Reading a card

The anatomy of the deck, and of a single card

What is on the face

Every suited card in the deck is laid out the same way. Take the Ace of Diamonds, which carries Anselm's Ontological Argument.

The Ace of Diamonds: Anselm's Ontological Argument, four premises and a conclusion, from the Proslogion. — The Ace of Diamonds, shown at about twice its printed size.

The corners carry the rank and suit, as on any playing deck. The deck is fully playable.
The name of the argument is set in red at the head of the card. It is the name the argument goes by in the literature, not one we gave it. Where an argument has no settled name, we use a plain descriptive one and say so on its page.
The premises are numbered. Each is a claim on which the argument rests. Nothing is assumed that is not stated; if a step is needed to reach the conclusion, it appears as a premise.
The pip divides premises from conclusion.
The conclusion is marked with ∴, the traditional sign for therefore, and set in red. It is what the premises, taken together, deliver. On some cards the author then identifies what has been concluded to as God; where that happens, the identification is the author's and is reported as such.
The attribution gives the author and the work in which the argument appears, in short form. The full edition-specific citation is on the card's page.
The address at the foot is the card's own page on this site. It is permanent.

Suits are families

The four suits group the arguments by family, and what places an argument in a family is the shape of its reasoning, not its subject matter.

♠Spades are cosmological: arguments that run from the existence of the world to that on which its existence depends, whether a first cause, a necessary being, or a sustaining ground.
♥Hearts are teleological: arguments from the order, design, and fitness of things, and from what such order is best explained by.
♦Diamonds are ontological and a priori: arguments that begin from the content of a thought, from a concept or a truth available to the intellect whatever the world happens to contain, and ask what that content requires.
♣Clubs are moral, experiential, and pragmatic: arguments from moral obligation, from religious experience, and from what it is reasonable or prudent to believe or to do.

The test that decides a suit is where the argument starts. Spades, Hearts, and Clubs begin from something in the world, something that exists or occurs and might not have. Diamonds begin from the content of thought. An argument that mentions the world is not thereby excluded from Diamonds, and an argument that uses an a priori principle is not thereby admitted to it; what matters is which premise carries the weight.

Rank is prominence

Within each suit, rank follows the argument's historical prominence in its family: the higher the card, the more prominent the argument. Prominence is not merit. A two may be as sound a piece of reasoning as an ace; it is simply less well known.

The court cards, King, Queen, and Jack, carry the arguments of major historical philosophers, those whose names a general reader is most likely to have met.

The twos are seeds. Each carries an early statement from which the rest of its family later grew: the precursor rather than the finished form.

The jokers

The two jokers stand outside the four families, as jokers do.

The first joker carries Gaunilo's Lost Island, from his Pro insipiente, the reply made to Anselm's Ontological Argument in Anselm's own lifetime. It is the one objection in the deck, and it is on the joker because the joker is the card that stands outside the game. It is there to show that the arguments were argued with from the beginning.

The second joker is the colophon: the deck speaking in its own voice, as a manuscript does on its final leaf, saying what it is, who made it, and where.

The four kinds of conclusion

Every card is also classed by what its conclusion asserts. There are four types. They differ in what is claimed, never in rigour: every argument in the deck is set out so that its conclusion follows from its premises.

Demonstrative: The conclusion asserts that something exists: a first cause, a necessary being, a designing mind. Where the author identifies that being as God, the card says so, and the identification is the author's.
Evidential: The conclusion asserts that some feature of the world is better explained by one hypothesis than by a named rival. The rival is always named on the card.
Analogical: The conclusion is reached by comparison with a known case, and states what the parallel entitles us to infer.
Conjectural: The conclusion asserts not that something exists but that belief is warranted: that a hypothesis has the highest claim on belief before it is tested, or that assent is required on practical or prudential grounds.

Each card's page names its type, and the index at The cards can be filtered by it.

Editorial placeholder, not for publication: the card pages also record further classifications (argument form, premise ground, modal strength, period, tradition). If these are to be explained to the public, this is the place; definitions to be supplied. Otherwise remove this paragraph and the matching one on the home page.

One thing the cards do not carry

No card, other than the first joker, carries an objection, and none carries a reply. Objections have been raised to every argument in the deck; each card's page links to a principal one, chosen by us, so that it can be read in full. What we hold ourselves to is set out at Standards.