Statements, Arguments and Explanations

Statements are the kind of sentences which can either be true or false. For eg: the statement “It’s rainy today.” is a statement as it has only two possibilities. It could either be true or false.

Rhetorical— A statement presented in the form of a question or which doesn’t require to be answered by the listener is called rhetorical. For eg: “Don’t you want to be rich ?” , “Did you know that the coronvirus cases have reached upto 12,735,446 ?”. These kinds of sentences don’t need an answer from the listener because they’re basically statements framed as questions. For eg: “Don’t you want to be rich ?” is a rhetorical question for the statement “You wish you were rich”. Also, “Did you know that the coronvirus cases have reached upto 12,735,446 ?” is a rhetorical question for the statement “The coronavirus cases have reached upto 12,735,446.”

Argument is a collection of statements, some of which are premises which support or favor the other statements which are conclusions. For eg: The weather is clear. Clear weather is an excellent condition for roadtrips. Therefore, we should go on a road trip.
In the above example, we have
Premise1 — The weather is clear.
Premise2 — Clear weather is an excellent condition for roadtrips.
Conclusion — We should go on a road trip.

Sometimes, the premise or the conclusion won’t be explicitly mentioned. In those cases, we call them suppressed premises or suppressed conclusions.
For eg: He finished work early, he must have a date.
The standard form of the above argument would be
Premise 1 — He finished work early.
Premise 2 — [He finishes work early when he’s supposed to go on a date.]
Conclusion — He must have a date.
In the above example, the Premise 2 is the suppressed premise and it’s deduced automatically as we read the argument.
Another example we could have for suppressed conclusion is
He said he’d get married at the age of 28. His family has started seeing girls for him.
The standard form for the above argument would be
Premise 1 — He said he’d get married at the age of 28.
Premise 2 — His family has started seeing girls for him.
Conclusion — [He’s now 28 years old.]
In the above example, conclusion is suppressed.

Explanations are also a set of statements but unlike arguments they don’t have a conclusion as such. They’re mere statements to make you understand why or how something is the case. They’re not meant to make you believe something. For eg: The answer to question “How has coronavirus been fatal to the world having such a low fatality rate ?” would be an explanation telling people about how the economies have been destroyed, people have lost jobs, suffered paycuts, poor people have died in scarcity of food and other basic needs. So, these are all reasons making it clear how coronavirus has affected lives of different people and the way it proved to be fatal for everybody despite having such low fatality rate. It doesn’t have any conclustion.