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Critical Thinking, Logic, and Argument: Chapter 2. Inference and Argument

Critical Thinking, Logic, and Argument
Chapter 2. Inference and Argument
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“Chapter 2. Inference and Argument” in “Critical Thinking, Logic, and Argument”

Chapter 2 Inference and Argument

In this chapter, we introduce the important distinction between inference or reasoning on the one hand and argument on the other. We then turn our attention to various kinds of arguments broadly taken and distinguish them from argument in a narrower sense that we will call logical argument. Let us start by considering what reasoning is and how it differs from mere thinking.

Human beings think a great deal. We do it all the time, in the sense that we think whenever we are conscious or aware of things. Thoughts constantly run through our minds. But the word “think” is ambiguous. On the one hand, it simply means to be in a conscious state; on the other hand, we use the word to refer to mental processes consisting of connected thoughts that fit together to form a piece of reasoning.

To tell someone what you are thinking in this second sense is to tell a story that has some kind of point or outcome. Sometimes the point of the story is entertainment, but often enough, the point is to give another person reasons for believing something. In such cases, the point of the body of the story is that it bears on the truth or reasonableness of the outcome. The thinking reported in stories of this sort can be evaluated or criticized according to how well the body of the story bears on its outcome. This text is about how to evaluate thinking in this sense. The stories we tell about our reasoning, particularly the stories we call “arguments,” are crucial in that evaluation. In spite of the fact that much reasoning is performed consciously and for a purpose, not all reasoning is conscious. Some, perhaps most, reasoning is unconscious reasoning. We know this because we sometimes find that we have worked out what we think about some matter without being aware of having done so. In such a case, we have to reconstruct what our reasoning must have been like. In the process of reconstructing our thinking, we also often reflect on what our reasoning ought to have been like.

We will use the word “inference” to refer to a piece of reasoning, and when we say that a person infers something X, we mean that they have performed a piece of reasoning with that thing, X, as a conclusion.

When we talk about reasoning in that way, we assume that the piece of reasoning was guided by rules and that in virtue of that guidance, it succeeded (or failed, as the case might be) in a certain aim.

Inferences and arguments are not at all the same kind of thing, although they are related in an important way. An inference, or a piece of reasoning, is a kind of mental process. As such, reasoning and the inferences involved in reasoning happen in the privacy of the minds of the agents engaging in the reasoning. Reasoning is in this sense not public. Whether or not an agent’s thought processes are disciplined by truth-conducive rules cannot be determined just by the conclusion an agent reaches. Consider the following example about how the conclusion someone reaches is separate from the rules they applied to reach that conclusion:

Example of rules as separate from outcomes

When a child is trying to add 3 and 4 on the blackboard in grade one and writes 7 on the board, they get the right answer. But if they wrote 7 because it is their favourite number, or because they just guessed and were lucky, then their choice of 7 wasn’t the right answer in the sense of it being the product of the rules of addition—the appropriate method to use.

This example illustrates that it is important to distinguish thinking that reaches a conclusion for the right reasons from cases of thinking guided by personal or private rules, such as “write your favourite number as the answer.”

How can we invite you to engage in a piece of reasoning in hopes you will reason according to appropriate methods? We may do this by offering you an argument. If we do this, we engage you in a public interpersonal process. An argument in this sense is not a mental process but a social exchange between two or more persons. Because inferences happen in the privacy of our own minds and may be largely unconscious or intuitive, they are hard to evaluate directly.

Argument

Inference

public

private

social exchange

unconscious or intuitive

evaluate with rules

difficult to evaluate

may have participants/collaborative

individual process

Others have no access to our inferences, and our own access is limited by the unreliability of memory, cognitive biases, and the limits of our self-analytical skills. Even though we have direct access to our thoughts, we typically need to dedicate time and practice to developing the methodological skills necessary to evaluate the processes producing thoughts. In contrast to inferences, arguments are public events typically involving a number of participants. The participants in an argument present claims as premises in support of other claims or conclusions, which can be “concluded” from the premises on the strength of a set of rules or principles.

The participants in an argument and any observers who are present are all positioned to make judgments about how well the argument goes—for example, about whether the offered conclusions really do follow from the premises offered by the rules of inference in question.

2.1 Context for Critical Thinking

In specific contexts, when we give verbal expression to our thoughts, they become open to others. Once a thought is spoken, anyone hearing could criticize it. Sometimes in ordinary speech, “criticize” can mean “to express disapproval or flat out contradict” someone. This is not how we mean it in Western philosophical traditions. In that tradition, we use “criticize” to mean “to evaluate by offering reasons.” Criticizing just means bringing rules to bear on the verbal expression of a thought. To put this all together, an argument is not only a public event; it is crucially a process that is governed by rules. This includes the ability to criticize this text and the claims it makes. We assume when you are taking in information that you are asking yourselves questions about its reasonableness throughout. This book aims to teach you techniques and methods that you can evaluate for reasonableness as you learn them!

It is important to understand that critical thinking as described thus far is not an appropriate method for all truth claims. There are reasons to adapt methods to context, for example in the case of Indigenous knowledges:

Traditional Indigenous knowledge is produced, owned, and distributed quite differently from the way it is done in Western tradition. Knowledge in many Indigenous cultures is not “open” in the same way as it is in the Western context, but instead is guarded by particular individuals, and the handing over of such knowledge is often safeguarded by strict cultural protocol. This is quite different from the Western academic context, which is fundamentally characterized by the ideas of openness to scrutiny and knowledge as situated in the “public domain.” (Sharon K. Chirgwin and Henk Huijser, “Cultural Variance, Critical Thinking, and Indigenous Knowledges: Exploring a Both-Ways Approach,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education, edited by Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett, p. 336, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

While we might value critical thinking, which aims at deciphering truth, it is not itself a value above all other values, such as respect, tolerance, diversity, culture, land, and so on.

[Western forms of critical thinking] is not the approach in some Indigenous contexts, where knowledge is seen as communal, and questioning that knowledge, or sharing it beyond the community, is in some cases considered inappropriate and can lead to sanctions for the individual. (Chirgwin and Huijser, “Cultural Variance,” 339)

Indigenous knowledges are a specific context in which some critical thinking methods are inappropriate, for example in terms of an objective standard of reasonableness where all knowledge is available to public scrutiny by any individual. This threatens whole worldviews, goes against cultural protocols, and is not appropriate.

Critical thinking then can also mean carefully selecting rules for finding truth that are appropriate for a context, place, and time. It also means demonstrating flexibility in approach so that we can apply rules that scrutinize beliefs in proper contexts. We also need to distinguish between the aim or purpose of argument as such from the purely private aims a person may have for engaging in an argument.

2.2 Arguments

A person might make an argument because they are motivated out of pride or pity, but we can still evaluate the argument apart from the personal motivations of the arguer. Some people pick arguments with others to annoy them or to show off or to express hostility (i.e., “Don’t read the comments”). But none of these purposes have anything to do with what arguments are supposed to do. There’s a big difference between how people actually argue versus how they should argue.

Preview: In our upcoming chapters on fallacies, you will encounter the difference between addressing a person and addressing their argument. If an arguer shifts the topic to the person rather than their argument, it is an ad hominem (appeal to the person) argument.

We will consider an argument to be a kind of exchange or collaboration between an arguer or arguers and an audience. It is also possible to engage in an argument with oneself—is this what it means to be “on the fence”?1 A good argument ought to be persuasive in the sense that it would persuade a rational agent who heard it.

Arguments are a kind of performance and are used in ordinary contexts to do a great number of different things, but as they bear on the task of critical thinking, they have a structure in which the in which the arguer:

  1. 1. asserts the premises (claims them to be true or acceptable, if only hypothetically or for the sake of the argument);
  2. 2. asserts that if the premises are true (or acceptable), then the conclusion is true (or acceptable); and thus
  3. 3. asserts the conclusion.

In what follows, we will abstract somewhat from arguments as public happenings and focus on the essential features that such happenings must be logical arguments. A cogent2 or good argument must meet three conditions:

  1. 1. A cogent argument must be grounded in premises that are accepted or rationally acceptable to a reasonable audience. The arguer’s assertion of the premises cannot therefore be silly or arbitrary.
  2. 2. The premises must be genuinely relevant to the conclusion. They need to have a relevant link to the conclusion.
  3. 3. The premises must provide sufficient or strong grounds for asserting the conclusion.

These three conditions are essential to clearly identify when evaluating arguments. We will work on one of the most important skills necessary for critical thinking with arguments: identifying premises from conclusions.

2.3 Relevance and Dialectic Acceptability

We use arguments to do many things: to show, suggest, convince, persuade, and explore ideas with others. When we introduce information directed toward influencing other people’s beliefs and opinions, the information we use to prove a point should be relevant to the point we are making.

A premise in an argument is relevant to the conclusion if accepting it provides the recipient of the argument with some reason to believe the conclusion.

Most of the informal fallacies3 we deal with in part 3 of this book demonstrate arguments where there is a failure of relevance. In effect, information that has nothing to do with the argument is used to distract or shift the focus of a discussion. It offers the appearance, but not the substance, of a reasonable argument. Of course, we can use arguments to deceive, humiliate, and dominate others. In short, we can use arguments in ways that are not aimed at truth. We will not consider these uses in detail in this course. Instead, our interest is directed toward methods that are good in the sense of aiming at appropriate truth.

If an argument is to be rationally convincing to its audience, it needs to have a reasonable form and its premises must be dialectically acceptable.

To be dialectically acceptable, premises must be able to survive a dialogue about their acceptability; they must be able to meet reasonable counterarguments.

We formulate arguments both to clarify our own thinking about a matter and to convince others to accept our thinking as reasonable or true. Sometimes, we try to convince others of the incorrectness of an opinion that they hold dear. To do this, we must get them to believe something inconsistent with what they presently believe—that is, to change their minds. This means we cannot always appeal to premises that they already believe. Instead, we need to suggest to them that they ought to accept new premises (in hopes they will be reasonable). In an ideal world, if they accept the premises and the argument is good, then they will be moved to accept the conclusion.

It is difficult to state precisely when a premise is acceptable. It certainly does not mean that a person actually does accept it. Many of us can think of unacceptable premises that are accepted (by others or maybe by us)! To say a premise is acceptable is to mean something like what a rational person ought to accept . . . on the evidence, if they are reasonable, and so on. Spelling out what “. . . and so on” comes to is very difficult. This relies on good methods of thinking, pre-established authoritative knowledge, good methods of science and statistics, and so on. On the other hand, there are uncontroversial examples of acceptable premises that can offer us some guidelines. Here are some examples of types of premises that are almost always acceptable:

Examples of acceptable premises

  1. 1. Claims that report our uncontested experience (what we see and hear, for example)
  2. 2. Claims that reflect widely accepted and uncontroversial common knowledge (roughly “what everyone knows” or what is generally accepted; e.g., humans need to eat food to survive)
  3. 3. Uncontroverted claims that are made by a consensus of recognized experts in a given area (e.g., smoking raises your probability of getting cancer so much so that it can be said to cause it)
  4. 4. Any premise that is the result of a cogent argument that is itself constructed of acceptable premises (e.g., relying on previously established claims)

For a premise to be acceptable is for it to be able to pass certain tests and to survive controversy. This is why we use the term dialectically acceptable. If a reasonable person using reasonable premises can question a statement, the person putting it forward must be able to meet those arguments with an adequate defence appealing to premises that are just as reasonable.

When we look at fallacies, we will see that some fallacies violate the criterion of dialectical acceptability, because they appeal to illegitimate authorities or depend on inadequately defended premises.

Notice that even though the idea of dialectical acceptability is vague, it is vague because there are many ways that arguers can interact reasonably, and it is impossible to state exactly when reasonable people will find a premise or conclusion to pass or fail the test of dialectical reasonableness. This does not mean that reasonableness is just a matter of personal opinion—quite the opposite is true; determining dialectical reasonableness, and relevance generally, requires careful consideration of alternatives and openness to the views of others as well as openness to their good arguments, and it may require a developed imagination.

Goodness in inference is more subtle and difficult to evaluate than goodness in argument. We have just seen that the criteria of relevance and dialectical acceptability appeal to the relationship that premises in an argument have to other arguments and stories that establish them as acceptable premises. This appeal takes us beyond the question of the formal goodness of the argument itself to the larger question of goodness of inference. To evaluate the formal goodness of an argument, it is merely necessary to analyze the relationship between the premises and conclusion. But when we attempt to evaluate goodness in inference, many more things need to be taken into account. Inference is something that happens inside a particular person’s belief set. This means that an agent has only her own beliefs as resources when she reasons.

The main difficulty is this: because the inferences we make are situated in the midst of the rest of the things that we believe, the question of whether they make sense or not depends on what we already believe. When we make inferences, we attempt to increase the overall coherence and explanatory power of our beliefs, but what makes our beliefs more coherent depends in large part on what we believe already. Also, when we make inferences, we attempt to increase the overall likelihood that our beliefs are true, and that attempt will also in large part depend on what we believe already. Among the things we believe already, there will be views about what is true, there will be views about what makes things more coherent, there will be methodological principles, and there will be models of how the world works in general. All these factors will affect what makes for overall coherence of belief for us. And our beliefs have not been formed in isolation from the influence of others.

While inference, being a mental process, is private, the beliefs that we form are influenced by the beliefs of others. Remember that we are always acting within a context of taking other people’s beliefs as likely to be true—just as they must act according to the likelihood that ours are true.

How sceptical should we be about our beliefs versus the beliefs of others? Our own belief set is vulnerable to confirmation bias.4 At the same time, others are vulnerable to confirmation bias. We are all vulnerable, but we are more likely to be sceptical of others. Should we be?

As a result of what other people tell us, it is often reasonable for us to change our minds. The fact that we sometimes infer that our past beliefs were mistaken provides another difficulty for evaluating goodness of inference. Since it is always possible for us to infer that our past beliefs are wrong in our attempts to increase the coherence of our overall view, it is in principle impossible to predict the best inference to make given a set of beliefs. Inference is thus creative and introduces genuine novelty into our conceptual scheme. Moreover, what will appear to us to be plausible is partly a function of our imaginative skills—our ability to envision and consider alternatives to what we presently believe.

2.4 Selecting a Method

We started out distinguishing inference from argument and examining the fact that because we cannot observe our inferences, they are difficult to evaluate for reasonableness. However, we can indirectly understand our inferences by attempting to reconstruct them and explain why we inferred what we did by presenting an argument justifying the inference. The danger is that it is possible that along the way you might change your mind! Analysis and evaluation of an argument are valuable not only for its own sake but for the insight it gives us into our own abilities to reason. Self-criticism can enable us to reduce the errors in our beliefs—both our own and those caused by the influence of others. Completely untrained reason is not, by itself, a particularly good guide to truth, but reason is trainable in a variety of ways. Dialogue, traditional teachings, learning languages, informed discussion, the (so-called) scientific method: these are all, if nothing else, exercises of reason. There is actually no such thing as the scientific method, or at least no single thing that is the scientific method. What exists is a manifold of methods of reasoning, some more powerful than others, some widely applicable, and others narrowly directed toward certain kinds of intellectual problems. We now need to talk a bit about method.

The question of what makes a method good has no simple answer, because we use many different kinds of methods for different purposes. To answer the question in a concrete case, we need, among other things, to know the following:

  1. 1. What purposes does the person using the method have?
  2. 2. Is the method well suited to meeting those purposes?
  3. 3. What alternative methods are available to that person?
  4. 4. What costs are associated with using those methods?

We normally assume that a desire for the truth is among the purposes of a person who is trying to solve a problem. While this may usually be so, it is not always, and in any case, there may be other motives operating in the person as well (the desire for prestige, money, or power, saving face, the obedience of others, and so on). As a result, methods that maximize the likelihood of truth may not necessarily be the methods sought after. Methods unsuitable for acquiring truth may be well suited to meeting other purposes. However, because we are interested in critical thinking in this course, we will assume that truth is the dominant goal of method, although we will need to qualify this in an important way in a moment.

The methods available to a person are roughly those that a person is capable of adopting or learning at a given time with acceptable cost to the person. When a person learns new methods of thinking, the spontaneous causal processes by which their thinking naturally occurs undergo change. As a person acquires increasingly powerful intellectual methods and as their mind becomes more disciplined, these methods and discipline enable the person to learn yet more powerful methods. There is no such thing as a best method—there are only increasingly better or more appropriate ones. The cost of acquiring a method is relevant in two ways.

First, there is the question of the cost of learning or applying a given method to a given problem. A problem that is trivial in the life of the person will not merit a costly method, but an important problem will be worth considerable expenditure of energy. Similarly, a problem that does not need to be answered exactly will not require an exact method; an approximate method will be good enough.

Second, there is the question of the person’s long-term goals in life. Not everyone seeks knowledge for its own sake. Most people are interested in having a reasonably happy and fulfilling life, and their conception of the happy and fulfilling may not include much in the way of highly specific forms of problem solving. As a result, many powerful methods (e.g., calculus or statistical mechanics) may not be worth the cost it would take for a particular person to learn them. For the most part, in this book, we will not deal with difficult and costly methodologies. Instead, we will focus on foundational analytical tools that will, among other skills, enhance one’s intellectual abilities.

2.5 Language Matters

Human beings are language users. This fact is central to the possibility of articulate thinking. Human beings, like other creatures, live in the actual world. When it rains, we get wet, and when our bodies are damaged, we are injured. But because we are conscious, we can know when these things happen to us; in fact, we are aware of a whole world of things around us. But the actual world is not the same thing as our awareness of it. Our consciousness of the world is not outside the world but is itself part of it, and a small part at that. This is, of course, not to say that the things we see around us are really just inside our heads (unless we are hallucinating or dreaming, what we see is really there).

But there is much that is there that we do not see. And what we do see and are conscious of, we do not just see. Rather, we see things as this or that. When you see a table, what you see is the very same thing as your cat sees when she looks at the table—namely, the table. But unlike your cat, you not only see the table; you see it as a table (and that it is a table). You not only see the brown colour of the table, but you see it as brown and that it is brown, and so on. This is something your cat is unable to do, because she lacks language (or what philosophers have traditionally called “reason”). Our beliefs about the world are not just transcripts of reality; they involve conceptual commitments, and those conceptual commitments are lodged in the language we speak.

Example

It is part of the meaning of the word “brown” that it is a colour. Accordingly, if you see that the table is brown, you also see that it is coloured. You can infer from the fact that the table is brown and what “brown” means that the table is coloured.

The fact that you can (and do) make these inferences is part of what it means to have linguistic mastery or competence. A great deal of reasoning is simply tracing the consequences that our mastery of language, in the form of our knowledge of what words mean, makes possible.

The pervasiveness of language in our lives is so overwhelming that it is largely invisible to us. We think of the world as full of facts and truths. We conceptualize reality by way of our linguistic competence, and as a consequence, we live in a world filled with significance and meaning and consequence. We grasp reality with a linguistic net, which makes it appear that reality is structured the way our language is.

We will spend some time in this course talking about language and how it shapes thought. We will see that linguistic competency is a knowledge-based transaction with the world.

Here are some general distinctions: People often use the terms “sentence,” “belief,” “statement” (or “utterance”), “assertion,” “proposition,” “state of affairs,” “fact,” and “truth,” as though they mean more or less the same things. But it takes only a moment to realize that even though the very same set of words can be used to refer to all these things, they are very different from each other.

A sentence is a grammatically complete string of words ending in a full stop. Thus “Bill is a good cook” is a sentence but “Bill is a good . . .” is not. Let us leave open what a word is, but note that the word “cook” could be made of black dots on a page, puffs of air coming out of someone’s mouth, white chalk dust on a blackboard, and so on. Each token (individual instance) of the word “cook” is different than any other, but all of them are tokens of the same type. A word is a type. It is, if you like, a kind of job.

Types versus tokens is a metaphysical distinction5 that philosophers use to differentiate a general category and instances of particular things. “Cook” appears many times in this book, each time as a token instance, which at some points is referring to a type (rather than merely demonstrating the kind of thing a token is).

The individual tokens of the word “cook” all do the same job, which is to refer to cooks when it is used as a noun. Sentences are also types. This token of the sentence “Bill is a good cook” is different from the one provided just above, but they are both tokens of the same sentence. They both have the same job.

Sentences can be used to express beliefs, which are the mental state of a person (i.e., a thought). If Mary believes that Bill is a good cook, we use the sentence “Bill is a good cook” to refer to what she believes. We could consider several accounts of what makes a mental state a belief, but here we can come up with a provisional definition of what a belief is.

A belief is a mental state of a person (a thought), expressible by a sentence, such that if the person has it, they act as though the sentence that expresses the belief is true.

Thus if Mary believes that Bill is a good cook, then Mary is in a mental state such that Mary acts as though it is true that Bill is a good cook. There is another free-floating sense of belief that does not pick out the mental state of a person, but rather that refers to a belief in general. Thus we can talk about the belief that the economy is in a recession without talking about any particular person that holds it. Note that while particular mental states are tokens (individual instances) of beliefs, beliefs themselves are types (general kinds of things). Fred and Mary can both believe that Bill is a good cook, but their individual mental states will be numerically different (non-identical).

A statement or utterance is the event of someone saying (uttering) a sentence. Events happen at particular times. Mary might have stated that Bill is a good cook seven times on Friday; each of these events would consist in the production by Mary of a token of the sentence “Bill is a good cook.”

A statement is the use of a sentence to make a claim that can be true or false.

Earlier, we said that in an argument a claim is made or asserted (the conclusion) on the basis of other claims or assertions (the premises). When you use a sentence to make a claim or assertion, you say that some state of affairs is true, and you make a truth claim or statement. Not every sentence can be used to make a statement. For example, the sentence “What is your name?” doesn’t make a claim. But the answer, “My name is Keith” is a statement because the sentence is indicative. This indicative sentence makes a statement because it is true if my name is Keith and false if it is not. Our language contains many different kinds of sentences that are used for a great variety of different purposes.

An assertion is a statement that expresses a belief of the speaker. If Mary asserts that Bill is a good cook, then her statement expresses her belief that Bill is a good cook.

A proposition is the meaning of a sentence or a belief. We express a proposition by using the sentence or a that-clause (e.g., “that Bill is a good cook”). We need to distinguish between sentences and propositions because sentences can be ambiguous. Thus the sentence “Bill is a good cook” could in one context mean that Bill is good at cooking and in another context mean that Bill is a cook who is a good man. Of course, we cannot identify a proposition without using a sentence; it is just that when we talk of propositions, we assume that the context is fixed so as to rule out ambiguity.

A state of affairs is what must obtain for a sentence or belief to be true. Thus if Mary’s belief that Bill is a good cook is true, the state of affairs of Bill’s being a good cook obtains (or happens). In that case, the state of affairs of Bill’s being a bad cook doesn’t obtain, and the sentence “Bill is a bad cook” isn’t true.

A fact is a state of affairs that obtains (is happening). Thus if Bill is a good cook, then Bill’s being a good cook is a fact. You might want to say that facts are what make propositions or beliefs true, but there would obviously be something circular about this.

A truth is a fact about the world. Thus if Bill’s being a good cook is a fact, then it is true that Bill is a good cook. If it is true that Bill is a good cook, then Bill is a good cook. We can think of truth as an agreement between a thought and the world: a thought is true if the state of affairs picked out by the sentence that expresses that thought is a fact.

We see that our understanding of propositions, beliefs, sentences, states of affairs, and truth are all interrelated. To say that we live inside of language in part means that the world we live in is a world of facts as much as a world of things. We can think of the world as being fully described by a book (we might call it “the universe’s book of all the facts”) in which every fact is written down and every sentence is true.

Key Takeaways

  • • Belief can have a causal character (belief-forming processes) at the same time as it can be true that beliefs can be evaluated for their reasonableness.
  • • Inferences are different from arguments in four key ways: arguments are what we are able to explicitly construct, rehearse, justify, and evaluate, whereas our access to inferences is limited by the unreliability of memory, cognitive biases, and the limits of our self-analytical skills.
  • • Critical thinking is not a universal method for acquiring truth that is appropriate in all contexts.
  • • Arguments have three main components: asserted premises; a relationship that if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true; and an asserted conclusion.
  • • A cogent argument has the added features of reasonableness and relevance.
  • • Premises need to be dialectically acceptable, meaning they can withstand specific forms of scrutiny.
  • • In order to evaluate an argument properly, it must be clear what kinds of statements are being used and whether they make a claim.
  • • A statement is the use of a sentence to make a claim that can be true or false.
  • • A proposition is the meaning of a sentence. Sentences can have multiple meanings, but propositions each have a fixed meaning.
  • • A state of affairs is what must be the case for a belief to be true. A fact is a state of affairs that is happening. A truth is a fact about the world.

Exercises

Part I. Identifying Statements

For each of the following, identify whether the sentence is making a statement. If it is a statement, is it the kind that makes a claim that can be true or false?

  1. 1. It is nine o’clock.
  2. 2. What time is it?
  3. 3. Please come to dinner at seven.
  4. 4. I hate you.
  5. 5. Tell me when you can come to dinner.
  6. 6. Either Rome is the capital of Italy, or it isn’t.
  7. 7. The Pope is an old man.
  8. 8. Pay attention, you lazy lout!
  9. 9. Hippopotami are ferocious.

Part II. Identifying Arguments

Determine whether these are arguments. If they are arguments, try to identify the conclusion from the premises.

  1. 1. God can perform miracles but not contradictions—not because his power is limited, but because contradictions are not genuine possibilities.
  2. 2. The moral law demands that we pursue, and ultimately attain, moral perfection. But we can’t reasonably expect to reach moral perfection in this life. Therefore, we must postulate, or suppose, that there is another life in which this demand of the moral law can be met.
  3. 3. I read a book that was full of errors. I think I will call the company to tell them about the errors.
  4. 4. Pain is pain wherever it occurs. If your neighbour causing you pain is wrong because the pain hurts and hurting is bad, then the pain a dog feels when you mistreat it is wrong as well.
  5. 5. Martha bought vodka, and Frank bought wieners. Between them, they bought vodka and wieners.
  6. 6. No scientific hypothesis can be conclusively confirmed because no evidence we could ever find could rule out the possibility of contrary evidence in the future.
  7. 7. I followed the directions when cooking tortellini, and it worked for me.

1 https://www.theidioms.com/sit-on-the-fence/

2 https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/cogent

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

5 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/

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