12 Making Claims

This chapter covers what claims are generally as well as a particular kind of them, definitional claims.

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CLAIMS — What they are and what they are not

There are lots of things we do with language:

• We ask questions (“why did you order the French fries?”)
• We give orders and make threats (“order the fries, or else!”).
• We express feelings and sensations (“yum, fries”, “ouch, too hot!”).

But one of the most important things we do is to state what we take to be true. When we do this, we make a claim.

A claim is a statement, expressible as a declarative sentence, that is either true or false. (We’ll use the terms “claim” and “statement,” and sometimes “judgment,” interchangeably.)

Here are some examples of claims/statements:

• You ordered the French fries.
• I told you to order the French fries.
• French fries are delicious.
• French fries are made from potatoes.
• French fries are made from tomatoes.
• If you eat too many French fries, then you’ll get a stomach ache.
• French fries are bad for you.
• French fries are good for you.
• French fries are not good for you.
• Either French fries are good for you, or they are not.
• I like French fries.
• It is immoral to eat French fries.
• Hobbits are especially fond of French fries.
• The largest French fry ever made was over 2 pounds.

Each of these is  either true or it isn’t (and obviously not all of them can be true, since some state opposite and so incompatible things). But:

CRUCIAL POINT: Whether or not a claim is actually true is a separate issue from whether it is  a claim.

This is most clear when you look at claims that are obviously false, as in the case of “French fries are made from tomatoes.”

(For you food nerds out there: fries used to be called French fried potatoes, which implies there is a technique of French frying that could, in principle, be used to cook other things, possibly even tomatoes (though the water content, at least for ripe ones, would make that a challenge. But the term “French fries” is pretty much exclusively used to refer to potatoes. This points to the importance of definitions in knowing what claims are being made, which we’ll discuss below.)

In many cases you may not know whether a given claim is true, but you can still see that a claim is being made. I have no idea, for instance, whether the claim “the largest French fry ever made was over two pounds” is true. I doubt it is, but who knows? Still, I can see that there’s a claim there, and it’s either true or it’s not, regardless of whether I know it to be.

In other cases the truth of a claim may depend on some context or other, such as who is saying it. This is true in the case of, e.g., “I like French fries.” When I, Prof. Shockey, say it, it is true. But if someone who didn’t like fries said it, they’d be saying something false. See below for more on context.

So, to make a claim is to make an assertion, which can then be evaluated for its truth.

By contrast, a question or a command or an exclamation or an expression or exclamation of feeling isn’t like that. If I say, “Do you like French fries?” And you respond, “false!”, that doesn’t really make any sense. Likewise, if I say “Hand over the fries!”, or “Gross, French fries!,” and you respond, “true!”, that shows you don’t really understand what a command or an exclamation is.

We’re focusing on claims because our big-picture aim in becoming better critical thinkers is to get better at tracking the truth. For that, we need to know what form our truth-tracking takes, and claims are at the heart of this. They are also the building blocks of inferential reasoning (inferring some things from others). When presented in a certain way, inferences are what we’ll call arguments, which are chains of claims where some are used to support or prove another. We’ll talk more about arguments in later modules.

First, there are three kinds of claims we are going to talk about. Evaluative claims, non-evaluative claims, and definitional claims. We’ll finish off this chapter looking at the last of these. You’ll learn about evaluative and non-evaluative claims in the next chapters.

Definitional Claims

The point here is that words typically have fairly fixed meanings. It’s not up to us as individuals to decide what these meanings are. Of course, these meanings change over time; many words have multiple meanings; casual usage can differ from formal; etc. But, as any dictionary will show you, words have relatively fixed definitions — and they need to if we are to be able to communicate with one another.

When we state definitions of words or ideas, we make definitional claims, that is, claims about the meanings of words or concepts.

If, for instance, I say “a caboodle is a collection of things,” you may not know whether that is true. So you open your dictionary app (or blow the dust off your print copy) and check, and you find that the claim is true. (My son got a kitten and named him Kaboodle, based on the expression “the whole kit and caboodle” — Kitten Kaboodle, get it? So I myself just looked up the word “caboodle” in order to make my claim about what it means.)

If, on the other hand, I say, “a biped is a four-footed animal,” you know, or can look up and find out, that my claim is false. Bipeds have two feet, not four.

Being clear on definitions is necessary in many cases to avoid mistaking one claim for another. Suppose I report to the police, having just witnessed a heist in South Bend, “the robbers are on the bank.” If what I mean is that they have climbed to the top of the building they robbed (the bank), but the police think I mean they ran to the edge of the river (the bank), that’s a problem. The claim they think I am making is false, whereas the one I am actually making is true.  The problem is that “bank” is ambiguous, and the same sentence, “the robbers are on the bank,” can mean two different things. This is a somewhat silly example, but it serves to illustrate a common danger: unless we are sure we are interpreting our words in the same way, we can easily make mistakes in understanding each other and so in assessing the truth of what we say to each other. We often waste a lot of time arguing about things because of such misunderstandings. (These are what are called “verbal disputes.”)

Context

Here’s another example where context matters. Suppose I say, “Earl is tall.” In order to assess whether that is true, it’s not enough to know Earl’s actual height. Suppose Earl is 6′ 1″. Is he tall? Well, he’s taller than the average American man. If he were a 1st-grade teacher and you saw him next to his students, he’d look really tall. But if you saw him next to an NBA team, he’d look short. In order to know whether the claim is true, then, you have to know what class of people I’m judging Earl in relation to.

Lots of words work this way: to say it’s hot outside, or that someone is smart, or that the music is loud, etc., is to assume a context where heat, intelligence, or loudness are measurable in some reasonably stable way. Relative to the context, the claim may or may not be true. And even if it is true in one context, it might not be in another.

There’s a great deal more that could be said about how words vary according to context. All meaning is contextual in some way or other. As competent language users, we are constantly taking context into account. If you remember this, then you can be careful not to make mistakes based on placing a claim in the wrong context, and you can recognize that you can’t tell what kind of claim you’re dealing with in some cases without being told the context.