Week 12 Session: Write a claim you can defend

Take a real piece of evidence from earlier in this course, write the specific claim it justifies and the specific claim it does not, and check your reasoning against a hard case that resists a clean verdict.

10 May 2027

What makes the inference defensible?#

Validity concerns how well the evidence supports the particular interpretation and use we propose. A successful performance does not validate every claim about the person. This returns to Week 1’s distinction between an observation and an inference. Farhan is a new fictional hard case; compare it with your own Week 11 record, using the supplied fallback if needed.

Purpose and preparation#

This self-guided activity applies Week 12’s lesson. Allow 20 minutes. Work alone; a partner variant is offered in step 4. No specialist topic, paid tool or AI account is required. Farhan and the overheard conversation in the lecture are fictional, built to stress-test the course’s own ladder; nothing here reports a real exam or a real case.

This activity does not ask you to build anything new. It asks you to look honestly at evidence you already have, from your own work in this course, and say exactly what it is and is not entitled to support.

1. Choose your evidence — 3 minutes#

Pick one real record from earlier in this course: your Week 11 examination (administered or received), a Week 5 or Week 9 record, a Week 2 or Week 8 transcript, or any performance of yours that still exists in writing.

If you did not keep a record from an earlier week, use a fresh short one instead: explain something you know well, with a friend or on your own, without notes, and write down what you said.

2. Write two sentences — 5 minutes#

Write one sentence claiming what your chosen evidence justifies. Write a second sentence stating, specifically, what it does not.

Match the shape from the lecture’s worked response: name the exact condition the evidence was produced under in the first sentence, and name the exact thing that condition cannot rule out in the second. “I’m not completely sure, but I think I understand it” does not meet this bar — it does not say what is uncertain or why.

3. Apply the hard case to your own evidence — 6 minutes#

The lecture left Farhan’s case with two live verdicts: count the pass, on the grounds the administration was sound and some preparation is normal; or mark it inconclusive, on the grounds the specific Challenge he answered may have been rehearsed.

Ask the same question of your own evidence from step 1. Is there a plausible, ordinary way it could have been produced that would make it much weaker evidence than it looks — prior practice on the exact question, memorised phrasing, help from a source you didn’t fully record? Write one or two sentences naming that possibility honestly, even if you believe it did not happen.

If you genuinely cannot think of a plausible alternative explanation for your evidence, say why — for example, because the exact question was provably impossible to anticipate. That is also a legitimate answer, and a stronger one than most.

4. Optional: swap evidence with a partner#

If you have a partner, exchange your step-1 evidence and step-2 claims. Each person tries to find a plausible alternative explanation for the other’s evidence that they did not think of themselves — the way Week 12’s examiner learned about Farhan’s rehearsal only from someone outside the exam room.

This adds a second, independent source of scrutiny your own step 3 cannot supply on its own. It does not remove the core limit: your partner still cannot observe what actually happened before your evidence was produced, only propose plausible alternatives to it, exactly as you did for yourself.

5. Name what would change your verdict — 4 minutes#

Write one sentence: what single additional piece of evidence — a topic you provably could not have prepared for, a witness to your preparation, a transcript of what you actually did beforehand — would move your claim from step 2 toward more certainty, one way or the other?

If you cannot name one, that is itself worth recording: it means your current verdict may be as settled as this kind of evidence can make it, and further hedging would not be honesty, just caution for its own sake.

6. Keep a short record#

This record is the last one this course asks you to keep. Its shape is no different from Week 1’s observation, interpretation and limit — twelve weeks later, the tool is the same one, applied more carefully.

7. Read further#

For the general framework behind step 2’s two-sentence shape — a claim supported by a stated warrant, qualified by what it does not establish — read Part 3 of Booth, Colomb, Williams, Bizup and FitzGerald’s The Craft of Research (University of Chicago Press), particularly its sections on warrants and on acknowledging and responding to objections. Ask: what is the difference between qualifying a claim honestly and simply hedging it into meaninglessness?