Running the foundations pipeline end-to-end
Each of the previous four lessons taught one move in isolation. Lesson 1 taught you to find arguments and identify their parts. Lesson 2 taught you to classify reasoning modes. Lesson 3 taught you to evaluate arguments using the appropriate standard. Lesson 4 taught you to extract arguments from natural language and formalize them. This capstone asks you to do all of them in sequence on a single passage, just as you would when encountering real-world reasoning.
In practice, reasoning does not arrive in pre-sorted piles labeled 'deductive,' 'inductive,' or 'not an argument.' You will read a paragraph in a newspaper, a textbook, a policy brief, or a social media post, notice that an argument is inside it, and have to decide what mode it is, what the premises are, whether any premises are implicit, and whether the inference actually works. The capstone simulates that encounter.
The pipeline has five steps, and each one depends on the previous. You cannot evaluate until you have classified the mode. You cannot classify the mode until you have extracted the argument. You cannot extract the argument until you have identified whether one is present. And you cannot communicate your analysis until you have completed the evaluation. Skipping steps or doing them out of order produces unreliable results.
Think of this lesson as a dress rehearsal. The passages you will see are deliberately varied — some deductive, some inductive, some abductive, and some not arguments at all. Your job is not just to analyze each passage correctly but to demonstrate that you can run the entire pipeline from start to finish without getting lost or applying the wrong tool at the wrong step.