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Some Logic Definitions

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Mathew Webster
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24 views1 page

Some Logic Definitions

Uploaded by

Mathew Webster
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Definitions

Statements of fact
• A statement of fact or a factual claim is a statement that is presented as an accurate
representation of a situation, event, or condition, and that is capable of being either proved or
disproved.
Argument
• a list of statements, one of which is designated as the conclusion and the rest of which are
designated as premises. The conclusion follows from the premise(s).
• An argument is a set of two or more propositions related to each other in such a way that all but
one of them (the premises) are supposed to provide support for the remaining one (the
conclusion).
Inference
• The relationship that holds between the premises and the conclusion of a logical argument, or the
process of drawing a conclusion from premises that support it deductively or inductively.
• Inference is the process that ties premises to the conclusion.
Validity
• An argument is valid – i.e. a “good argument” - if the conclusion logically follows from the
premises. More formally, an argument is valid if one cannot consistently assert the truth of the
premises while denying the truth of the conclusion. Therefore, the validity of an argument is
determined by the argument’s structure rather than the truth of any statement in isolation. Here
are some examples.
“All pigs are green. All things that are green glow in the dark. Therefore all pigs glow in the dark.”
Valid – if the conclusion were true, you would have to accept the conclusion as true. “Whales are
mammals. Humans hunt mammals. Therefore humans hunt whales.” Invalid - although all the
statements are true it is not necessarily the case that humans hunt whales even if the two premises are
true.

[NOTE: “Black is white. Regardless of who you vote for, the government always gets in. Therefore,
aliens are bipedal.” Technically, a logician might claim this argument is valid since validity only
applies to the form of the argument – never to the truth of the premises or the conclusion. However,
since the definition of argument within logic demands some “course of reasoning” with “connected”
statements, this example is not an argument at all and therefore I would suggest that a valid or an
invalid designation is meaningless. These statements are more correctly referred to as simple nonsense
rather than an argument which can be termed valid or invalid.]

A deductive argument is an argument which, given the premises, guarantees the truth of the conclusion.
That is, the premises provide support you the conclusion such that, if they were true, would be impossible
to have a false conclusion. In an inductive argument, the truth of the conclusion is only a probability and
never a certainty.
In a deductive argument, the truth of the premises is supposed to guarantee the truth of the conclusion; in
an inductive argument, the truth of the premises merely makes it probable that the conclusion is true

Some define a deductive argument as an argument that argues from the general to the specific and an
inductive argument as one that argues from the specific to the general. Although this is often the case,
these definitions of deductive and inductive reasoning are erroneous. For further information, consult the
following links:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/argument.htm
http://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/ded_ind.html

Soundness: an argument is considered sound if all of its premises are true and it is valid.

Rick Pelletier 2013

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