Knowledge Society

Lecture 10

Reasoning with Knowledge

Overview

 Many routine tasks are automatable – indeed many of these are now regularly
solved by computing based devices
 Routine tasks that are not computer controlled and require people will be
outsourced to low cost countries, or low wage paying positions
 Now we need to draw facts together to make inferences and conclusions about
maintaining and sorting information and analysing information numerically
 The discipline of formalised thinking processes falls into the domain critical
thinking

What is “Critical Thinking”

 Many everyday distinctions are based on emotion and instinct

 Cannot be sure that the decisions we makes are reasonable ones
 The discipline of critical thinking provides us with a set of conceptual tools,
coupled with intellectual skills and strategies for making reasonable decisions
about what to believe or do
 Critical thinking is the science of using reasoning to make up your mind, rather
than purely emotion
 Reasoning is the disciplined use of intelligence for problem solving
 Do not think of the term “critical” as pejorative
 Critical refers to our ability to make judgements based on facts and evidence
 The field of critical thinking is vast
 Ideally it is something that we should study and practice for the rest of our
lives
 Two important and related parts f critical thinking
o Types of reasoning
o Use of logic to evaluate truth

Types of Reasoning

 Reasoning is the human capacity to use disciplined intelligence to solve

problems
 Developing arguments that take us from a premise or premises to a conclusion
 A premise is a claim offered in support of the conclusion
 Important consideration is the strength, or the degree to which we can trust,
our movement (or inference) from a premise to conclusion
 Abductive Inferencing
1. Reasoning technique that most people practice
2. Working off a “hunch”
3. The reasoner uses intuition to try to find connections between
seemingly unrelated facts
4. Uses the premise or remises to explain the conclusion
5. Least powerful because there may be multiple possible
explanations of the conclusion
6. Example:
 Argument
 The world must be spherical in shape. The night sky
looks different in the northern and southern regions,
and this would be so if the earth were spherical. –
Aristotle, Physics
 Method
 Abduction. Here Aristotle starts with the conclusion
to try and justify it from the premise.
 Inductive Inferencing
1. If the premises of the argument are true, it is reasonable or likely,
to make the conclusion true
2. Degree or certainty is established from multiple instances of the
association of a premise or premises with a conclusion
3. Experiential in nature
4. Scientists often refer to this type of reasoning as empiricism
5. Developed in the 17th century by Sir Francis Bacon
6. Words such as ‘probably’ and ‘likely’ imply induction
7. Example:
 E.g. 1
 Argument
o A student passed the skills test and the mid-
semester exam, always studies hard and wear
glasses, therefore, the student will pass the
subject ‘knowledge’ society
 Method
o Induction. The various premises are true,
therefore the conclusion is extremely likely.
However, by no means a certainty.
 Deductive Inferencing
1. Strongest for of inferencing
2. Directly derive the conclusion form a premise or a set thereof
3. If premises are true, the conclusion will be true
4. Deductive inferencing achieves absolute security in reasoning
5. Words such as ‘certainly’, ‘ necessarily’ and ‘must’ imply a
deductive argument
6. Example:
 E.g. 1
  Argument:
o All men are mortal
o Socrates is mortal
o  Socrates is mortal
 Method:
o Deduction – both premises are true, thus the
conclusion is true
 This syllogism is an example of a sound argument as
both premises are true
 E.g. 2
 Argument
o Every animal that has four legs is a dog
o My cat has four legs
o  My cat is a dog
 This is an unsound (invalid) argument as one of the
premises is incorrect
 First great treaties on logic written by the Greek philosopher Aristotle
 Collection of rules for deductive reasoning as the basis for the study of every
branch of knowledge
 Use of language is important when trying to determine the inferencing method
being used (and hence the strength of the argument)
 The form in which we write an argument is very important
1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3.  Socrates is mortal
 It is impossible to deny the plausibility of the argument
seeing it in this form
 This is a valid form of deductive argument
 However, consider the slightly modified argument
1. All emus are birds
2. All cockatoos are birds
3.  All emus are cockatoos
 Appears reasonable but the conclusion is not necessarily
true
1. All Queenslanders are Australians
2. All Victorians are Australians
3.  All Victorians are Queenslanders
 This is FORMAL FALLACY

Universal and Existential

 So far we have used universal statements

 Distinguished by the use of the word ‘All’
 The other form of statement is called the existential
 Usually beginning with ‘SOME’ or ‘THERE EXISTS”
 Both the universal and the existential can be either negative or affirmative
Graphical Depiction

 Understanding the logical processes in statement (worded) form can be

difficult
 Venn Diagrams can be used to help the reasoner understanding particular
situation
 Some properties:
o The circle denote sets of things/objects/people
o Shaded areas indicate that there are no elements or members
o An ‘X’ denotes at least one member or element

o Consider the following argument:

1. All lecturers are human
2. All humans are mortal
3.  All lecturers are mortal

 Premise 1 is represented by the grey shading,

whereas the yellow is premise 2
Composed versus Categorical Statements

 So far we have been studying categorical statements

 These are statements about one particular thing (e.g. ‘all lecturers are human’)
 However, statements can be joined together and even negated
 E.g.
o If the battery is flat, then the car will not start
o A square has four sides and a triangle has 3 sides
o The Knowledge Society exam is on Monday or is it on Tuesday
o The Knowledge Society exam is not an assessment item
 Can evaluate the truth of each of these statements
 Logicians have developed a system that can automatically evaluate the truth
composed statements
 Called truth function logic or simply symbolic logic
 It is used as the basis of all electronic computation
 Logicians assign statements variable names
 This makes the easier to work with
 E.g.
o “A square has four sides and a triangle has 3 sides” becomes A^B,
where A = “ a square has four sides”, ^ = AND, B = “A triangle has 3
sides”
 A logical operator (such as AND) combines two or more simple statements
together into a compound statement
 The basic operators are:


The operators can best be explained using truth tables

 Consider a statement such as A = “It is hot”
 Evaluate: A^B A

 In the previous case we have a tautology, as all the outputs are true
 If the outputs are all false, we would have a contradiction
 Consider A = “It is Hot”
o A~A is a contradiction
o A~A is a tautology
 If we have a complex compound statement, we can evaluate using truth tables
 “Boolean algebra” can evaluate these statements symbolically and underpins
the operations of all digital computers