Week 1 — Taking Apart a Founding Argument: Claims, Kinds, and Counts — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 1 of the term — take apart a founding argument the way a political scientist does, and explain it to someone new to the subject.

This week you learned to sort a claim as empirical or normative by its kind rather than its topic, and to run four moves on a political text. In this assignment you work four short problems on the Declaration's second paragraph, interpret each one, and explain the argument to someone who has never studied political science. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Political Analysis Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your shared text is the Declaration's second paragraph, adopted in 1776, as the National Archives transcript prints it. Its premises open: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Its standard is that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed", and its conclusion is that when a government becomes destructive of those ends, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it". In this week's claim sort, 4 claims from the paragraph were sorted by kind, and 3 of them are normative.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic and citing your evidence:

1. Article I, Section 3 gives two Senators from each State, and there are 50 States. How many members does the Senate have?
2. In the claim sort of the Declaration's second paragraph, 4 claims are sorted and 3 of them are normative. How many of the sorted claims are empirical-leaning?
3. Lasswell's Politics: Who Gets What, When, How appeared in 1936, and Easton's The Political System appeared in 1953. How many years after Lasswell's book did Easton's book appear?
4. In the same claim sort, 3 of the 4 sorted claims are normative. What fraction of the sorted claims is normative, written as a decimal?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: sort the claim "the Senate has 100 members" as empirical or normative, name the evidence that checks it, and write one normative claim about the same institution. Explain in a sentence why the two claims share a topic but differ in kind.
• Problem 2: name the empirical-leaning claim, quoted exactly, and explain why it describes how things are rather than how they ought to be. Then state the paragraph's conclusion and its unstated premise.
• Problem 3: match each thinker to his shorthand definition, with the year and the title. Then apply Lasswell's three questions (who gets what, when, how) to an illustrative campus club whose bylaws let members remove an officer by a majority vote at a called meeting.
• Problem 4: explain why an argument made mostly of normative claims cannot be settled by evidence alone, and name the one claim evidence could check. Then compare the Declaration with the club's bylaw: which one names a judge and a procedure, and which one does not?

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker read a chatbot summary and asks you, "So the Declaration says we have a right to life, liberty, and property, and the facts prove it, right?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects the trio, explains in everyday words the difference between a claim you can check and a claim you have to argue, reports that 3 of the 4 sorted claims are normative, and names one limit: the transcript shows how the argument is built, not whether its premises are true. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor reading a homeowners' association rule that says the board "may raise dues whenever expenses require." Model answer: "The rule mixes two kinds of statements. Whether expenses went up is something you can check in the budget. Whether the board should be the one to decide is a question about what is fair, so the budget alone cannot settle it. Notice, too, that the rule never says who decides when expenses truly require a raise."

Use that pattern for the Declaration, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic and cite your evidence. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report, and check every quotation against the National Archives transcript, without guessing which values, steps, or sources you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the coworker, correcting the trio, explaining the two kinds of claim, reporting that 3 of the 4 sorted claims are normative, and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used (the Senate design, the claim-sort tally, and the two publication years), so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch that maps the paragraph's premises, conclusion, and unstated premise with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Quote the Declaration only from the National Archives transcript, letter for letter. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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