Argument from composition

You reason upward from the parts to the whole they make up: what is true of every part is claimed for the thing they compose. The argument works by treating the whole as nothing more than its parts put together, so that a quality shared by all the parts must belong to the whole as well. It can be attacked by showing that a whole can have qualities that arise only when the parts work together, and lack qualities that each part has on its own.

Example

The Toronto Leaf Hockey team is good because all the hockey players in the team are good

Standardised form

The Toronto Leaf Hockey team (a) is good (X) because all the hockey players in the team (b) are good (X).

Transformations applied: none — the example is already in canonical form.

Classification

The subjects differ, and the predicate is the same, so the argument form is beta (a is X because b is X).

The conclusion is about all the players making up the team (u) and the premise about all the players in the team (u), so the argument substance is uu.

The keyword COMPOSED OF describes the relationship between subjects a and b. The argument lever can thus be formulated as “The Toronto Leaf Hockey team (a) is COMPOSED of all the hockey players in the team (b)”.

Not to be confused with

• Argument from division — The same relationship run the other way, from the whole down to its parts. A PART OF
• Argument from example — The premise offers one member as a specimen, not the complete set of parts. us
• Argument from species — The premise is a kind within a wider kind, not the components of a thing. A SPECIES OF

Source

Source not yet recorded.

Notes

One could argue that “the Toronto Leaf Hockey team” is a singular statement (s). In the context of the argument, however, it is a cognitive shorthand for “all the hockey players in the team”. For this reason the subject type is universal (u) rather than singular (s). See also the argument from division, where the same choice is made. One could imagine a similar argument type with a particular statement (p) as a premise: “The Toronto Leaf Hockey team is good (u) because most of the hockey players in the team are good (p)”. Since the substance is up, that argument type belongs to a different group of the Beta Quadrant.