytical Essay - Philosophical Problems and Critical Assessment
What the task demands
The Unit 4 IA3 analytical essay raises the level of expectation: you must engage with a substantive philosophical problem, situate your treatment within a recognised debate, and assess competing positions critically rather than merely describing them. The concepts you must understand include: the problem of induction, the is–ought gap, the nature of knowledge and justification (including Gettier-style cases), free will and determinism (compatibilism versus incompatibilism), personal identity over time, moral relativism versus objectivism, and the principle of sufficient reason. You should be able to explain what makes each a problem rather than a puzzle - that is, why reasonable people disagree and what turns on the answer.
Traps in the questions
The characteristic traps at this level are subtler. Definitional stipulation is one: defining a term so that your conclusion follows trivially, which wins the argument by fiat rather than by reasoning. False dilemma is another: assuming the only options are, say, hard determinism and libertarian free will, when compatibilism is on the table. A third is ignoring the strongest rival: an essay that dispatches a weak version of the opposing position while the best version goes unmentioned will be marked down for critical depth. A fourth is assertion in place of argument at the crucial moment - the paragraph where the real work should happen often collapses into a confident restatement.
Rule of thumb
Use the dialectical triad: thesis, antithesis, synthesis-or-defence. For each rival position, state its best case, identify the precise point of disagreement, and say what evidence or argument would settle it. A worked example: on free will, do not merely assert that determinism makes responsibility impossible - specify the conditions you take responsibility to require, show that determinism violates one of them, and then consider whether a compatibilist account of those conditions (for example, acting on one's own desires without external constraint) survives your objection.
Reserve space for a conclusion that states what you have established and what remains unresolved. Acknowledging the limits of your argument is a strength, not a concession.