Strengthen with Sufficient Premise Questions - - Question 16

The desire for praise is the desire to obtain, as a sign that one is good, the favorable opinions of others. But beca...

lauraduffy700 May 18, 2024

Writing out Argument Question

For practice, I was writing out this argument for myself... I was wondering if it is "allowed" to make this leap: --- Premise) The desire to be praised is the desire to obtain favorable opinions of others. --> To be praised is to obtain the favorable opinions of others. -- I was thinking this could be done like factoring in algebra, i.e. the sufficient and necessary statements both have the phrase "the desire to" so I am wondering if I can "factor them out." --- I understand that this is not necessarily relevant to answering the question, I am just wondering for the sake of practicing writing out argument.

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lauraduffy700 May 18, 2024

*clarity edit
*I am wondering if I can "factor out" the phrase "the desire to."

Emil-Kunkin May 21, 2024

I do think that's fair to do, but only as a shorthand. It's not exactly the same thing to say that X is Y and The desire to receive X is the desire to receive Y, although they often will be the same. If factoring it out helps you to distill the argument then great, but make sure you aren't loosing critical details. Here it wasn't really useful, so you're fine losing it.

More generally I like to rephrase the clunky writing of the test into something that's easier for me to understand, which it seems like is what you're doing here