CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCING PHILOSOPHY
INTRODUCTION

Meaning and Nature of Philosophy

 Giving a clear-cut definition for philosophy is difficult, because philosophy has no a specific subject
matter to primarily deal with. Philosophy deals primarily with issues. What contents philosophy has are
not the specific subject matters, but issues, which are universal in nature. To understand philosophy, it is
better to read different thoughts of philosophers, consciously see its salient features by yourself,
participate in it, and do it. Philosophy is not as elusive as it is often thought to be. Nor is it remote from
our various problems. It is unanimously agreed that the best way to learn and understand philosophy is to
philosophize. Socrates once stated that “Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins
in wonder”. We may not have a clear knowledge about the history, nature, language, and issues of
philosophy. But, we all think and reflect in our own way about issues that matter us most. We all
participate, more or less, in philosophical issues, even though thinking alone cannot make us
philosophers.
 Etymologically /from its foundation/ the word Philosophy comes from two Greek words: “Philo” and
“Sophia”, which mean “love” and “wisdom”, respectively. Thus, as a pursuit of wisdom, philosophy
refers to the development of critical habits, the continuous search for truth, and the questioning of
the apparent. It is, however, important to note that “questioning the apparent” does not mean denying
the obviously real. It simply refers to the extraordinary ability and curiosity to deal creatively with
the phenomenal world, to go beyond the common understanding, and to speculate about things that
other people accept with no doubt.
 The ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras was the first to use the word “philosopher” to call a person
who clearly shows a marked curiosity in the things he experiences. Anyone who raises questions, such
as Does God exists? What is reality? What is the ultimate source of being? What is knowledge? What
does it mean to know? How do we come to know? What is value? And the like, is really showing a
curiosity that can be described as a vital concern for becoming wise about the phenomena of the world and
the human experiences. The wisdom that philosophers seek is not the wisdom of the expertise or technical
skills of professionals. According to Socrates, wisdom consists of a critical habit and eternal vigilance
about all things and a reverence for truth, whatever its form, and wherever its place.
 Philosophy: Is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as
existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, law, justice, validity, mind, and language. Questioning/criticism
is not the final end of philosophy, though raising the right question is often taken not only as the
beginning and direction of philosophy but also as its essence. The philosophical enterprise, as Vincent
Barry stated, Philosophy is “an active imaginative process of formulating proper questions and
resolving them by rigorous, persistent analysis”.
 Therefore, philosophy is a rational and critical enterprise that tries to formulate and answer
fundamental questions through an intensive application of reason, an application that draws on
analysis, comparison, and evaluation. It involves reason, rational criticism, examination, and
analysis.
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 Philosophy, as a rational and critical enterprise that tries to formulate and answer fundamental questions
through an intensive application of reason, is a dual-sided universal discipline: constructive and critical
sides:
 As Constructive side, it attempts to formulate rationally defensible answers to certain
fundamental questions concerning the nature of reality, the nature of value, and the nature of
knowledge and truth.
 As Critical side, it deals with giving a rational critic, analysis, clarification, and evaluation of
answers given to basic metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological questions.
 Philosophy is an activity; it is not something that can be easily mastered or learned in schools. A
philosopher is a great philosopher, not because he mastered philosophy, but because he did it. It is not his
theory, but his extraordinary ability to critically think, to conceptualize, to analyze, to compare, to
evaluate, and to understand i.e., to philosophize that makes him so. The product of philosophizing is
philosophy as a product. However, what makes someone a great philosopher is not the produced
philosophy, but his/her outstanding ability to philosophize.

Basic Features of Philosophy

 Philosophy, as an academic discipline, has its own salient features that distinguish it from other
academic disciplines, be it natural, social and humanistic disciplines. Its systematic, logical and
flexible approach to the ultimate reality of the universe, human life, knowledge experience, truth
and values and its holistic and evolutionary nature are some the fundamental features of
philosophy. The general features of philosophy can be summarized as follows:
1. Philosophy is a set of views or beliefs about life and the universe, which are often held
uncritically. Usually when a person says “my philosophy” is, he or she is referring to an informal
personal attitude to whatever topic is being discussed.
2. Philosophy is a process of reflecting on and criticizing our most deeply held conceptions and
beliefs. A genuine philosophical attitude is searching and critical; it is open-minded and tolerant
willing to look at all sides of an issue without prejudice.
 To philosophize is not merely to read and know philosophy; there are skills of
argumentation to be mastered, techniques of analysis to be employed, and a body of
material to be appropriated such that we become able to think philosophically.
 To philosophize also means to generalize. Philosophers are reflective and critical. They take
a second look at the material presented by common sense. They attempt to think through a
variety of life„s problems and to face all the facts involved impartially.
 Philosophers, theologians, scientists, and others disagree, because:
 They view things from different points of view and with different assumptions. Their personal
experiences, cultural backgrounds, and training may vary widely. This is especially true of
people living at different times and in different places.
 They live in a changing universe. People change, society changes, and nature changes. Some
people are responsive and sensitive to change; others cling to tradition and the status quo, to
systems that were formulated some time ago and that were declared to be authoritative and final.
 They deal with an area of human experience in which the evidence is not complete. Different
people may interpret the evidence we do have in various ways. Despite these disagreements,

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 however, philosophers continue to probe, examine, and evaluate the material with the hope
of presenting consistent principles by which we can live.
3. Philosophy is a rational attempt to look at the world as a whole. Philosophy seeks to combine the
conclusions of the various sciences and human experience into some kind of consistent
worldview. Philosophers wish to see life, not with the specialized slant of the scientist or the
businessperson or the artist, but with the overall view of someone cognizant of life as a totality.
Philosophy„s task is to give a view of the whole, a life and a worldview, and to integrate the
knowledge of the sciences with that of other disciplines to achieve a consistent whole. Accordingly,
Philosophy attempts to bring the results of human inquiry-religious, historical, and scientific
into some meaningful interpretation that provides knowledge and insight for our lives.
4. Philosophy is the logical analysis of language and the clarification of the meaning of words and
concepts. The aim of philosophy is to expose confusion and nonsense and to clarify the meaning
and use of terms in science and everyday affairs.
5. Philosophy is a group of perennial problems that interest people and for which philosophers
always have sought answers. Philosophy presses its inquiry into the deepest problems of human
existence. The content of philosophy is better seen as asking the right questions rather than providing
the correct answers. It even can be said that philosophy is the study of questions. Examples of
philosophical questions: What is truth? And what is the distinction between right and wrong?.
Sometimes we think seriously about fundamental life issues:
 What is life and why am I here? Why is there anything at all?
 What is the place of life in this great universe? Is the universe friendly or unfriendly?
 Do things operate by chance or through sheer mechanism, or is there some plan, purpose, or
intelligence at the heart of things?
 Is my life controlled by outside forces, or do I have a determining or even a partial degree of
control?
 Why do people struggle and strive for their rights, for justice, for better things in the future?
What do concepts like “right” (meaningful and relevant) and “justice” means, and what are
the marks of a good society? Often men and women have been asked to sacrifice their lives,
if need be, for certain values and ideals.
 What are the genuine values of life and how can it attained?
 Is there really a fundamental distinction between right and wrong, or is it just a matter of
one„s own opinions?
 What is beauty?
 Should religion count in a person„s life? Is it intellectually valid to believe in God? Is there a
possibility of a life after death?
 Is there any way we can get an answer to these and many related questions? Where does
knowledge come from, and can we have any assurances that anything is true?
 The attempt to seek answers or solutions to them has given rise to theories and systems of thought,
such as idealism, realism, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and
process philosophy. Philosophy also means the various theories or systems of thought developed by the
great philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke,
Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Royce, James, Dewey, Whitehead, and others.

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1.3. Core Fields of Philosophy
 Philosophy uses its major primary and secondary branches to deal with the most important issues
human beings face, namely Metaphysics, Epistemology, Axiology, and Logic.

1.3.1 Metaphysics
 The term metaphysics is derived from the Greek words “meta” means (“beyond”, “upon” or “after”)
and “physika”, means (“physics”). Literally, it refers “those things after the physics”. Metaphysics is
the most important fields of philosophy that deal with the studies of ultimate reality and human
knowledge, respectively.
 Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the ultimate nature of reality or existence. It deal
with issues of reality, God, freedom, soul/immortality, the mind-body problem, form and substance
relationship, cause and effect relationship, and other related issues. Metaphysicians seek an irreducible
foundation of reality or “first principles” from which absolute knowledge or truth can be induced and
deduced. Some of the questions that Metaphysics primarily deals with:
 What is reality? What is the ultimately real? What is the nature of the ultimate reality?
 Is there a cause and effect relationship between reality and appearance?
 Can reality be grasped by the senses, or it is transcendent? What makes reality different from a
mere appearance?
 Is it one thing or is it many different things?
 What is mind, and what is its relation to the body?
 What is the meaning of life? Does God exist, and if so, can we prove it?
 Are human actions free, or predetermined by a supernatural force?
 What is human being? A thinking mind? A perishable body? Or a combination of both?
 What is time?
 Metaphysical questions are the most basic to ask because they provide the foundation upon which all
subsequent inquiry is based. Metaphysical questions may be divided into four subsets or aspects.
1. Cosmological Aspect: Cosmology consists in the study of theories about the origin, nature, and
development of the universe as an orderly system. Questions such as these populate the realm of
cosmology: “How did the universe originate and develop? Did it come about by accident or design?
Does its existence have any purpose?”
2. Theological Aspect: Theology is that part of religious theory that deals with conceptions of and
about God. “Is there a God? If so, is there one or more than one? What are the attributes of God? If
God is both all good and all powerful, why does evil exist? If God exists, what is His relationship to
human beings and the „real‟ world of everyday life?”
3. Anthropological Aspect: Anthropology deals with the study of human beings and asks questions
like the following: What is the relation between mind and body? Is mind more fundamental than
body, with body depending on mind, or vice versa? What is humanity„s moral status? Are people
born good, evil, or morally neutral? To what extent are individuals free? Do they have free will, or
are their thoughts and actions determined by their environment, inheritance, or a divine being? Does
each person have a soul? If so, what is it? People have obviously adopted different positions on
these questions, and those positions influence their political, social, religious, and educational ideals
and practices.

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 4. Ontological Aspect: Ontology is the study of the nature of existence, or what it means for anything
to exist. Several questions are central to ontology: “Is basic reality found in matter or physical
energy (the world we can sense), or is it found in spirit or spiritual energy? Is it composed of one
element (e.g., matter or spirit), or two (e.g., matter and spirit), or many?” “Is reality orderly and
lawful in itself, or is it merely orderable by the human mind? Is it fixed and stable, or is change its
central feature? Is this reality friendly, unfriendly, or neutral toward humanity?”

1.3.2 Epistemology
 Epistemology is the other field of philosophy that studies about the nature, scope, meaning, and
possibility of knowledge. It deals with issues of knowledge, opinion, truth, falsity, reason,
experience, and faith. Epistemology is also referred to as “theory of knowledge”. Etymologically, the
word epistemology has been derived from the Greek words episteme, meaning “knowledge,
understanding”, and logos, meaning “study of”. In other words, we can say that Epistemology is the study
of the nature, source, and validity of knowledge. It seeks to answer of the basic questions as “What is
true?” and “How do we know?”. Thus, epistemology covers two areas: the content of thought and thought
itself. The study of epistemology deals with issues related to the dependability of knowledge and the
validity of the sources through which we gain information.
 The questions/issues with which Epistemology deals:
 What is knowledge? What does it mean to know?
 What is the source of knowledge? Experience? Reason? Or both?
 How can we be sure that what we perceive through our senses is correct?
 What makes knowledge different from belief or opinion?
 What is truth, and how can we know a statement is true?
 Can reason really help us to know phenomenal things without being informed by sense experiences?
 Can our sense experience really help us to know things beyond our perception without the assistance
of our reasoning ability?
 What is the relationship and difference between faith and reason?
 Epistemology seeks answers to a number of fundamental issues. One is whether reality can even be
known. Skepticism in its narrow sense is the position claiming that people cannot acquire reliable
knowledge and that any search for truth is in vain. That thought was well expressed by Gorgias, the Greek
Sophist who asserted that nothing exists, and that if it did, we could not know it. A full-blown skepticism
would make intelligent action impossible. A term closely related to skepticism is agnosticism.
Agnosticism is a profession of ignorance in reference to the existence or nonexistence of God.
 Most people claim that reality can be known. However, once they have taken that position, they must
decide through what sources reality may be known, and must have some concept of how to judge the
validity of their knowledge. A second issue foundational to epistemology is whether all truth is relative, or
whether some truths are absolute. Is all truth subject to change? Is it possible that what is true today may
be false tomorrow? If the answer is „Yes‟ to the previous questions, such truths are relative. If, however,
there is Absolute Truth, such Truth is eternally and universally true irrespective of time or place. Closely
related to the issue of the relativity and absoluteness of truth are the questions of whether knowledge is
subjective or objective, and whether there is truth that is independent of human experience.
 A major aspect of epistemology relates to the sources of human knowledge. If one accepts the fact that
there is truth and even Truth in the universe, how can human beings comprehend such truths? How do
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 they become human knowledge? Central to most people„s answer to that question is empiricism
(knowledge obtained through the senses). Empirical knowledge appears to be built into the very nature of
human experience. Thus, when individuals walk out of doors on a spring day and see the beauty of the
landscape, hear the song of a bird, feel the warm rays of the sun, and smell the fragrance of the blossoms,
they „know‟ that it is spring. Sensory knowing for humans is immediate and universal, and in many ways
forms the basis of much of human knowledge.
 The existence of sensory data cannot be denied. Most people accept it uncritically as representing
“reality”. The danger of naively embracing this approach is that data obtained from the human senses have
been demonstrated to be both incomplete and undependable. (For example, most people have been
confronted with the contradiction of seeing a stick that looks bent when partially submerged in water but
appears to be straight when examined in the air.) Fatigue, frustration, and illness also distort and limit
sensory perception. In addition, there are sound and light waves that are inaudible and invisible to unaided
human perception.
 Humans have invented scientific instruments to extend the range of their senses, but it is impossible to
ascertain the exact dependability of these instruments since no one knows the total effect of the human
mind in recording, interpreting, and distorting sensual perception. Confidence in these instruments is built
upon speculative metaphysical theories whose validity has been reinforced by experimentation in which
predictions have been verified through the use of a theoretical construct or hypothesis. In general, sensory
knowledge is built upon assumptions that must be accepted by faith in the dependability of human sensory
mechanisms. The advantage of empirical knowledge is that many sensory experiences and experiments
are open to both replication and public examination.
 A second important source of human knowledge is reason. The view that reasoning, thought, or logic is
the central factor in knowledge is known as rationalism. The rationalist, in emphasizing humanity„s power
of thought and the mind„s contributions to knowledge, is likely to claim that the senses alone cannot
provide universal, valid judgments that are consistent with one another. From this perspective, the
sensations and experiences humans obtain through their senses are the raw material of knowledge. These
sensations must be organized by the mind into a meaningful system before they become knowledge.
Rationalism in a less extreme form claims that people have the power to know with certainty various
truths about the universe that the senses alone cannot give. In its extreme form, rationalism claims that
humans are capable of arriving at irrefutable knowledge independently of sensory experience. Formal
logic is a tool used by rationalists. Systems of logic have the advantage of possessing internal consistency,
but they risk being disconnected from the external world. Systems of thought based upon logic are only as
valid as the premises upon which they are built.
 A third source of human knowledge is intuition- the direct apprehension of knowledge that is not
derived from conscious reasoning or immediate sense perception. In the literature dealing with intuition,
one often finds such expressions as “immediate feeling of certainty”. Intuition occurs beneath the
threshold of consciousness and is often experienced as a sudden flash of insight. Intuition has been
claimed under varying circumstances as a source of both religious and secular knowledge. Certainly many
scientific breakthroughs have been initiated by intuitive hunches that were confirmed by experimentation.
The weakness or danger of intuition is that it does not appear to be a safe method of obtaining knowledge
when used alone. It goes astray very easily and may lead to absurd claims unless it is controlled by or
checked against other methods of knowing. Intuitive knowledge, however, has the distinct advantage of
being able to bypass the limitations of human experience.

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 A fourth influential source of knowledge throughout the span of human history has been revelation.
Revealed knowledge has been of prime importance in the field of religion. It differs from all other sources
of knowledge because it presupposes a transcendent supernatural reality that breaks into the natural order.
Christians believe that such revelation is God„s communication concerning the divine will. Believers in
supernatural revelation hold that this form of knowledge has the distinct advantage of being an omniscient
source of information that is not available through other epistemological methods. The truth revealed
through this source is believed by Christians to be absolute and uncontaminated. On the other hand, it is
generally realized that distortion of revealed truth can occur in the process of human interpretation. Some
people assert that a major disadvantage of revealed knowledge is that it must be accepted by faith and
cannot be proved or disproved empirically.
 A fifth source of human knowledge, though not a philosophical position is authority. Authoritative
knowledge is accepted as true because it comes from experts or has been sanctified over time as tradition.
In the classroom, the most common source of information is some authority, such as a textbook, teacher,
or reference work. Accepting authority as a source of knowledge has its advantages as well as its dangers.
Civilization would certainly stagnate if people refused to accept any statement unless they personally
verified it through direct, firsthand experience. On the other hand, if authoritative knowledge is built upon
a foundation of incorrect assumptions, then such knowledge will surely be distorted.
 One source of information alone might not be capable of supplying people with all knowledge. It might be
important to see the various sources as complementary rather than antagonistic. However, it is true that
most people choose one source as being more basic than, or preferable to, the others, and then use it as a
benchmark for testing other sources of knowledge. For example, in the contemporary world, knowledge
obtained empirically is generally seen as the most basic and reliable type.
1.3.3 Axiology
 Axiology is the philosophical study of value, which originally meant the worth of something. It
includes the studies of moral values, aesthetic values, as well as political and social values. Axiology
is the study or theory of value. The term Axiology stems from two Greek words “Axios”, meaning
“value, worth”, and “logos”, meaning “reason/ theory/ symbol / science/study of”. Hence, Axiology is
the philosophical study of value, which originally meant the worth of something. Axiology asks the
philosophical questions of values that deal with notions of what a person or a society regards as
good or preferable, such as:
 What is a value? Where do values come from? How do we justify our values?
 How do we know what is valuable?
 What is the relationship between values and knowledge? What kinds of values exist?
 Can it be demonstrated that one value is better than another?
 Who benefits from values? And so on.
 Axiology deals with the above and related issues of value in three areas, namely Ethics, Aesthetics, and
Social/Political Philosophy.

1. Ethics /Moral Philosophy/: is a science that deals with the philosophical study of moral principles,
values, codes, and rules, which may be used as standards for determining what kind of human
conduct/action is said to be good or bad, right or wrong. Ethics raises various questions including:

 What is good/bad? Or what is right/wrong?

 Is it the Right Principle or the Good End that makes human action/conduct moral?
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  Is an action right because of its good end, or it is good because of its right principle?
 Are moral principles universal, objective, and unconditional, or relative, subjective and
conditional?
 What is the ultimate foundation of moral principles? The supernatural God? Human reason?
Mutual social contract? Social custom?
 Does God exist? If so, is he Benevolent and Omnipotent?
 If God is Benevolent, why He creates evil things? If God does not create evil things, then, there
must be another creator who is responsible to creation of the evil things? But, if it is so, how can
God be an Omnipotent creator?
 Why we honor and obey moral rules? For the sake of our own individual benefits? Or for the sake
of others? Or just for the sake of fulfilling our infallible duty?
 Ethics, or ethical studies, can be grouped into three broad categories/ main branches/: Normative
ethics, Meta-ethics, and Applied Ethics.
A. Normative Ethics refers to the ethical studies that attempt to study and determine precisely the
moral rules, principles, standards and goals by which human beings might evaluate and judge the
moral values of their conducts, actions and decisions. It is the reasoned search for principles of
human conduct, including a critical study of the major theories about which things are good, which
acts are right, and which acts are blameworthy. Consequentialism or Teleological Ethics,
Deontological Ethics, and Virtue Ethics are the major examples of normative ethical studies.
B. Meta-ethics is the highly technical philosophical discipline that deals with investigation of the
meaning of ethical terms, including a critical study of how ethical statements can be verified. It is
more concerned with the meanings of such ethical terms as good or bad and right or wrong than
with what we think is good or bad and right or wrong. Moral Intuitionism, Moral Emotivism, Moral
Prescriptivism, Moral Nihilism, and Ethical Relativism are the main examples of meta-ethical
studies.
C. Applied Ethics is a normative ethics that attempts to explain, justify, apply moral rules,
principles, standards, and positions to specific moral problems, such as capital punishment,
euthanasia, abortion, adultery, animal right, and so on. This area of normative ethics is termed
applied because the ethicist applies or uses general ethical princes in an attempt to resolve specific
moral problems.

2. Aesthetics is the theory of beauty. It studies about the particular value of our artistic and aesthetic
experiences. It deals with beauty, art, enjoyment, sensory/emotional values, perception, and matters
of taste and sentiment. A typical Aesthetic question includes:

 What is beauty? What is the relation between art and beauty?

 What is the connection between art, beauty, and truth?
 Can there be any objective standard by which we may judge the beauty of artistic works, or beauty
is subjective?
 What is artistic creativity and how does it differ from scientific creativity?
 Why works of art are valuable?
 Can artistic works communicate? If so, what do they communicate?
 What is art? Does art have any moral value, and obligations or constraints?
 Are there standards of quality in Art?

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3. Social/Political Philosophy studies about of the value judgments operating in a civil society, be it social
or political. Some of the major Social/Political Philosophy questions:

 What form of government is best? What is the purpose of government?

 How are civil society and government come to exist? Are we obligated to obey all laws of the State?
 What economic system is best?
 What is justice/injustice? What makes an action/judgment just/unjust?
 What is society? Does society exist? If it does, how does it come to existence?

1.3.4 Logic
 Logic is a philosophical study of arguments and the methods and principles of right reasoning. Is
concerned with the study of arguments, and it seeks to establish the conditions under which an
argument may be considered as acceptable or good; including the development of standard methods
and principles of arguments. Is often treated simultaneously as a field of study and as an instrument. As
a field of study, it is a branch of philosophy that deals with the study of arguments and the principles and
methods of right reasoning. As an instrument, it is something, which we can use to formulate our own
rational arguments and critically evaluate the soundness of others „arguments.
 Logic is the study or theory of principles of right reasoning. It deals with formulating the right
principles of reasoning; and developing scientific methods of evaluating the validity and soundness
of arguments. The following are among the various questions raised by Logic:
 What is an argument; what does it mean to argue?
 What makes an argument valid or invalid? What is a sound argument?
 What relation do premise and conclusion have in argument?
 How can we formulate and evaluate an argument?
 What is a fallacy? What makes an argument fallacious?

1.4 Importance of Learning Philosophy

 If we ask any philosophy student what is the necessity of studying philosophy„, he/she may give you the
following famous philosophical statement: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. The ancient
Greek philosopher, Socrates, once said that “I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness
and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really
the best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living....” Thus,
among the various benefits of learning philosophy is that philosophy provides students with the tools
they need to critically examine their own lives as well as the world in which they live. Let us clarify it
more.
 Some modern psychologists point out that human beings have both maintenance and actualizing needs.
Maintenance needs refers to the physical and psychological needs that we must satisfy in order to
maintain ourselves as human beings: food, shelter, security, social interaction, and the like.
Actualizing needs appear to be associated with self-fulfillment, creativity, self-expression, realization
of one„s potential, and being everything one can be.
 Although philosophy may not necessarily lead to this sort of self-actualization, it can assist us to
actualize ourselves by promoting the ideal of self-actualization. There are many characteristics of self-

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 actualization to whose achievement studying philosophy has a primordial contribution. Here below are
some of them.
A. Intellectual and Behavioral Independence: - This is the ability to develop one„s own opinion and
beliefs. Among the primary goals of philosophy, one is the integration of experiences into a unified,
coherent, and systematic world views. Studying philosophy helps us not only to know the alternative
world views but also to know how philosophers have ordered the universe for themselves. As a result,
we can learn how to develop and integrate our experiences, thoughts, feelings, and actions for
ourselves, and thus how to be intellectually and behaviorally independent.
B. Reflective Self-Awareness:- self-actualization cannot be realized without a clear knowledge of
oneself and the world in which one lives. Philosophy helps us to intensify our self-awareness by
inviting us to critically examine the essential intellectual grounds of our lives.
C. Flexibility, Tolerance, and Open-Mindedness:- by studying different philosophical perspectives we
can understand the evolutionary nature of intellectual achievement and the ongoing development of
human thought. As we confront with the thoughts of various philosophers we can easily realize that
no viewpoint is necessarily true or false-that the value of any attitude is contextual. Finally, we
become more tolerant, open-minded, more receptive, and more sympathetic to views that contend or
clash with ours.
D. Creative and Critical Thinking: - this is the ability to develop original philosophical perspective on
issues, problems, and events; and to engage them on a deeper level. From the study of philosophy, we
can learn how to refine our powers of analysis, our abilities to think critically, to reason, to evaluate,
to theorize, and to justify. i.e., critical thinking means correct thinking in the pursuit of relevant and
reliable knowledge about the world.
E. Conceptualized and well-thought-out value systems in morality, art, politics, and the like: -
since philosophy directly deals with morality, art, politics, and other related value theories, studying
philosophy provides us with an opportunity to formulate feasible evaluations of value; and thereby to
find meaning in our lives.
 The other benefit of studying philosophy that should not be missed is that it helps us to deal with the
uncertainty of living, meaning it helps us to realize the absence of an absolutely ascertained
knowledge, and hence prepare ourselves to the ever growing human knowledge. But, what is the
advantage of uncertainty? What Bertrand Russell stated in his book, The Problem of Philosophy, can be a
sufficient answer for this question.
 The value of philosophy is, in part, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture
of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual
benefits of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the
cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite,
obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As
soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find... that even the most everyday things lead to
problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with
certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it rises, is able to suggest many possibilities which
enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of
certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the
somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it
keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect (Bertrand, 1912, P; 158).

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 CHAPTER TWO
BASIC CONCEPTS OF LOGIC
Basic Concepts of Logic: Arguments, Premises and Conclusions
Logic
 The word logic comes from Greek word logos, which means sentence, discourse, reason, truth and
rule. It is generally be defined as a philosophical science that evaluates arguments or it is a
philosophical study of arguments and the methods and principles of right or correct reasoning.
 Logic is the attempt to codify the rules of rational thought. Logicians explore the structure of
arguments that preserve truth or allow the optimal extraction of knowledge from evidence. Thus,
Logic is one of the primary tools philosophers use in their inquiries. The precision of logic helps them
to cope with the subtlety of philosophical problems and the often misleading nature of conversational
language.
 Is concerned with the study of arguments, and it seeks to establish the conditions under which an
argument may be considered as acceptable or good; including the development of standard methods
and principles of arguments. Logic often treated simultaneously as a field of study and as an
instrument.
 As a field of study, it is a branch of philosophy that deals with the study of arguments and the
principles and methods of right reasoning or it may be defined as the organized body of
knowledge, or science that evaluates arguments.
 As an instrument, it is something, which we can use to formulate our own rational arguments
and critically evaluate the soundness of others „arguments.
 In logic, as an academic discipline, we study reasoning itself: forms of argument, general principles
and particular errors, along with methods of arguing. We see lots of mistakes in reasoning in daily life
and logic can help us understand what is wrong or why someone is arguing in a particular way.

The Benefit of Studying Logic

 Logic sharpens and refines our natural gifts to think, reason and argue. As human beings, we all
think, reason and argue; and we all are subject to the reasoning of other people. Some of us may
think well, reason well and argue well, but some of us may not.
 The ability to think, reason and argue well might partially be a matter of natural gift. However,
whatever our natural gifts, they can be refined, improved and sharpened; and the study of logic is
one of the best ways to refine one„s natural ability to think, reason and argue. Likewise, as
academicians, our arguments must be logical and acceptable; and the tool to do so is provided by logic.
 In general, the following are some of the major benefits that we can gain from the study of logic:
 It helps us to develop the skill needed to construct sound (good) and fallacy-free arguments of
one„s own and to evaluate the arguments of others;
 It provides a fundamental defense against the prejudiced and uncivilized attitudes that threaten
the foundation of a civilized and democratic society;
 It helps us to distinguish good arguments from bad arguments;

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  It helps us to understand and identify the common logical errors in reasoning;
 It helps us to understand and identify the common confusions that often happen due to misuse of
language;
 It enables us to disclose ill-conceived policies in the political sphere, to be careful of disguises,
and to distinguish the rational from irrational and the sane from the insane and so on.
 The aim of logic is to develop a system of methods and principles that we may use as criteria for
evaluating the arguments of others and as guides in constructing arguments of our own in our
day-to-day lives. Thus, the study of logic increases our confidence to criticize the arguments of
others and advance arguments of our own.
 In fact, one of the goals of logic is to produce individuals who are critical, rational and reasonable
both in the sphere of public and private life. However, to be full beneficial of the worth which logic
provides, one must thoroughly and carefully understand the basic concepts of the subject and be
able to apply them in the actual situations. On a broader scale, by focusing attention on the
requirement for reasons or evidence to support our views, logic provides a fundamental defense against
the prejudiced and uncivilized attitudes that threaten the foundations of democratic society. Finally,
through its analysis of inconsistency as a fatal flaw in any theory or point of view, logic proves a useful
device in disclosing ill- conceived policies in various spheres and, ultimately, in distinguishing the
rational from the irrational, the sane from the insane.

Arguments
 The word argument may not be a new word to all of us. We read them in books and newspapers,
hear them on television, and formulate them when communicating with friends and associates.
Among the various benefits of studying logic, identifying, analyzing and evaluating arguments is the
most important one.
 Argument is a technical term and the chief concern of logic. Argument might have defined and
described in different ways. When we define an arguments from logical point of view, it is a group of
statements, one or more of which (the premise) are claimed to provide support for, or reason to
believe, one of the other, the (conclusion).
 The main features of arguments definition:

1. An argument is a group of statements. That is, the first requirement for a passage to be
qualified as an argument is to combine two or more statements. A statement is a declarative
sentence that has a truth-value of either true or false. That is, statement is a sentence that has truth-
value. Thus, statements can be either true or false, and they can be simple or complex. But they must be
grammatical and complete sentences. Look the following examples:

A. Dr. Abiy Ahmed the current Prime Minister of Ethiopia.

B. Addis Ababa is the capital city of Ethiopia.
C. France is found in Latin America.
 Statement (a) and (b) are true, because they describe things as they are, or assert what really is the
case. Hence, “Truth” is their truth-value. Whereas, statement (c) is false because it asserts what is not,
and “Falsity” its truth-value.

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  Unlike statements, many sentences cannot be said to be either true or false. Questions, proposals,
suggestions, commands and exclamations usually cannot and so are not usually classified as
statements. The following sentences are not statements:
 Can you come to the party please? (Question)
 Next week, I will go to Gonder to visit the castle of Fassil. (Proposal)
 It would be better for you to study hard to score best grades. (Suggestion)
 Come here! (Command)
 Excellent!! (Exclamation)
 In fact, sentence is a group of words or phrases that enables us to express ideas or thought
meaningfully. However, unlike statements, none of the above sentences can be either true or false.
Hence, none of them can be classified as statement. As a result, none of them can make up an
argument.

2. The statements that make up an argument are divided into premise(s) and conclusion. That means,
the mere fact that a passage contains two or more statements cannot guarantee the existence of an
argument. Hence, an argument is a group statement, which contains at least one premise and one
and only one conclusion. Argument always attempts to justify a claim. The claim that the
statement attempts to justify is known as a conclusion of an argument; and the statement or
statements that supposedly justify the claim is/are known as the premises of the argument.

 Therefore, a premise is a statement that set forth the reason or evidence, which is given for
accepting the conclusion of an argument. It is claimed evidence; and a conclusion is a statement,
which is claimed to follow from the given evidence (premise). In other words, the conclusion is the
claim that an argument is trying to establish.

Example 1

All crimes are violations of the law. (Premise 1)

Theft is a crime. (Premise2)

Therefore, theft is a violation of the law. (Conclusion)

Example 2

Some Americans are black. (Premise-1)

John is an American. (Premise-2)

Therefore, John is black. (Conclusion)

 In both arguments, the first two statements are premises, because they are claimed to provide evidence for
the third statement, whereas the third statement is a conclusion because it is claimed to follow from the
given evidences. The claim that the premises support the conclusion, (and/or that the conclusion follow
from the premises), is indicated by the word “therefore”.
 All arguments may be placed in one of two basic groups: those in which the premises really do
support the conclusion and those in which they do not, even though they are claimed to. The former
are said to be good (well-supported) arguments, the latter bad (poorly-supported) arguments. For
example, compare the above two examples. In the first argument, the premises really do support the
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 conclusion, they give good reason for believing that the conclusion is true, and therefore, the
argument is a good one. But the premises of the second argument fail to support the conclusion
adequately. Even if they may be true, they do not provide good reason to believe that the conclusion
is true. Therefore, it is bad argument, but it is still an argument.

How can we distinguish premises from conclusion and vice versa?

 Premises and conclusions are difficult to identify for a number of reasons. Even though all
arguments are ideally presumed to be composed of premises and a conclusion, in reality, sometimes
arguments may contain other sentences as elements. Moreover, even though it is assumed, for the
sake of argument, that all arguments are composed of premises and conclusion, identifying
conclusion from argument is very difficult. Since it is impossible to analyze arguments without
identifying a conclusion from premises, we need techniques that can help us to identify premises
from a conclusion and vice versa.
 The first technique that can be used to identify premises from a conclusion and vice versa is looking
at an indicator word. Frequently, arguments contain certain indicator words that provide clues in
identifying premises and conclusion. Here below are some Conclusion Indicators:

Therefore Wherefore Accordingly So

Provided that It must be that We may conclude

Entails that Hence It shows that

Thus Consequently We may infer

It implies that As a result It follows that

 If an argument does not contain a conclusion indicator, it may contain a premise indicator. Here
below are some typical Premise Indicators:

Since As indicated by Because

Owing to Seeing that Given that

As For In that

May be inferred from Inasmuch as for the reason that

 For example: You should avoid any form of cheating on exams because cheating on exams is punishable
by the Senate Legislation of the University. Based on the above rule, the premise of this argument is
“cheating on exams is punishable by the Senate Legislation of the University” because it follows the
premise indicator word “because”, and the other statement is a premise.

Techniques of Recognizing Arguments

 Not all passages contain arguments. Because logic deals with arguments, it is important to be able to
distinguish passages that contain arguments from those that do not. In general, a passage contains an
argument if it purports to prove something; if it does not do so, it doesn‟t contain an argument. Two
conditions must be fulfilled for a passage to purport to prove something:

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 1. At least one of the statements must claim to present evidence or reasons.
2. There must be a claim that the alleged evidence or reasons supports or implies something- that
is, a claim that something follows from the alleged evidence.
 The statements that claim to present the evidence or reasons are premises. The statement that the evidence
is claimed to support or imply is the conclusion. It is not necessary that the premises present actual
evidence or true reasons nor that the premises actually support the conclusion. But at least the premises
must claim to present evidence or reason, and there must be a claim that the evidence or reasons supports
or implies something.
 In the above case, the first condition expresses the factual claim, and deciding whether it is fulfilled
usually presents few problems. Thus most of our attention will be concentrated on whether the second
condition is fulfilled. This second condition expresses what is called an inferential claim. The inferential
claim is simply the claim that the passage expresses a reasoning process that something supports or
implies something or that something follows from something. Such a claim can be either explicit or
implicit. An explicit inferential claim is usually asserted by premise or conclusion indicator words such as,
“thus,” “since,” “because,” “hence,” “therefore,” and so on). Example: The human eye can see a source of
light that is as faint as an ordinary candle from a distance of 27 kilometers, through a nonabsorbent
atmosphere. Thus, a powerful searchlight directed from a new moon should be visible on earth with naked
eye. The word “thus” expresses the claim that something is being inferred, so the passage is an argument.
 An implicit inferential claim exists when there is an inferential relationship between the statements in the
passage. Example; the price reduction [seen with an electronic calculator] is the result of technological
revolution. The calculator of the 1960s used integrated electronic circuits that contained about a dozen of
transistors or similar components on a single chip. Today, mass produced chips, only a few square,
contain several thousand such components. The inferential relationship between the first statement and the
other two constitutes an implicit claim that evidence supports something, so we are justified in calling the
passage an argument. The first statement is the conclusion, and the other two are premises. In deciding
whether there is a claim that evidence supports or implies something, keep an eye out for:
1. Indicator words; and
2. The presence of inferential relationship between the statements.
 In connection with these points, however, a word of caution is in order. First, the occurrence of an
indicator word by no means guarantees the presence of an argument. This is because; these words are
often used for purposes other than to indicate the occurrence of a premise or conclusion. The most
important way to know whether a given passage contains an argument or not is to focus whether there is
an inferential claim between the statements that construct the passage or not. This is because; there are
cases in which passages contain indicator words, but lack inferential claim between the statements.

Passages Lacking an Inferential Claim

 Passages lacking an inferential claim contain statements that could be premises or conclusion or both, but
what is missing is a claim that a reasoning process is being expressed-that potential premises support a
conclusion or that a potential conclusion follows from premises. Passages lacking an inferential claim are;
passages in which there is no claim that something is being proved. They contain statements that could
pass for premises or conclusions, or even both, but they are not. They are passages in which there is no
claim that a premise might support a conclusion, or that a conclusion is supported by a premise.

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 Some of the examples of passages lacking an inferential claim are: Warnings, (such as “watch out that you
shouldn‟t sleep on the ice”) and Pieces of advice, (such as “I suggest you take accounting during your first
semester”) are kinds of discourse aimed at modifying someone‟s behavior. Each of these could serve as
the conclusion of an argument; but in their present context, there is no claim that they are supported or
implied by reasons or evidence. Thus, there is no argument. For example:
 When you go to a job interview, be sure to dress neatly and be on time. Be sure to shake your employer‟s
hand and look him square in the eye. Try to show him you are interested in and really want the job.
Statements of belief or opinions: they are expressions about what someone believes or thinks about
something. For example let‟s see the following passage; I think that going through life with a negative
attitude is waste of time. I would prefer to talk at things with a fresher perspective. In the above passage,
the author is making claims but he/she offers no evidence to support his personal outlook.
 Loosely Associated Statements: are passages that contain statements that may be about a similar subject
but, they lack a claim that one is proved by the other. Example: not to honor men of worth will keep the
people from contention; not to value goods that are hard to come by will keep them from theft; not to
display what is desirable will keep them from being unsettled of mind.
 In the above passage, all the statements don‟t offer any support for one another. Therefore, it is not an
argument. Reports; consist of a group of statements that convey information about some situation or event.
Let us see the following report; A powerful car bomb blew up outside the regional telephone company
headquarters in Melbourne, injuring 25 people and causing millions of dollars of damage to nearby
buildings, police said. A police statement said that 198-pound bomb was packed into a milk churn hidden
in the back of a stolen car.
 The statements in the above report could serve as the premises of an argument; but because there is no
inferential claim that the statements support or imply any thing, it is not an argument. One must be careful,
though, with reports about arguments. Example: 500 prisoners were released from the Federal Corrective
Center. A spokesman for the Center said that the prisoners pose “no threat to the community” since they
have showed behavioral change and become persons of civic and moral virtues. Properly speaking, this
passage is not an argument, because the author of the passage does not claim that anything is supported by
evidence.
 An Expository Passage; is a kind of discourse that begins with a topic sentence followed by one or more
sentences that develop the topic sentence. If the objective is not to prove the topic sentence but only to
expand or elaborate it, then there is no argument. For example; there are three familiar states of matter;
solid, liquid and gas. Solid objects ordinarily maintain their shape and volume regardless of their location.
A liquid occupies a definite volume, but assumes the shape of the occupied portion of its container. A gas
contains neither shape nor volume. It expands to fill completely whatever container it is in.
 The aim of this passage is not to prove that the first statement is true. It simply further expands the idea of
the first statement. Because of this passage cannot be considered to be an argument. Yet expository
passages can also be interpreted as arguments if there is good reason that a statement is being proved by
others. This is not to say that some expository are arguments but only that some passages can be
interpreted both as expository passages and as arguments.
 An Illustration; consists of statements about a certain subject combined with a reference to one or more
specific instances intended to exemplify that statement. Illustrations are often confused with arguments
because many of them contain indicator words such as “thus.” For example: Chemical elements, as well
as, compounds can be represented by molecular formulas. Thus, oxygen is represented by “O2” Sodium

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 Chloride by “NaCl” and Sulfuric Acid by “H2So4”. This passage is not an argument, because there is no
claim that anything supported by evidence. The purpose of the word “thus” is not to indicate that
something is being proved but merely to show how something is done (how chemical elements and
compounds can represented by formulas).
 Nevertheless, as with expository passage, many passages that give examples can be interpreted as
argument. There are arguments which illustrate a process but they do it to prove a point. Such arguments
are called arguments from example. For example: Although most forms of cancer, if untreated can cause
death, not all cancers is life threatening. For example, basal cell carcinoma, the most common of all skin
cancers, can produce disfigurement, but it almost never result in death. This passage illustrates the effects
of skin cancer, but the point of the explanation is to show that not all cancers are life threatening. So it can
be taken as an argument. Let us also see another example. Water is an excellent solvent. It can dissolve a
wide range of materials that will not dissolve in other liquids. For example, salts do not dissolve in most
common solvents, such as gasoline, kerosene, turpentine and cleaning fluids. But many salts dissolve
readily in water. So do a variety of nonionic organic substances, such as sugars and alcohols of low
molecular weight.
 In this passage the examples that are cited can correctly be interpreted as proving the water is an excellent
solvent. Thus, the passage may be considered as an argument. The types of non-arguments described here
are not mutually exclusive. One passage can often be interpreted as an illustration, as an expository
passage, a statement of opinion, or a set of loosely associated statements. The main issue here is not what
kind of non-arguments a certain passage might be, but whether that passage is best interpreted as an
argument or non-argument.
 Conditional Statements; a conditional statement is an “if …then…” statement. For example; if air is
removed from a solid closed container, then the container will weigh less than it did. Every conditional
statement is made up of two components. The component statement immediately following the “if” is
called antecedent, and the one following the “then” is called the consequent. Occasionally, if the word
“then” is left out then the order of antecedent and consequent is reversed. In the above example, the
antecedent is “air is removed from a solid closed container,” and the consequent is “the container will
weigh less than it did.”
 Conditional statements are not arguments, because they fail to meet the criteria given earlier. In an
argument, at least one statement must claim to provide the evidence or reasons, and there must be a claim
that this evidence implies something. In conditional statement, there is no claim that either the antecedent
or the consequent present evidence. In other words, there is no assertion that either the antecedent or the
consequent is true. Rather there is only the assertion that if the antecedent is true, then so is the
consequent. Of course, a conditional statement as a whole may present evidence, because it asserts a
relationship between statements. Yet when conditional statements are taken in this sense, there is still no
argument, because there is then no separate claim that this evidence implies anything. Some conditional
arguments are similar to arguments, however, in that they express the outcome of a reasoning process. As
such, they may be said to have a certain inferential content. Consider the following:
1. If both Saturn and Uranus have rings, then Saturn has rings.
2. If iron is less dense than mercury, then it will float in mercury.
 The link between the antecedent and consequent of these conditional statements resembles the inferential
link between the premises and conclusion of an argument. Yet there is a difference because the premises
of an argument are claimed to be true, whereas no such claim is made for the antecedent of a conditional

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 statement. Accordingly, these conditional statements are not arguments. The relation between conditional
statements and arguments may be summarized as the following manner
1. A single conditional statement is not an argument.
2. A conditional statement may serve as either the premise or the conclusion or both of an
argument.
3. The inferential content of a conditional statement may be re-expressed to form an argument.
For example, let us the following conditional statement and it can be re-expressed to form an
argument; Conditional statement; if cigarette companies publish warning labels, then smokers
assume the risk of smoking.
 Argument form; if cigarette companies publish warning labels, then smokers assume the risk of smoking.
Cigarette companies do publish warning labels. Therefore, smokers assume the risk of reasoning.
Conditional statements are especially important in logic because they express the relationship between the
necessary and sufficient conditions.
 A is sufficient condition for B whenever the occurrence of A is all that is needed for the
occurrence of B.
 B is said to be a necessary condition for A, whenever A cannot occur without the occurrence of B.
 For example; (1) Being a human is sufficient for being a mammal. But being a mammal is necessary
before you can be a human. (2) Having gas in your car is necessary to driving, but it is not enough to
actually get you on the road. A sufficient condition for deriving would be to put the key into the
ignition, but without gas then driving won‟t happen. Explanations; an explanation consists of a
statement or group of statements intended to shed light on some phenomenon that is usually
accepted as a matter of fact. For example; the sky appears blue from the earth‟s surface because
light rays from the sun are scattered by particles in the atmosphere. Cows can digest grass, while
humans cannot, because their digestive systems contain enzymes not found in humans.
 Every explanation is composed of two distinct components: the explanandum and explanans. The
explanadum is a statement that describes the event or phenomenon to be explained, and the explanans is
the statement or group of statements that purports to do the explaining. Explanations are sometimes
mistaken for arguments because they often contain the indicator word “because.” Yet explanations are not
arguments for the following reason: In an explanation, the explanans is intended to show why something
is the case, whereas in an argument the premises are intended to prove that something is the case. In the
first example given above, the fact that the sky is blue is readily apparent. The intention of the passage is
to explain why it appears blue – not to prove that it appears blue. Similarly, in the second example,
virtually everyone knows that people cannot digest grass. The intention of the passage is to explain why
this is true.
 Explanations bear a certain similarity to arguments. Like certain conditional statements, explanations
express the outcome of a reasoning process. The rational link between the explanandum and the explanans
may at times resemble the inferential link between the premises and conclusion of an argument. Yet
explanations are not arguments, because they do not purport to prove anything. If explanations are said to
have a certain inferential content, that content is not used for the same purpose as the inferential content
expressed in arguments. In deciding whether a passage contains an argument, one should look for three
things:
1. Indicator words.
2. The presence of an inferential relationship between statements, and
3. Typical kinds of non-arguments.
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 Also, in the absence of indicator words, remember that it is often helps to mentally insert the word
“therefore” before the various statements to decide whether it makes sense to interpret one of them as
following from the others.

Types of Arguments: Deduction and Induction

 So far we have seen the meaning and structures of an argument. Now the discussion more continues on
types of arguments. Generally speaking arguments can be classified into two folds: deductive and
inductive.
1. Deductive argument
 A deductive argument is an argument in which the premises are claimed to support the conclusion
in such a way that if they are assumed true, it is impossible for the conclusion to be false. The word
“impossible” in strict sense implies that the conclusion is claimed to follow necessarily from the
premises. Thus, deductive arguments are those that involve necessary reasoning. Let‟s see following
two examples of a deductive argument;
A. There is no Ethiopian leader who is beheaded by foreigners. Emperor Yohannes IV is among
leaders of Ethiopia. Thus, he is not beheaded by foreign forces.
B. All Latin American nations are colonized by either the Spaniards or Portuguese. Brazil is not
colonized by Portuguese. Accordingly, Spain is the colonizer of Brazil.
2. Inductive Arguments
 An inductive argument is an argument in which the premises are claimed to support the conclusion
in such a way that if they are assumed true, then based on that assumption it is improbable that the
conclusion is false (that is, it is probable that the conclusion is true). In such arguments, the
conclusion is claimed to follow only probably from the premises. The premises may provide some
considerable evidence for the conclusion but they do not imply (necessarily support) the conclusion. In
this case, we might have sufficient condition (evidence) but we cannot be certain about the truth of the
conclusion. However, this does not mean that the conclusion is wrong or unacceptable, where as it could
be correct or acceptable but only based on probability. Thus, inductive arguments are those that involve
probabilistic reasoning. These are examples of an inductive argument;
A. Most famous philosophers of the world are theists. Fredric Nietzsche was one of the well-
known philosophers of the world. So, he was a religious man.
B. From our past experience we realized that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Hence,
tomorrow the sun will rise in the east and set in the west.

Differentiating Deductive and Inductive Arguments

 The distinction between inductive and deductive arguments appears in the strength of an argument‟s
inferential claim. This is to mean that the difference between deductive and inductive arguments lies in
how strongly the conclusion is claimed to follow from the premises. Although it may be sometimes
difficult to know explicitly the strength of the claims in a given argument, it is advisable to use one‟s
interpretive skill to evaluate it. There are three (3) factors that influence our decisions about this claim:

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 1. The occurrence of special indictor words: Some of the indictor terms of a deductive argument
are “definitely,” “certainly,” and “absolutely”-these all show that an absolute (strong) connection
between the premise(s) and a conclusion.
▪ E.g. Anyone who is trained in computer engineering must have an ample knowledge about software
programming and maintenance. Kiros is the newly employed computer engineer in our organization.
Thus, [it absolutely follows that] he knows about software programming and maintenance. These are some
of special indictor words of an inductive argument; “Probable” “Improbable,” “Plausible” “Implausible,”
“Likely” Unlikely” and “Reasonable to conclude”.
▪ E.g. Many pregnant women in Ethiopia lost their life because of malnutrition. Three pregnant women
recently died at Mekelle hospital. [We may conclude that,] they died due to malnutrition.

NB: the indictor word “Must” can imply either necessity or probability, so that it belongs to both categories.

2. The actual strength of the Inferential Link between premises and conclusion: Here it
is quite important the reader or listener to use the interpretive skill of her own by pondering the strength
of the inferential link between premise(s) and conclusion. You can use the above examples just by
excluding parts which are bracketed.

Example-1:

All Ethiopian people love their country.

Debebe is an Ethiopian.
Therefore, Debebe loves his country.

Example-2:

The majority of Ethiopian people are poor.

Alamudin is an Ethiopian.
Therefore, Alamudin is poor.
3. The Forms of Arguments: This is the third factor which can be used when an argument contains
no indictor words, and the conclusion does not follow either strictly or probably from the premises.

Some examples of deductive argumentative forms and inductive argumentative forms:

Instances of Deductive Argumentative Forms

 Many arguments have a distinctive character or form that indicates that the premises are supposed to
provide absolute support for the conclusion. Examples of such deductive forms or kinds of argumentation
are arguments based on pure mathematics, arguments from definition, and syllogisms: categorical,
hypothetical, and disjunctive syllogisms. Let us discuss them one by one.

A. Forms of a Deductive Argument

1. Argument based on mathematics: This includes argument based on some purely arithmetic
or geometric computation or measurement.
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 E.g. the total number of fresh students that are joined at Mekelle University in 2011/2012 is 12,000. For
each of the three campuses of the University 4000 new students are assigned to train in different fields of
study. Therefore, Adi Haki campus of Mekelle University will receive about 4,000, fresh students.
2. Argument from Definitions: This is an argument in which the conclusion is claimed to depend
merely upon the definition of some word or phrase used in the premise or conclusion.
▪ E.g. God is omnipotent, it follows that he is all-knowing.
3. Syllogistic Arguments: Syllogism is an argument consisting of exactly two premises and a
conclusion. There are three types of a syllogistic argument. These are;
A. Categorical Syllogism; it is a syllogism in which each statement starts with one of words “all,”
“no,” or “some.”
E.g. All lawyers are politicians. Some lawyers are economists. Therefore, some politicians are
economists.
B. Hypothetical Syllogism; is a syllogism having a conditional statement for one or both of its
premises.
E.g, If water boils 100 degree salacious, and then it evaporates. If water evaporates, then it
simply changes its chemical character into gas. Thus, if water boils 100 degree salacious, then it
simply changes its chemical character into gas.
C. Disjunctive Syllogism; is a syllogism having a disjunctive statement (i.e., an “either…or…”
statement) for one of its premises.
E.g. either colonel Muammar Gaddafi is killed by NATO‟s military force or by Libyan rebel
groups. Gaddafi is not killed by NATO‟s military power. Thus, he was killed by rebel groups.

Instances of Inductive Argumentative Forms /Forms of an Inductive Argument/

 In general, inductive arguments are such that the content of the conclusion is in some way intended
to “go beyond” the content of the premises. The premises of such an argument typically deal with some
subject that is relatively familiar, and the conclusion then moves beyond this to a subject that is less
familiar or that little is known about. Such an argument may take any of several forms: predictions about
the future, arguments from analogy, inductive generalizations, arguments from authority, arguments based
on signs, and causal inferences, to name just a few.
1. An argument based on prediction; in this type argument the premises deal with some known event
in the present or past, and the conclusion moves beyond this event to some event in the relative
future.
E.g. For the last consecutive three years Manchester United has won the European Champions League.
From this it is reasonable to argue that the champion of this year Champions League will be Manchester
United.
2. An argument from analogy; this argument occurs when there is an analogy or similarity between
two things or states of affairs.
E.g. Both Plato and Aristotle are classical Greece philosophers. Plato accuses poets for their imitative
character. Analogously, Aristotle blames poets for their imitative disposition.
3. An Inductive Generalization; this is an argument that proceeds from the knowledge of a selected
sample to some claim about the whole group. Since the members of the sample have a certain
attributes or characteristic(s), it is argued that all the members of the group have that same
characteristic(s).
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 E.g. your sample shows that more than 60% of the classes are highly interested in learning Ethiopian
traditional painting. Therefore, we may conclude that all students of the class are very much interested in
learning Ethiopian traditional painting.
4. An argument from Authority; this is an argument in which the conclusion rests upon a statement
made by some presumed authority or witness.
E.g. Mr. Thomas Michael, the director of World Food Program in Ethiopia mentioned that almost three
million people of the country are suffering because of food scarcity. On the basis of Mr. Thomas
Michael‟s authority, it is reasonable to conclude that millions of Ethiopians are starved.
5. An argument based on Signs; this is an argument that proceeds from the knowledge of a certain
sign (symbol, symptom) to knowledge of the thing or situation that the sign stands for.
E.g. look her shoulders; there is a tattoo of Emperor H/Sellase. Therefore, she is probably a Rastafarian.
6. A Causal Inference; this is an argument that proceeds from knowledge of a cause to knowledge of
the effect, or, conversely, from knowledge of an effect to knowledge of a cause.
E.g Ato Wondemu was an alcoholic person throughout his life. The medical test shows that he is
infected with a liver cancer. Thus, he is infected by a liver cancer because he drunk for a number of
years.

Furthermore Considerations
 It should be noted that the various subspecies of inductive arguments listed here are not intended to be
mutually exclusive. Overlaps can and do occur. For example, many causal inferences that proceed from
cause to effect also qualify as predictions. We should take care not to confuse arguments in geometry,
which are always deductive, with arguments from analogy or inductive generalizations. For example, an
argument concluding that a triangle has a certain attribute (such as a right angle) because another triangle,
with which it is congruent, also has that attribute might be mistaken for an argument from analogy. One
broad classification of arguments not listed in this survey is scientific arguments. Arguments that occur in
science can be either inductive or deductive, depending on the circumstances. In general, arguments aimed
at the discovery of a law of nature are usually considered inductive. Another type of argument that occurs
in science has to do with the application of known laws to specific circumstances. Arguments of this sort
are often considered to be deductive, but only with certain reservations.
 A final point needs to be made about the distinction between inductive and deductive arguments. There is
a tradition extending back to the time of Aristotle that holds that inductive arguments are those that
proceed from the particular to the general, while deductive arguments are those that proceed from the
general to the particular. (A particular statement is one that makes a claim about one or more particular
members of a class, while a general statement makes a claim about all the members of a class.) In fact,
there are deductive arguments that proceed from the general to the general, from the particular to the
particular, and from the particular to the general, as well as from the general to the particular; and there are
inductive arguments that do the same. For example, here is a deductive argument that proceeds from the
particular to the general:

Three is a prime number. Five is a prime number. Seven is a prime number.

Therefore, all odd numbers between two and eight are prime numbers.

 Here is an inductive argument that proceeds from the general to the particular:

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 All emeralds previously found have been green.

Therefore, the next emerald to be found will be green.

Evaluating Arguments
 Every argument makes two basic claims: a claim that evidence or reasons exist and a claim that the
alleged evidence or reasons support something (or that something follows from the alleged evidence
or reasons). The first is a factual claim, and the second is an inferential claim. The evaluation of every
argument centers on the evaluation of these two claims. The most important of the two is the inferential
claim, because if the premises fail to support the conclusion (that is, if the reasoning is bad), an
argument is worthless. Thus, we will always test the inferential claim first, and only if the premises do
support the conclusion will we test the factual claim (that is, the claim that the premises present genuine
evidence, or are true).

Evaluating Deductive Arguments: Validity, Truth, and Soundness

Deduction and Validity

 A deductive argument is an argument in which the premises are assumed to be true; it is impossible for the
conclusion to be false. If the premises do in fact support the conclusions in this way the arguments is said
to be valid; if not, it is invalid. Thus,
 A valid deductive argument is an argument such that if the premises are assumed true, it is
impossible for the conclusion to be false. In such arguments, the conclusion follows with strict
necessity from the premises. For example;
All birds are mammals.
A crocodile is a bird. Therefore, the crocodile is a mammal.
 Invalid deductive argument is an argument such that if the premises are assumed true, it is
possible for the conclusion to be false. In these arguments, the conclusion does not follow with
strict necessity from the premises, even though it is claimed to. For example:
All philosophers are rational.
Socrates was rational. Therefore, Socrates was a philosopher.
 Two immediate consequences follow from these two definitions:
 The first is that, there is no middle ground between valid and invalid argument. That means there
are no arguments that are “almost” valid and “almost” invalid. If the conclusion follows with
strict necessity from the premises, the argument is valid, if not, it is invalid.
 The second consequence is that there is only an indirect relation between validity and truth. For
an argument to be valid, it is not necessary that either the premises or the conclusion be true,
but merely that if the premises are assumed true, it is impossible that the conclusion be false.
Here is an example of valid argument having a false premise and false conclusion:

All auto makers are computer manufacturers;

NOKIA is an auto maker. Therefore, NOKIA is a computer manufacturer.

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 To see this argument is valid one must ignore the fact that the premises are false and attempt to determine
that would be true, if the premises were true. Clearly, if the premises were true, it would follow
necessarily that NOKIA is a computer manufacturer. Thus, the argument is valid. Just the occurrence of
false premises and a false conclusion does not prevent an argument from being valid, so the
occurrence of true premises and a true conclusion does not guarantee validity. Here is an example of
an invalid argument having true premises and a false conclusion:

All banks are financial organizations.

Nyala Insurance Company is a financial organization.

Therefore, Nyala Insurance Company is a bank.

 Note that the truth and falsity of premises and conclusion is irrelevant to the question of validity except in
the case of true premises and a false conclusion. Any deductive argument having true premises and a
false conclusion is necessarily invalid. This is perhaps the most important fact in all of deductive logic.
The entire system of deductive logic would be quite useless if it accepted as valid any inferential process
by which a person could start with truth in the premises and arrive at falsity in the conclusion.
 For an argument to be valid it is not necessary that either the premises or the conclusions be true,
but merely that if the premises assumed true, it is impossible for the conclusion be false. That is, we
do not have to know whether the premise of an argument is actually true in order to determine its validity
(valid or invalid). To test an argument for validity, we begin by assuming that all premises are true, and
then we determine if it is possible, in light of that assumption, for the conclusion to be false.
 Thus, the validity of argument is the connection between premise and conclusion rather than on the
actual truth or falsity of the statement formed the argument. There are four possibilities with
respect to the truth or falsity of the premises and conclusion of a given argument:
1. True premises and True conclusion,
2. True premises and False conclusion,
3. False premises and True conclusion, and
4. False premises and False conclusion
 All of the above possibilities allow for both valid and invalid arguments, except the second case (true
premises and false conclusion). That is, the second (2) case does not allow for valid arguments.

Deduction and Soundness

 The evaluation of every argument centers on the evaluation of two claims: the inferential claim and
factual claim of the argument. Again, we will always test the inferential claim first, and only if the
premises do support the conclusion will we test the factual claim (that is, the claim that the premises
present genuine evidence, or are true). Depending on their actual ability, (assuming that they already
have actually accomplished their inferential claims by being valid), to accomplish their factual claims,
deductive arguments can be either sound or unsound.
 Sound argument is a deductive argument that is valid and has all true premises. Both
conditions must be met for an argument to be sound, and if either is missing the argument is
unsound. A deductive argument that does not actually accomplish its inferential claim, (that is not
valid), cannot be sound, regardless of the truth values of its premises. Such a deductive argument is
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 unsound, by definition. A sound argument therefore, is what is meant by a “good” deductive argument
in the fullest sense of the term. For example
All trees are plants.
Acacia is a tree. Therefore, acacia is a plant.
Sound Argument = A valid argument + All true premises
 Unsound argument is a deductive argument that is either valid with one or more false
premises, or invalid, or both. Because a valid argument is one such that it is impossible for the
premises to be true and the conclusion false, and because a sound argument does in fact have
true premises, it follows that every sound argument, by definition, will have a true conclusion as
well. A sound argument, therefore, is what is meant by a “good” deductive argument in the fullest
sense of the term.
 In connection with definition of soundness, a single provision is required: for an argument to be unsound,
the false premise or premises must actually be needed to support the conclusion. All invalid deductive
arguments are unsound.

Evaluating Inductive Arguments: Strength, Truth, and Cogency

Induction and Strength
 Inductive argument is an argument in which the premises are claimed to support the conclusions in such a
way that if they are assumed true, it is improbable for the conclusions to be false. If the premises do in fact
support the conclusions in this way the arguments is said to be strong; if not, it is weak.
 A strong inductive argument is an argument such that if the premises are assumed true, it is
improbable for the conclusion to be false. In such arguments, the conclusion follows probably from
the premises. For example,
This barrel contains one hundred apples.
Eighty apples selected at random were found tasty.
Therefore, probably all one hundred apples are tasty.
 A weak inductive argument is an argument such that if the premises are assumed true, it is
probable for the conclusions to be false. In these arguments, the conclusion does not follow probably
from the premises, even though it is claimed to.
This barrel contains one hundred apples.
Three apples selected at random were found tasty.
Therefore, probably all one hundred apples are tasty.
 Unlike validity and invalidity, strength and weakness generally admit of degrees. The central question in
determining strength or weakness is whether the conclusion would probably be true if the premises are
assumed true. The following examples demonstrate that the first argument is not absolutely weak nor the
second absolutely strong. Both arguments would be strengthened or weakened by the random selection of
a larger or smaller sample. The incorporation of additional premises into an inductive argument will also
generally tend to strengthen or weaken it.
1. This mini-library contains over 10,000 books. 50 books selected at random were found to be
written on philosophy. Thus, it is likely that all of the books in the mini-library are books
written on philosophy. (Weak Inductive Argument)
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 2. This mini-library contains over 10,000 books. 1000 books selected at random were found to be
written on philosophy. Thus, it is likely that all of the books in the mini-library are books
written on philosophy. (Strong Inductive Argument)
 As with validity and invalidity, strength and weakness are only indirectly related to truth and falsity
except in the case of true premises and a probably false conclusion. Any inductive argument having
true premises and a probable false conclusion is always weak. Inductive logic would be useless if it
accepted as strong any inductive argument having true premises and a probably false conclusion.

Strength and Truth Value

 Four possibilities with respect to the truth or falsity of the premises and conclusion of a given argument:
(1) True premises and True conclusion, (2) True premises and False conclusion, (3) False premises and
True conclusion, and (4) False premises and False conclusion; works in inductive arguments as well. Note
that all these possibilities, except the second case (true premises and false conclusion), allow for both
strong and weak arguments. That is, the second case does not allow for strong arguments. As we have just
seen, any argument having this combination is necessarily weak.
 In general, the basic idea of evaluating inductive argument, strength is not something that is
determined by the actual truth or falsity of the premises and conclusion, but by the relationship
between premises and conclusion. Nevertheless, there is one arrangement of truth and falsity in the
premises and conclusion that does determine the issue of strength. Thus, any inductive argument
having actually true premises and an actually false conclusion is weak.

Induction and Cogency

 We said earlier that the evaluation of every argument centers on the evaluation of two claims: the
inferential claim and factual claim of the argument. We have also said that we will always test the
inferential claim first, and only if the premises do support the conclusion will we test the factual claim
(that is, the claim that the premises present genuine evidence, or are true). Now that we have tested the
inferential claims of inductive arguments, it is time to proceed to the next step: evaluating the factual
claims of inductive arguments.
 Depending on their actual ability, (assuming that they already have actually accomplished their
inferential claims by being strong), to accomplish their factual claims, inductive arguments can be
either cogent or uncogent.
 A cogent argument is an inductive argument that is strong and has all true premises. Both
conditions must be met for an argument to be cogent, and if either is missing the argument is
uncogent. An inductive argument that does not actually accomplish its inferential claim, (that is not
strong), cannot be cogent, regardless of the truth values of its premises. Such an inductive argument is
uncogent, by definition. For example:
Some South African leaders were imprisoned before they become president. Nelson Mandela
was a South African leader. Thus, before his leadership carrier of South Africa Mandela was
imprisoned. (Cogent)

Cogent Argument = A strong argument + All true premises

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 Thus, an uncogent argument is an inductive argument that is either strong with one or more false
premises, or weak, or both. Because the conclusion of a cogent argument is genuinely supported by true
premises, it follows that the conclusion of every cogent argument is probably true. A cogent argument is
the inductive analogue of a sound deductive argument and is what is meant by a “good” inductive
argument without qualification. For example:
The famous economist Sir Isaac Newton stated that World Bank‟s structural adjustment
program cannot be effectively implemented in the Third-World nations due to
governmental mismanagement. In views of Newton, we may conclude that World Banks
structural adjustment program is ineffective. (Uncogent)
 There is a difference between sound and cogent arguments in regard to the true-premises
requirement. In a sound argument it is only necessary that the premises be true and nothing more.
Given such premises and a good reasoning, a true conclusion is guaranteed. In a cogent argument,
on the other hand, the premises must not only be true, they must also not ignore some important piece of
evidence that outweighs the given evidence and entails a quite different conclusion.

All weak inductive arguments are uncogent.

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 CHAPTER THREE
LOGIC AND LANGUAGE
Philosophy of Language

1.1 What is Philosophy of Language?

 Philosophy of Language is the reasoned inquiry into the origins of language, nature of meaning, the
usage and cognition of language, and the relationship between language, logic and reality. For
continental philosophers, however, the philosophy of language tends to be dealt with, not as a separate
topic, but as a part of logic and other field of studies.
 One of the most fundamental questions asked in Philosophy of Language is "what is language?"
According to semiotics, language is the mere manipulation and use of symbols in order to draw
attention to signified content. Semiotics is the study of sign processes in communication and of how
meaning is constructed and understood. Thus, language is a body of standard meanings of words
and the form of speech used as a means of expressing the feeling, emotion, desire, thought etc. in a
consistent pattern of communication. It is an important discipline in its own right, and hence, it poses
questions like:
 What is meaning
 How does language refer to the real world?
 Is language learned or is it innate?
 How does the meaning of a sentence emerge out of its parts? And other related issues.
 Philosophy of language, however, should not be confused with Linguistics, because Linguistics is the field
of study that asks questions like: What distinguishes one particular language from another e.g. what is it
that makes "English" English? What is the difference between Spanish and French? Linguists, like Noam
Chomsky, a figure who has come to define the 20th century linguistics, have emphasized the role of
"grammar" and syntax (the rules that govern the structure of sentences) as a characteristic of any
language. Chomsky believes that humans are born with an innate understanding of what he calls
"universal grammar" (an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans) and a child's exposure
to a particular language just triggers this antecedent knowledge. Chomsky begins with the study of
people's internal language (what he calls "I-languages"), which are based upon certain rules which
generate grammars, supported in part by the conviction that there is no clear, general and principled
difference between one language and the next, and which may apply across the field of all languages.
Other attempts, which he dubs "E-languages", have tried to explain a language as usage within a specific
speech community with a specific set of well-formed utterances in mind.
 Translation and interpretation present other problems to philosophers of language. The resulting view is
called Semantic Holism, a type of Holism which holds that meaning is not something that is associated
with a single word or sentence, but can only be attributed to a whole language (if at all).
 Language is the most important thing in the study of logic. Giving that logic is the study of
arguments, and language is the fundamental tool of communication, there is not only a strong
relationship between language and logic but also the former has a prominent position within the
discipline of the latter. Argument, as the most special subject matter of logic, is nothing but a reasoning
process that is constructed and conveyed through language. The clarification and analysis of terms and
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 statements is the objective of philosophy in general and logic in particular. In order to interpret, analyze,
and evaluate arguments well, one must pay close attention to language. Many errors in logic stem from a
careless or imprecise use of language, and many misunderstandings about the nature of language. Hence,
if we are to successfully evaluate the logical correctness of arguments, it is important to pay a special
attention to the language in which the arguments are cast. More specially, meanings and definitions are
very important both, for clear, effective, and comprehensive communications, and for logical, scientific,
and critical evaluations of arguments. Before we decide whether the requirements of a certain argument
are fulfilled, it is necessary to understand the meanings of the words that make up the statements, which in
its turn, make up the given argument.

1.2 A Brief Note on the Debates and History of Philosophy of Language

 In the Western tradition, the early work was covered, by Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics of Ancient
Greece. Plato generally considered that the names of things are determined by nature, with each
phoneme (the smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning) representing basic ideas or sentiments,
and that convention only has a small part to play. Aristotle held that the meaning of a predicate (the way
a subject is modified or described in a sentence) is established through an abstraction of the similarities
between various individual things (a theory later known as Nominalism). His assumption that these
similarities are constituted by a real commonality of form, however, also makes him a proponent of
moderate Realism.
 The Stoic philosophers made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five
parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives, conjunctions and articles. What they called the lektón (the
meaning, or sense, of every term) gave rise to the important concept of the proposition of a
sentence (its ability to be considered an assertion, which can be either true or false). The Scholastics of
the medieval era were greatly interested in the subtleties of language and its usage, provoked to some
extent by the necessity of translating Greek texts into Latin. They considered Logic to be a "science
of language", and anticipated many of the most interesting problems of modern Philosophy of
Language, including the phenomena of vagueness and ambiguity, the doctrines of proper and improper
supposition (the interpretation of a term in a specific context), and the study of categorematic and
syncategorematic words and terms. Linguists of the Renaissance period were particularly interested in
the idea of a philosophical language (or universal language), spurred on by the gradual discovery in the
West of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
 The philosophical study of language, finally, began to play a more central role in Western
philosophy in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, especially philosophical branches of Analytic
Philosophy and philosophy as a whole was understood to be purely a matter of Philosophy of
Language.

1.3 Some Philosophical Approaches to the Nature of Meaning

 The question, "what is meaning?” is not immediately obvious. Most frequently, “Meaning" can be
described as the content carried by the words or signs exchanged by people when communicating through
language. Arguably, there are two essentially different types of linguistic meaning:
 Conceptual meaning: which refers to the definitions of words themselves and the features of those
definitions, which can be treated using semantic feature analysis; and

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  Associative meaning: which refers to the individual mental understandings of the speaker, and
which may be connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected or thematic.
 There are several approaches to the philosophical nature of meaning. Among others, the following are the
major ones:
1. Idea theories: these theories claim that meanings are purely mental contents provoked by
signs. This approach is mainly associated with the British Empiricist traditions of John Locke, George
Berkeley and David Hume, though some contemporary theorists have renewed it under the guise of
semantic internalism.
2. Truth-conditional theories: these theories hold meaning to be the conditions under which
an expression may be true or false. This tradition goes back to Gottlob Frege, although there has also
been much modern work in this area.
3. Use theories: these theories understand meaning to involve or be related to speech acts and
particular utterances, not the expressions themselves. This approach was pioneered by Ludwig
Wittgenstein and his Communitarian view of language.
4. Reference theories or semantic externalism: these theories view meaning to be equivalent
to those things in the world that are actually connected to signs. Tyler Burge and Saul Kripke are
the best known proponents of this approach.
5. Verificationist theories: these theories associate the meaning of a sentence with its method of
verification or falsification. This Verificationist approach was adopted by the Logical Positivists of
the early 20th century.
6. Pragmatist theories: these theories maintain that the meaning or understanding of a sentence
is determined by the consequences of its application.

Logic and Meaning

The Functions of Language: Cognitive and Emotive Meanings

 Language requires symbol such as words, sounds, gestures, signs that are patterned and related in a certain
way for the purpose of communicating meanings. We use language in many different ways. It is the tool
of communication and the means of expressing ideas. It is the way of conveying information and evoking
feelings. As we have discussed, in chapter two that argument is a group of statements; and statements are
sentences that are declarative. Sentences are made up of words; and words have their own meanings that
are to be conveyed through definitions. Therefore, words are the most basic units in any language, and
thus the most important thing in every argument.
 Language has two fundamental functions in logic, conveying information and expressing or evoking
feeling, which are expressed through some terminologies. Those terminologies that convey information
are said to have cognitive meanings, and those that expresses or evokes feelings are said to have emotive
meanings. Emotively charged statements usually have both cognitive meaning and emotive meaning.
However, since logic is concerned chiefly with cognitive meaning, our primary concern should be to
distinguish and disengage the cognitive meaning of emotive statements from the emotive meaning, which
is commonly known as a value claim. Value claims are usually the most important part of the cognitive
meaning of emotive statements. Thus, for the purposes of logic, it is important that we be able to

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 disengage the value claims of emotively charged statements from the emotive meaning and treat these
claims as separate statements.
 Ordinary language, as most of us are at least vaguely aware, serves various functions in our day- to-day
lives. The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein thought the number of these functions to be
virtually unlimited. Thus, among other things, language is used to:

Ask questions Tell jokes Tell stories Flirt with someone Tell lies
Give directions Guess at answers Sing songs Form hypotheses
Issue commands Launch verbal assaults Greet someone and so on.

 For our purpose, two linguistic functions are particularly important: (1) to convey information and (2) to
express or evoke feelings. Consider, for example, the following Statements: Examples:
A. “Death penalty, which is legal in thirty-six states, has been carried out most often in Georgia;
however, since 1977 Texas holds the record for the greatest number of executions.”
B. “Death penalty is a cruel and inhuman form of punishment in which hapless prisoners are
dragged from their cells and summarily slaughtered only to satiate the bloodlust of a
vengeful public.”
 The statement in Example 1 is intended primarily to convey information while the statement in Example 2
is intended, at least in part, to express or evoke feelings. These statements accomplish their respective
functions through the distinct kinds of terminology in which they are phrased. Terminology that conveys
information is said to have cognitive meaning, and terminology that expresses or evokes feelings is said to
have emotive meaning.
 Thus, in Example 1, the words “Legal,” “thirty-six,” “most often,” “Georgia,” “record,” etc. have
primarily a cognitive meaning, while in Example 2, the words “cruel,” “inhuman,” “hapless,”
“dragged,” “slaughtered,” “bloodlust,” and “vengeful” have a strong emotive meaning. Of course, these
latter words have cognitive meaning as well. “Cruel” means tending to hurt others, “inhuman” means
inappropriate for humans, “hapless” means unfortunate, and so on.

Emotive Terminologies in Arguments

 In arguments, emotive terminology accomplishes basically the same function as emotive terminology in
statements. It allows the arguer to make value claims about the subject matter of the argument without
providing evidence, and it gives the argument a kind of steamroller quality by which it tends to crush
potential counter arguments before the reader or listener has a chance to think of them. This steamroller
quality also tends to paralyze the logical thought processes of readers or listeners so that they are
not able to see illogical arguments in their true light. These effects of emotive terminology can be avoided
if the reader or listener will disengage the value claims and other cognitive meanings from the emotive
meaning of the language and re-express them as distinct premises.

Deficiency of Cognitive Meanings: Vagueness and Ambiguity

 Two problems that affect our cognitive use of language are vagueness and ambiguity.
1. A linguistic expression is said to be vague if there are borderline cases in which it is impossible
to tell if the expression applies or does not apply. Vague expressions often allow for a
continuous range of interpretations. The meaning is hazy, obscure, and imprecise. For

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 example, words such as “love,” “happiness,” “peace,” “excessive,” “fresh,” “rich,” “poor,”
“normal,” “conservative” and “polluted” are vague. Vagueness can also affect entire
statements. Such vagueness may arise not so much from the individual words as from the way
in which the words are combined. For example, suppose someone were to say, “Today our job
situation is more transparent. „„First, what is the meaning of “job situation”? Does it refer to
finding a job, keeping a job, filling a job, completing a job, or bidding on a job? And what exactly
does it mean for a job situation to be “transparent”? Does it mean that the job is more easily
perceived or comprehended? That the job is more easily completed? That we can anticipate our
future job needs more clearly? Or, what else? Not all cases of vagueness, however, are
problematic.
2. The other way in which cognitive meanings can be defective is ambiguity. An expression is said
to be ambiguous when it can be interpreted as having more than one clearly distinct meaning
in a given context. For example, words such as “light,” “proper,” “critical,” “stress,” “mad,”
“inflate,„„ “chest,” “bank,” “sound,” and “race” can be used ambiguously. Thus, if one were to
describe a beer as a light pilsner, does this mean that the beer is light in color, light in calories, or
light in taste? If one were to describe an action as proper, does this mean proper in a moral sense or
proper in the sense of being socially acceptable? Or if one were to describe a person as critical, does
this mean that the person is essential for a certain task or that the person tends to criticize others?
 The difference between ambiguity and vagueness is that vague terminology allows for a relatively
continuous range of interpretations, whereas ambiguous terminology allows for multiple discrete
interpretations. In a vague expression there is a blur of meaning, whereas in an ambiguous expression
there is a mix-up of otherwise clear meanings. However, there are many forms of expression that are
ambiguous in one context and vague in another. For example, the word “slow” in one context could mean
either mentally retarded or physically slow, but when the word refers to physical slowness, it could be
vague. How slow is slow? Similar remarks apply to “light,” “fast, „„and “rich.”
 The role of vagueness and ambiguity in arguments may be conveniently explored in the context of
conflicting arguments between individuals. Such conflicts are called disputes. Now let us see the two
kinds of disputes in logic.
 Vagueness and ambiguity are the two linguistic problems that affect our cognitive use of language.
 A linguistic expression is said to be vague if there are borderline cases in which it is
impossible to tell if the expression applies or does not apply. Vague expressions often allow for
a continuous range of interpretations.
 An expression is said to be ambiguous when it can be interpreted as having more than one
clearly distinct meaning in a given context.
 The role of vagueness and ambiguity in arguments may be conveniently explored in the context of
conflicting arguments between individuals. Such conflicts are called disputes. Disputes can be verbal
or factual. The former centers on a confusion of cognitive meanings between disputants, while the later on
a matter of fact.

Forms of Disputes in Logic: Verbal and Factual Disputes

 Disputes that arise over the meaning of language are called verbal disputes. These are disputes in
which the apparent conflict is not genuine and can be resolved by coming to agreement about how
some words or phrases is to be understood. But not all disputes are of this sort. Some disputes arise
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 over a disagreement about facts or because of the truth or falsity of claims, and these are called
factual disputes.
 Terms symbolize two kinds of meanings: intensional meaning and extensional meaning. The
intensional meaning, which is otherwise known as intension or connotation, consists of the qualities or
attributes that the term connotes, and the extensional meaning, which is otherwise known as extension
or denotation, consists of the members of the class that the term denotes. To avoid the subjective
elements that invades the notion of connotation and of course that of denotation, logicians typically
restrict the meaning of connotation and denotation to the conventional connotation and denotation.
Sometimes extensions can be empty, but intensions.

The Intension and Extension of Term

 The main task of logic is the evaluation of arguments. However, as we saw in the previous section, there
are countless arguments, in which this task leads to the observation. Such an observation usually indicates
that the meaning of certain words in the argument is vague or ambiguous. Clearing up the problem often
involves supplying a definition. Thus, the study of meaning and definition is closely related to the main
task of logic. The basic units of any ordinary language are words. Our main concern in this chapter,
however, is not with words in general but with terms. A term is any word or arrangement of words that
may serve as the subject of a statement. Terms consist of proper names, common names, and descriptive
phrases. Some examples:
 Proper Names: (Abebe, South Ethiopia, The Ethiopian Parliament and Girmaa Gamachuu)
 Common Names: (Animal, Activity, Person and House)
 Descriptive Phrases: (First Prime Minister of Ethiopia, author of Oromia and those who study
hard)
 Words that are not terms include verbs, non-substantive adjectives, adverbs, prepositions,
conjunctions, and all non-syntactic arrangements of words. The following words or phrases are not terms;
none can serve as the subject of a statement: (Dictatorial, above and beyond, craves, runs quickly,
moreover, cabbages into again the forest
 Words are usually considered to be symbols, and the entities they symbolize are usually called meanings.
Terms, being made up of words, are also symbols, but the meanings they symbolize are of two kinds:
intensional and extensional. The intensional meaning (which is otherwise known as intension or
connotation) consists of the qualities or attributes that the term connotes, and the extensional meaning
(which is otherwise known as extension or denotation) consists of the members of the class that the term
denotes. For example, the intensional meaning of the term “cat” consists of the attributes of being furry, of
having four legs, of moving in a certain way, of emitting certain sounds, and so on, while the extensional
meaning consists of cats themselves- all the cats in the universe. The term connotes the attributes and
denotes the cats. “Intension” and “extension” are roughly equivalent to the more modern terms “sense”
and “reference,” respectively. Also, it should be noted that logic uses the terms “connotation” and
“denotation” differently from the way they are used in grammar. In grammar, “connotation” refers to the
subtle nuances of a word, whereas “denotation” refers to the word„s direct and specific meaning.
 Because terms symbolize meanings to individual persons, it is inevitable for subjective elements to invade
the notion of connotation. To a cat lover the term “cat”, for example, might connote the attributes of being
cuddly and adorable, while to someone who hates cats it might connote the attributes of being obnoxious
and disgusting. To avoid this problem, logicians typically restrict the meaning of connotation to what is
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 usually called the conventional connotation. The conventional connotation of a term includes the attributes
that the term commonly calls forth in the minds of competent speakers of the language. Under this
interpretation, the connotation of a term remains more or less the same from person to person and from
time to time.
 The denotation of a term also typically remains the same from person to person, but it may change with
the passage of time. The denotation of “currently living cat,” for example, is constantly fluctuating as
some cats die and others are born. The denotation of the term “cat,” on the other hand, is presumably
constant because it denotes all cats, past, present, and future. Sometimes the denotation of a term can
change radically with the passage of time. The terms “currently living dodo bird” and “current king of
France,„„ for example, at one time denoted actually existing entities, but today all such entities have
perished. Accordingly, these terms now have what is called empty extension. They are said to denote the
empty (or “null„„) class, the class that has no members. While these terms have empty extension, however,
they do not have empty intension, for they connote a variety of intelligible attributes.
 The fact that some terms have empty extension leads us to an important connection between extension and
intension- that intension determines extension. The intensional meaning of a term serves as the criterion
for deciding what the extension consists of. Because we know the attributes connoted by the term
“unicorn”- a term with empty extension-,w for example, we know that the term has empty extension.
That is, we know that there are no four-legged mammals having a single straight horn projecting from
their forehead. Similarly, the intension of the word “cat” serves as the criterion for determining what is
and what not a member of the class of cats is.
 One kind of term that raises problems for the intension-determines-extension rule is proper names. For
example, the name “Abebe” might not appear to have any intension, but it denotes the person who has this
name. Although philosophers have disagreed about this, it would seem that proper names must have some
kind of intension or we would not know what persons, if any, they denote. Thus, we solve the problem.
One possible solution to this problem is that names are shorthand symbols for descriptions or bundles of
descriptions. For example, “Abebe” could be shorthand for “the first year student of Civil Engineering
department, since 2005 E.C.” or “the person who is a representative of this section.”
 Another possible solution to the problem of proper names is that the intension of proper names consists of
the causal chain of events leading from the point at which the name is first assigned to the point at which a
certain person learns about the name. Thus, the first link in such a chain might be the baptismal event at
which the name “Abebe” is given to a certain infant; the second link would be the event in which a certain
third party is informed of the first event, and so on. This entire chain of events extending through the
linguistic community would then constitute the intension of “Abebe.” Thus, we conclude that for all
terms, including proper names, intension determines extension.
 The distinction between intension and extension may be further illustrated by comparing the way in which
these concepts can be used to give order to random sequences of terms. Terms may be put in the order of
increasing intension, increasing extension, decreasing intension, and decreasing extension. A series of
terms is in the order of increasing intension when each term in the series (except the first) connotes more
attributes than the one preceding it. In other words, each term in the series (except the first) is more
specific than the one preceding it. (A term is specific to the degree that it connotes more attributes.) The
order of decreasing intension is the reverse of that of increasing intension. A series of terms is in the
order of increasing extension when each term in the series (except the first) denotes a class having more
members than the class denoted by the term preceding it. In other words, the class size gets larger with

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 each successive term. The order of decreasing extension is the reverse of that of increasing extension.
Examples:
 Increasing intension: animal, mammal, feline, tiger
 Increasing extension: tiger, feline, mammal, animal
 Decreasing intension: tiger, feline, mammal, animal
 Decreasing extension: animal, mammal, feline, tiger

Logic and Definition

Meaning, Types, and Purposes of Definitions

3.1 The Meaning of Definition

 Definition is a technical and structural organization of words and/or terms or phrases in

explaining the meaning of a given term. For most logicians, definitions are intended exclusively to
explicate the meaning of words. Hence, we may define definition as a group of words that assigns a
meaning to some word or group of words. Accordingly, every definition consists of two parts: the
definiendum and the definiens. The definiendum is the word or group of words that is supposed to
be defined, and the definiens is the word or group of words that does the defining. For example, in
the definition. “Tiger” means a large, striped, ferocious feline indigenous to the jungles of India and
Asia”, the word “tiger” is the definiendum, and everything after the word “means” is the definiens.
The definiens is not itself the meaning of the definiendum; rather, it is the group of words that symbolizes
(or that is supposed to symbolize) the same meaning as the definiendum.

3.2 The Types and Purposes of Definitions

 There are various kinds of definitions that are actually used in our practical life. Based on the
functions that they actually serve, definitions can be classified into five: stipulative, lexical,
précising, theoretical, and persuasive definitions. Let us discuss them in detail

1) Stipulative Definitions:

 A stipulative definition assigns a meaning to a word for the first time. This may involve either
coining a new word or giving a new meaning to an old word. The purpose of a stipulative
definition is usually to replace a more complex expression with a simpler one. Another use for
stipulative definitions is to set up secret codes. For example, during World War II, “Tora, Tora,
Tora” was the code name Admiral Yamamoto transmitted to the war office in Tokyo signaling that the
Japanese fleet had not been spotted in the hours preceding the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
 It is important to note that because a stipulative definition is a completely arbitrary assignment of
a meaning to a word for the first time, there can be no such thing as a “true” or “false”
stipulative definition. Furthermore, for the same reason, a stipulative definition cannot provide
any new information about the subject matter of the definiendum.
 Stipulative definitions are misused in verbal disputes when one person covertly uses a word in a
peculiar way and then proceeds to assume that everyone else uses that word in the same way.
Under these circumstances that person is said to be using the word “stipulatively”. In such cases

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 the assumption that other persons use the word in the same way is rarely justified. It is important,
however, to be aware that insofar as people keep coming up with new creations, whether it be new food
concoctions, new inventions, new modes of behavior, new kinds of apparel, new dances, or whatever,
the demand for stipulative definitions will continue.

2) Lexical Definitions

 This definition is used to report the meaning that a word already has in a language. Dictionary
definitions are all instances of lexical definitions. Thus, in contrast with a stipulative definition, a
lexical definition may be true or false depending on whether it does or does not report the way a
word is actually used. Because words are frequently used in more than one way, lexical definitions
have the further purpose of eliminating the ambiguity that would otherwise arise if one of these
meanings were to be confused with another.

3) Précising Definitions

 The purpose of a précising definition is to reduce the vagueness of a word. Words such as “fresh,”
“rich” and “poor” are vague. Once the vagueness of such words is reduced by a précising
definition, one can reach a decision as to the applicability of the word to a specific situation. For
example, if legislation were ever introduced to give direct financial assistance to the poor, a
précising definition would have to be supplied specifying exactly who is poor and who is not. The
definition “Poor” means having an annual income of less than $4,000 and a net worth of less than $
20,000 is an example of a précising definition.
 Whenever words are taken from ordinary usage and used in a highly systematic context such as
science, mathematics, medicine, or law, they must always be clarified by means of a précising
definition. The terms “force,” “energy,” “acid,” “element,” “number,” “equality,” “contract,” and
“agent” have all been given précising definitions by specific disciplines.
 A précising definition differs from a stipulative definition in that the latter involves a purely arbitrary
assignment of meaning, whereas the assignment of meaning in a précising definition is not at all
arbitrary. A great deal of care must be taken to ensure that the assignment of meaning in a précising
definition is appropriate and legitimate for the context within which the term is to be employed.

4) Theoretical Definitions

 A theoretical definition assigns a meaning to a word by suggesting a theory that gives a certain
characterization to the entities that the term denotes. Such a definition provides a way of viewing
or conceiving these entities that suggests deductive consequences, further investigation
(experimental or otherwise), and whatever else would be entailed by the acceptance of a theory
governing these entities.
 However, not all theoretical definitions are associated with science. Many terms in philosophy, such as
“substance”, “form”, “cause”, “change”, “idea”, “good”, “mind”, and “God” have been given
theoretical definitions. In fact most of the major philosophers in history have given these terms their
own peculiar theoretical definitions, and this fact accounts in part for the unique character of their
respective philosophies.

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  Like stipulative definitions, theoretical definitions are neither true nor false, strictly speaking. The
reason is that theoretical definitions function as proposals to see or interpret some phenomenon in a
certain way. Since proposals have no truth value, neither do theoretical definitions. They may,
however, be more or less interesting or more or less fruitful, depending on the deductive consequences
they entail and on the outcome of the experiments they suggest.

5) Persuasive Definitions
 The purpose of a persuasive definition is to engender a favorable or unfavorable attitude toward
what is denoted by the definiendum. This purpose is accomplished by assigning an emotionally
charged or value-laden meaning to a word while making it appears that the word really has (or
ought to have) that meaning in the language in which it is used. Thus, persuasive definitions amount
to a certain synthesis of stipulative, lexical, and, possibly, theoretical definitions backed by the rhetorical
motive to engender a certain attitude. As a result of this synthesis, a persuasive definition masquerades
as an honest assignment of meaning to a term while condemning or blessing with approval the subject
matter of the definiendum. Examples:
 “Abortion” means the ruthless murdering of innocent human beings. Or, “Abortion” means a safe
and established surgical procedure whereby a woman is relieved of an unwanted burden.
 “Taxation” means the procedure by means of which our common wealth is preserved and
sustained. Or, “Taxation” means the procedure used by bureaucrats to rip off the people who
elected them.
 While persuasive definitions may, like lexical definitions, be evaluated as either true or false, the
primary issue is neither truth nor falsity but the effectiveness of such definitions as instruments of
persuasion. Giving their primary objective i.e., influencing the attitudes of the reader/listener- persuasive
definitions may be used with considerable effectiveness in political speeches and editorial columns.

Techniques of Definition
 Techniques may be classified in terms of the two kinds of meaning, extensional and intensional.
4.1 The Extensional (Denotative) Definitional Techniques
 An extensional definition is one that assigns a meaning to a term by indicating the members of the class
that the definiendum denotes. There are at least three ways of indicating the members of a class:
pointing to them (demonstrative or ostensive definitions), naming them individually (enumerative
definitions), and naming them in groups (definitions by subclass).

1) Demonstrative (Ostensive) Definitions

 Demonstrative (Ostensive) definitions are probably the most primitive form of definition. All one
need know to understand such a definition is the meaning of pointing. Such definitions may be
either partial or complete, depending on whether all or only some of the members of the class
denoted by the definiendum are pointed to. For examples: “Chair” means this and this and this- as
you point to a number of chairs, one after the other.
 Demonstrative definitions are also the most limited. In addition to the limitations affecting all
extensional definitions, there is the obvious limitation that the required objects are available for
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 being pointed at. For example, if one wishes to define the word “sun” and it happens to be nighttime,
a demonstrative definition cannot be used. Demonstrative definitions differ from the other kinds of
definitions in that the definiens is constituted at least in part by a gesture- the gesture of
pointing. Since the definiens in any definition is a group of words, however, a gesture, such as
pointing, must count as a word. While this conclusion may appear strange at first, it is supported by the
fact that the “words” in many sign languages consist exclusively of gestures.

2) Enumerative Definitions
 Enumerative Definitions assign a meaning to a term by naming the members of the class the term
denotes. Like demonstrative definitions, they may also be either partial or complete. For
example: “Actor” means a person such as Abebe Balicha, Samsom Taddesse, or Mahder Assefa.
Complete enumerative definitions are usually more satisfying than partial ones because they identify
the definiendum with greater assurance. However, relatively few classes can be completely
enumerated.

3) Definition by Subclass
 Definition by Subclass assigns a meaning to a term by naming subclasses of the class denoted by
the term. Such a definition, too, may be either partial or complete, depending on whether the
subclasses named, when taken together, include all the members of the class or only some of
them. See the following examples, the first is partial, the second is complete:
 “Tree” means an oak, pine, palm, spruce, maple, and the like.
 “Fictional work” means a poem, a play, a novel, or a short story.
 Extensional definitions are chiefly used as techniques for producing lexical and stipulative
definitions. Lexical definitions are aimed at communicating how a word is actually used, and
one of the ways of doing so is by identifying the members of the class that the word denotes.
Dictionaries, for example, frequently include references to the individual members (enumerative
definition), or to the subclasses of the class (definition by subclass) denoted by the word being defined;
and sometimes to the picture of the object that word symbolizes (demonstrative).

The Intensional (Connotative) Definitional Techniques

 An intensional definition one that assigns a meaning to a word by indicating the qualities or
attributes that the word connotes. There are at least four strategies that may be used to indicate the
attributes/qualities that a word connotes. These strategies result synonymous definitions,
etymological definitions, operational definitions, definitions by genus and difference.

1) Synonymous Definition
 Synonymous Definition is one in which the definiens is a single word that connotes the same
attributes as the definiendum- that the definiens is a synonym of the word being defined. For
examples: “Physician” means doctor and “Observe “means see.
 When a single word can be found that has the same intensional meaning as the word being defined, a
synonymous definition is a highly concise way of assigning a meaning. However, many words have

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 subtle shades of meaning that are not connoted by any other single word. For example, the word
“wisdom” is not synonymous with either “knowledge”, “understanding”, or “sense.”

2) Etymological Definition
 Etymological Definition assigns a meaning to a word by disclosing the word„s ancestry in both its
own language and other languages. For example, the English word “license” is derived from the
Latin verb licere, which means to be permitted. Etymological definitions have special importance for
at least two reasons.
 The first reason is that the etymological definition of a word often conveys the word„s root
meaning or seminal meaning from which all other associated meanings are derived. Unless
one is familiar with this root meaning, one often fails to place other meanings in their proper light
or to grasp the meaning of the word when it is used in its most proper sense. For example, the word
“principle” derives from the Latin word principium, which means beginning or source.
Accordingly, the “principles of physics” are those fundamental laws that provide the “source” of the
science of physics.
 The second reason why etymological definitions have a special importance is that if one is familiar
with the etymology of one word, one often has access to the meaning of an entire constellation
of related words. For example, if one is familiar with the etymological definition of “polygon”
(from the Greek words poly, meaning many, and ganos meaning angle), one might grasp the
meanings of “polygamy” (from gamos, meaning marriage).

3) Operational Definition
 Operational Definition assigns a meaning to a word by specifying certain experimental
procedures that determine whether or not the word applies to a certain thing. For examples: one
substance is “harder than” another if and only if one scratches the other when the two are rubbed
together. A solution is an “acid” if and only if litmus paper turns red when dipped into it. Each of these
definitions prescribes an operation to be performed. The first prescribes that the two substances in
question be rubbed together, the second that the litmus paper be placed in the solution and observed
for color change. Unless it specifies such an operation, a definition cannot be an operational definition.
For example, the definition “A solution is an “acid” if and only if it has a pH of less than 7,” while
good in other respects, is not an operational definition because it prescribes no operation.
 Operational definitions were invented for the purpose of tying down relatively abstract concepts
to the solid ground of empirical reality. In this they succeed fairly well; yet, from the standpoint of
ordinary language usage, they involve certain deficiencies. One of these deficiencies concerns the fact
that operational definitions usually convey only part of the intensional meaning of a term. “Acid„„, for
example, means more than blue litmus paper turning red. Moreover, operational definitions cannot
apply to terms outside the framework of science. For example, no adequate operational definition
could be given for such words as “love,” “respect,” “freedom,” and “dignity.”

4) Definition by Genus and Difference

 Definition by genus and difference assigns a meaning to a term by identifying a genus term and
one or more difference words that, when combined, convey the meaning of the term being

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 defined. It is more generally applicable and achieves more adequate results than any of the other kinds
of intensional definition. To explain how it works, we must first explain the meanings of the terms
“genus,” “species,” and “specific difference.”
 In logic, “genus” and “species” have a somewhat different meaning than they have in biology. In
logic, “genus” simply means a relatively larger class, and “species‟ means a relatively smaller
subclass of the genus. For example, we may speak of the genus animal and the species mammal, or of
the genus mammal and the species feline, or of the genus feline and the species tiger, or the genus tiger
and the species Bengal tiger.
 The “specific difference,” or “difference,” for short, is the attribute or attributes that distinguishes the
various species within a genus. Because the specific difference is what distinguishes the species, when
a genus is qualified by a specific difference, a species is identified. Definition by genus and
difference consists of combining a term denoting a genus with a word or group of words
connoting a specific difference so that the combination identifies the meaning of the term
denoting the species.
 Let us construct a definition by genus and difference for the word “ice.” The first step is to identify a
genus of which ice is the species. The required genus is water. Next we must identify a specific
difference (attribute) that makes ice a special form of water. The required difference is frozen. The
completed definition may now be written out:

Species Difference Genus

“Ice” means frozen water

 Therefore, it is easy to construct a definition by genus and difference. Simply select a term that is more
general than the term to be defined. Then narrow it down so that it means the same thing as the term
being defined. Definition by genus and difference is the most effective of the intensional definitions for
producing the five kinds of definition discussed in the previous lesson. Stipulative, lexical, précising,
theoretical, and persuasive definitions can all be constructed according to the method of genus
and difference. Lexical definitions are typically definitions by genus and difference, but they also
often include etymological definitions. Operational definition can serve as the method for constructing
stipulative, lexical, précising, and persuasive definitions, but because of the limitations we have noted,
it typically could not be used to produce a complete lexical definition. Other techniques would have to
be used in addition.
 Synonymous definition may be used to produce only lexical definitions. Since this definition requires
that the definiendum must have a meaning before a synonym can be found, this technique cannot be
used to produce stipulative definitions. At the same time, since the definiens of such a definition
contains no more information than the definiendum, it cannot be used to construct précising,
theoretical, and persuasive definitions. This account of definitions is inevitably incomplete. At the
beginning of the chapter, we mentioned that all words- not just terms- stand in need of definitions, but
the account given here is based on the intension and extension of terms. Nevertheless, many of the
techniques developed here can be applied to words in general, and even to symbols.

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Criteria for Lexical Definitions
 Lexical definition is the most important and common type of definition that we often use in our
day-to-day life. In this lesson, we will see the common rules of lexical definitions. Giving the function
of a lexical definition, lexical definitions are what we most frequently encounter and are what most
people mean when they speak of the “definition” of a word. Accordingly, it is appropriate that we have a
set of rules that we may use in constructing our own lexical definitions and in evaluating the lexical
definitions of others. While some of these rules apply to the other kinds of definitions as well, the unique
functions that are served by stipulative, précising, theoretical, and persuasive definitions prescribe
different sets of criteria.

Rule 1: A Lexical definition should conform to the standards of proper grammar: A definition, like any
other form of expression, should be grammatically correct. For examples, the following
definitions are grammatically incorrect: Vacation is when you don‟t have to go to work or school.
Furious means if you‟re angry at someone. Here are the grammatically correct definitions of the
above terms: “Vacation” means a period during which activity is suspended from work or school.
“Furious” means a condition of being angry.

Rule 2: A Lexical definition should convey the essential meaning of the word being
defined: A definition cannot be helpful if it fails to convey the essential meaning of the
definiendum. Any definition that defines the word “human” as “featherless bipedal”, for instance,
cannot be helpful since it fails to convey the essential meaning of “human” as the word is used in
ordinary English. It says nothing about the important attributes that distinguish humans from the other
animals, namely, the capacity to reason and to use language on a sophisticated level. Thus, a more
adequate definition would be “human” means the animal that has the capacity to reason and to speak.”

Rule 3: A Lexical definition should be neither too broad nor too narrow : If a definition is
too broad, the definiens includes too much; if it is too narrow, the definiens includes too little.
For example, “bird” were defined as any warm-blooded animal having wings, the definition would
be too broad because it would include bats, and bats are not birds. If, on the other hand, “bird” were
defined as any warm-blooded, feathered animal that can fly, the definition would be too narrow
because it would exclude ostriches, which cannot fly. The only types of lexical definitions that tend
to be susceptible to either of these deficiencies are synonymous definitions and definitions by genus
and difference. With synonymous definitions, one must be careful that the definiens really is a
synonym of the definiendum. As for definitions by genus and difference, one must ensure that the
specific difference narrows the genus in exactly the right way.

Rule 4: A Lexical definition should avoid circularity: Sometimes the problem of circularity
appears in connection with pairs of definitions. The following pair is circular: “Science” means
the activity engaged in by scientists. “Scientist” means anyone who engages in science. At other
times, a definition may be intrinsically circular. Of the following, the first is a synonymous
definition, the second a definition by genus and difference: “Quiet” means quietude. “Silence”
means the state of being silent. Certain operational definitions also run the risk of circularity:

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 “Time” means whatever is measured by a clock. Surely a person would have to know what “time”
means before he/she could understand the purpose of a clock.

Rule 5: A Lexical definition should not be negative when it can be affirmative: Of the
following two definitions, the first is affirmative, the second negative: “Concord” means harmony.
“Concord” means the absence of discord. Some words, however, are intrinsically negative. For
them, a negative definition is quite appropriate. Examples: “Bald” means lacking hair. “Darkness”
means the absence of light.

Rule 6: A Lexical definition should avoid figurative, obscure, vague, or ambiguous

language: A definition is figurative if it involves metaphors or tends to paint a picture
instead of exposing the essential meaning of a term. Example: “Camel” means a ship of the
desert. A definition is obscure if its meaning is hidden as a result of defective or
inappropriate language. One source of obscurity is overly technical language. Compare the
following two definitions: “Bunny” means a mammalian of the family Leporidae of the order.
Lagomorpha whose young are born furless and blind. “Bunny” means a rabbit. A definition is
vague if it lacks precision or if its meaning is blurred- that is, if there is no way of telling
exactly what class of things the definiens refers to. Example: “Democracy” means a kind of
government where the people are in control. This definition fails to identify the people who are in
control, how they exercise their control, and what they are in control of. A definition is
ambiguous if it lends itself to more than one distinct interpretation. Example: “Triangle”
means a figure composed of three straight lines in which all the angles are equal to 180. Does this
mean that each angle separately is equal to 180 or that the angles taken together are equal to 180?
Either interpretation is possible given the ambiguous meaning of “all the angles are equal to 180.”

Rule 7: A Lexical definition should avoid affective terminology: Affective terminology is any
kind of word usage that plays upon the emotions of the reader or listener. It includes
sarcastic and facetious language and any other kind of language that is liable to influence
attitudes. Example: “Communism” means that “brilliant” invention of Karl Marx and other
foolish political visionaries in which the national wealth is supposed to be held in common
by the people.

Rule 8: A Lexical definition should indicate the context to which the definiens pertains :
This rule applies to any definition in which the context of the definiens is important to the
meaning of the definiendum. Examples: “Strike” means (in baseball) a pitch at which a batter
swings and misses. “Strike” means (in bowling) the act of knocking down all the pins with the
first ball of a frame. “Strike” means (in fishing) a pull on a line made by a fish in taking the bait. It
is not always necessary to make explicit reference to the context, but at least the phraseology of
the definiens should indicate the context.

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 CHAPTER FOUR:
BASIC CONCEPTS OF CRITICAL THINKING
Meaning of Critical Thinking
 Critical means involving or exercising skilled judgment or observation. In this sense, critical thinking
means thinking clearly and intelligently. More precisely, critical thinking is the general term given to a
wide range of cognitive skills and intellectual dispositions needed to effectively identify, analyze, and
evaluate arguments and truth claims. Moreover, it helps to discover and overcome personal
preconceptions and biases; to formulate and present convincing reasons in support of conclusions;
and to make reasonable, intelligent decisions about what to believe and what to do.
 However, it does not automatically follow that being intelligent means being able think critically or reason
about information in a useful, effective and efficient manner. Being smart and intelligent is not sufficient.
Critical thinking is a process or journey that helps us to arrive at the most useful, helpful, and most
likely destinations when evaluating claims for scientific truth. Critical thinking, thus, is thinking
clearly, thinking fairly, thinking rationally, thinking objectively, and thinking independently. It is
a process that hopefully leads to an impartial investigation of the data and facts that remains not swayed
by irrelevant emotions. Therefore, the aim of critical thinking is to arrive at well-reasoned,
considered, and justifiable conclusions. The American philosopher, John Dewey, has defined critical
thinking as an active, persistent, and careful consideration of a belief or supposed form of knowledge in
the light of the grounds, which support it and the further conclusions to which it tends. In this definition,
there are three main points that we should focus on: active, persistent and grounds.
 The first point is that critical thinking is an active process. By defining critical thinking as an active
process, Dewey is contrasting it with the kind of thinking in which you just receive ideas and information
from other people-what you might reasonably call a passive process. For Dewey, critical thinking is
essentially an active process one in which you think things through for yourself, raise questions
yourself, find relevant information yourself and so on, rather than learning in a largely passive way
from someone else. The second point is that critical thinking is persistent and careful consideration. Here,
Dewey is contrasting critical thinking with the kind of unreflective thinking we all sometimes engage in.
For example, we sometimes jump to a conclusion or make a quick decision without thinking about it. Of
course, sometimes, we may have to do this because we need to decide quickly or the issue is not important
enough to warrant careful thought, but we often do it when we ought to stop and think-when we ought to
persist a bit. However, the most important point in Dewey‟s definition lies in what he said about the
grounds which support a belief and the further conclusions to which it tends. What Dewey is saying, to
express it in a more familiar language, is that what matters are the reasons we have for believing
something and the implications of our beliefs. It is no exaggeration to say that critical thinking attaches
huge importance to reasoning, to giving reasons and to evaluating reasoning as far as possible. There is
more to it than that, but skillful reasoning is a key element.
 Dewey‟s definition, though it is important, misses some important features of critical thinking. Let us now
see the other definition given by Edward Glaser. Edward Glaser defined critical thinking as: (1) an
attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come
within the range of one„s experience; (2) knowledge of the methods of logical enquiry and reasoning;
and (3) some skill in applying those methods. If we closely observe Glaser‟s definition, it is
immediately obvious that this definition owes a lot to Dewey‟s original definition. Glaser uses the term
evidence in place of grounds but otherwise the second sentence is much the same. But there are two points
which stands out in this definition. The first sentence speaks about an attitude or disposition to be
thoughtful about problems and recognizes that you can apply what he calls the methods of logical enquiry
and reasoning with more or less skill. The tradition has picked up on both these elements, recognizing that
critical thinking is partly a matter of having certain thinking skills. But it is not just a matter of having
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 these skills; it is also a matter of being disposed to use them. Critical thinking combines these habits and
abilities in approaching and understanding our experience.
 The other most famous contributors to the development of the critical thinking tradition are Robert Ennis.
He defined critical thinking as reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to
believe or do. Notice that the emphasis on being reasonable and reflective in this definition is similar with
the above two definitions. But notice also that Ennis speaks of deciding what to do which was not
explicitly mentioned in the above definitions. So decision-making is an important part of critical thinking
in Ennis‟s conception. What we learn from Ennis definition is that when we make a decision, we should
be serious about it. The decision may be about purchasing a phone, or it may be about choosing a
department, or any other issues. But we should employ critical thinking to make a decision.
 Here is another important definition of critical thinking is given by Richard Paul: Critical thinking is that
mode of thinking about any subject, content or problem in which the thinker improves the quality
of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing
intellectual standards upon them. Paul associates critical thinking with reflecting on thoughts. This
definition is interesting and somehow looks different from the other definitions given above. It draws
attention to a feature of critical thinking on which scholars in the field seem to be largely agreed-that the
only realistic way to develop one‟s critical thinking ability is through “thinking about one‟s thinking”
(often called meta-cognition), and consciously aiming to improve it by reference to some model of good
thinking in that domain.
 One last definition is worth reviewing. Michael Screven has defined critical thinking as skilled and active
interpretation and evaluation of observations and communications, information and argumentation.
He argued that critical thinking is an academic competency akin to reading and writing and is of similarly
fundamental importance. It is worth unpacking Screven‟s definition a little. He defines critical thinking as
a skilled activity for reasons similar to those mentioned above. He points out that thinking does not count
as critical merely because it is intended to be, any more than thinking counts as scientific simply because
it aims to be. To be critical, thinking has to meet certain standards, (clarity, relevance, reasonableness and
so on), and one may be more or less skilled at this. He defined critical thinking as an active process, partly
because it involves questioning and partly because of the role played by meta-cognition. He includes
interpretation of texts, speech, film, graphics, actions and even body language, because “like explanation,
interpretation typically involves constructing and selecting the best of several alternatives, and it is a
crucial preliminary to drawing conclusions about complex claims”. He includes evaluation because this is
the process of determining the merit, quality, worth, or value of something and much critical thinking is
concerned with evaluating the truth, probability or reliability of claims.
 Critical thinking is sometimes referred to as “critic-creative” thinking. This word is the
combination of two words: critical and creative. There are two related reasons for this. The first is
that the term “critical thinking” is sometimes thought to sound rather negative, as though one‟s
only interest is in adversely criticizing other people‟s arguments and ideas. This would be a serious
mistake since (and this is the second reason) to be good at evaluating arguments and ideas, one often
has to be very imaginative and creative about other possibilities, alternative considerations,
different options and so on.
 To be a good judge of issues, it is not enough to see faults in what other people say. You need to base your
judgment on the best arguments you can devise in the time available; and this often requires you to think
of relevant considerations other than those presented, look at issues from different points of view, imagine
alternative scenarios and perhaps find other relevant information in short, you will need to be quite
creative. For these reasons, some writers have wanted to speak of “critic-creative” thinking to emphasize
the positive, imaginative aspects of critical thinking. Unfortunately, the result is a rather cumbersome
expression so we shall use the term “critical thinking”, which is now so widely used, whilst understanding
it in this positive, imaginative sense. In short, critical thinking is a kind of evaluative thinking which
involves both criticism and creative thinking and which is particularly concerned with the quality of
reasoning or argument that is presented in support of a belief, or a course of action.
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Standards of Critical Thinking
 Standard of critical thinking refers a conditions or a level that critical thinking should meet to be
considered as normal and acceptable. Clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, consistency, logical
correctness, completeness, and fairness are some of the most important intellectual standards of critical
thinking. Let us discuss these standards in detail.
1. Clarity: Clarity refers to clear understanding of concepts and clearly expressing them in a
language that is free of obscurity and vagueness. When we construct argument, we should take into
consideration or pay close attention to clarity. Before we can effectively evaluate a person‟s argument or
claim, we need to understand clearly what the person is saying. Unfortunately, that can be difficult
because people often fail to express themselves clearly. But clarity is a gateway standard. If a statement is
unclear, we cannot determine whether it is accurate or relevant. In fact, we cannot tell anything about it
because we do not yet know what it is saying. For example, the question “What can be done about the
education system in Ethiopia?” is unclear. In order to address the question adequately, we would need to
have a clearer understanding of what the person is asking. The question is considering the “problem” to
be. A clearer question might be “What can educators do to ensure that students learn the skills
and abilities which help them function successfully on the job and in their daily decision-making?”
Sometimes lack of clarity is due to laziness, carelessness, or a lack of skill. At other times, it results
from a misguided effort to appear clever, learned, or profound. As William Strunk and E. B. White, in
their classic, “The Elements of Style”, remark that “Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also
a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among
lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter.... Only by paying careful attention to
language can we avoid such needless miscommunications and disappointments. Critical thinkers,
however, not only strive for clarity of language but also seek maximum clarity of thought. To
achieve our personal goals in life, we need a clear conception of our goals and priorities a realistic
grasp of our abilities, and a clear understanding of the problems and opportunities we face. Such
self-understanding can be achieved only if we value and pursue clarity of thought.
2. Precision: Precision is a matter of being exact, accurate and careful. Most ideas are vague and
obscures though we think we have precise understanding of them. When we try to meticulous these
ideas, we will find that they are imprecise. To get precise understanding, we should pay close attention to
details. Everyone recognizes the importance of precision in specialized fields such as medicine,
mathematics, architecture, and engineering. Critical thinkers also understand the importance of precise
thinking in different contexts. They understand that to cut through the confusions and uncertainties that
surround many everyday problems and issues, it is often necessary to insist on precise answers to precise
questions: What exactly is the problem we are facing? What exactly are the alternatives? What exactly are
the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative? Only when we habitually seek such precision are
we truly become critical thinkers.
3. Accuracy: Accuracy is about correct information. Critical thinking should care a lot about genuine
information. If the ideas and thoughts one processes are not real, then once decision based on wrong
and false information will likely to result in distorting realities. John Rawls, in his book entitled as “A
Theory of Justice” argued that truth is the first virtue of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and
economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue. Whether an idea is attractive or sophisticated
should be abandoned if it is based on false information. Accuracy is about having and getting true
information. There is a well-known saying about computers: “Garbage in, garbage out”. Simply put,
this means that if you put bad information into a computer, bad information is exactly what you will get
out of it. Much the same is true of human thinking. No matter how brilliant you may be, you are almost
guaranteed to make bad decisions if your decisions are based on false information. Critical thinkers do
not merely value the truth; they also have a passion for accurate, timely information. As consumers,
citizens, workers, and parents, they strive to make decisions and this decision should be based on true
information.
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4. Relevance: The question of relevance is a question of connections. When there is a discussion or
debate, it should focus on relevant ideas and information. That is, only those points that bear on the issue
should be raised. A favorite debater‟s trick is to try to distract an audience‟s attention by raising an
irrelevant issue. Critical thinkers do not collect any information; they focus and carefully choose only the
information that has logical relation with the ideas at hands. Issues raised should have logical connection
with the question at hand. Two ideas are relevant when they have logical connection. A critical thinker
should be relevant in his ideas and thoughts.
5. Consistency: Consistency is about the quality of always behaving in the same way or of having the
same opinions or standards. It is easy to see why consistency is essential to critical thinking. Logic
tells us that if a person holds inconsistent beliefs, at least one of those beliefs must be false. Critical
thinkers prize truth and so are constantly on the lookout for inconsistencies, both in their own thinking and
in the arguments and assertions of others. There are two kinds of inconsistency that should be avoided.
A. Logical inconsistency, which involves saying or believing inconsistent things (i.e., things that
cannot both or all be true) about a particular matter.
B. Practical inconsistency, which involves saying one thing and doing another. Sometimes people are
fully aware that their words conflict with their deeds; in short people sometime are hypocrites.
 Critical thinking helps us become aware of such unconscious practical inconsistencies, allowing us to
deal with them on a conscious and rational basis. It is also common, of course, for people to hold
unknowingly inconsistent beliefs about a particular subject. In fact, as Socrates pointed out long ago,
such unconscious logical inconsistency is far more common than most people suspect. For example, many
today claim that morality is relative, while holding a variety of views that imply that it is not relative.
Critical thinking helps us to recognize such logical inconsistencies or, still better, avoid them altogether. A
critical thinker should be consistent logically and practically.
6. Logical Correctness: To think logically is to reason correctly; that is, to draw well-founded
conclusions from the beliefs held. To think critically, we need accurate and well supported beliefs. But,
just as important, we need to be able to reason from those beliefs to conclusions that logically follow from
them. Unfortunately, illogical thinking is all too common in human affairs. When we think, we bring a
variety of thoughts together into some order. When the combinations of thoughts are mutually supporting
and make sense in combination, the thinking is logical. When the combination is not mutually supporting,
is contradictory in some sense, or does not make sense the combination, is not logical.
7. Completeness: In most contexts, we rightly prefer deep and complete thinking to shallow and
superficial thinking. Of course, there are times when it is impossible or inappropriate to discuss an issue in
depth; no one would expect, for example, a thorough and wide-ranging discussion of the ethics of the right
to self- determination in a short newspaper editorial. However, thinking is better when it is deep rather
than shallow, thorough rather than superficial.
8. Fairness: Critical thinking demands that our thinking be fair - that is, open minded, impartial, and free
of distorting biases and preconceptions. That can be very difficult to achieve. Even the most superficial
acquaintance with history and the social sciences tells us that people are often strongly disposed to resist
unfamiliar ideas, to prejudge issues, to stereotype outsiders, and to identify truth with their own self-
interest or the interests of their nation or group.
Codes of Intellectual Conduct for Effective Discussion
 The basic codes of intellectual conduct, especially the common principles of a good argument as well as
that of a critical thinking include:
1. The Structural Principle: The structural principle of a good argument requires that one who
argues for or against a position should use an argument that meets the fundamental structural
requirements of a well-formed argument. Such an argument does not use reasons that contradict
each other, that contradict the conclusion, or that explicitly or implicitly assume the truth of the
conclusion. Neither does it draw any invalid deductive inferences.

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  The first criterion used in determining whether an argument is a good one is the requirement
that it be structurally sound. An argument must look and works like an argument. In other
words, it should be formed in such a way that the conclusion either follows necessarily from its
premises, in the case of deductive arguments, or follows probably from its premises, in the case
of inductive arguments. A good argument should also provide us with reasons to believe that the
conclusion deserves our acceptance. Since most discussions about controversial issues are
initiated because the arguments conclusion has not yet been accepted by all participants, the
arguer will use premises that are more likely to be accepted than the conclusion. If those
premises are accepted and they lead to the conclusion, it is more likely that the conclusion will
also be accepted.
 Another structural feature of an argument that could render it fatally flawed would be one whose
premises are incompatible with one another. An argument that has such premises is one from
which any conclusion, no matter how outrageous, can be drawn. The fact that an argument with
incompatible premises may yield an absurd result demonstrates that it cannot even function as an
argument let alone a good one. It certainly cannot help us decide what to do or believe. The same
is true of an argument with a conclusion that contradicts one of the premises. A conclusion that
contradicts another claim in the same argument violates the law of non-contradiction.
2. The Relevance Principle: This is the second principle of a good argument that requires that one
who presents an argument for or against a position should set forth only reasons whose truth
provides some evidence for the truth of the conclusion. The premises of a good argument must be
relevant to the truth or merit of the conclusion. There is no reason to waste time assessing the truth or
acceptability of a premise if it is not even relevant to the truth of the conclusion. A premise is relevant
if its acceptance provides some reason to believe, counts in favor of, or has some bearing on the
truth or merit of the conclusion. A premise is irrelevant if its acceptance has no bearing on,
provides no evidence for, or has no connection to the truth or merit of the conclusion. One may
want to ask two questions in an effort to determine whether a particular premise or reason is relevant.
 First, would the premises being true in any way make one more likely to believe that the
conclusion is true? If the answer is yes, the premise is probably relevant. If the answer is no, the
premise is probably not relevant.
 Second, even if the premise is true, should it be a consideration in the determination of whether or
not the conclusion of the argument is true? For example, does the fact that an idea that is widely
accepted by most people can be considered as a sign that the idea itself is good. ? If the answer is
no, then a premise that asserts that claim is irrelevant. If the answer is yes, which is unlikely in this
case, and then the premise should be regarded as relevant.
3. The Acceptability Principle: The third principle of a good argument is the acceptability principle.
This principle requires that one who presents an argument for or against a position should
provide reasons that are likely to be accepted by a mature, rational person and that meet standard
criteria of acceptability. The reasons set forth in support of a conclusion must be acceptable. A reason
is acceptable if it is the kind of claim that a rational person would accept in the face of all the
relevant evidence available. Some people believe that the acceptability principle should be replaced by
the truth principle to connote the idea that premises should be true to be acceptable. However, the term
“acceptable” is preferable to the more traditional term “true” for several reasons.
 First, the notion of acceptability stems from the very nature of argumentative interchange. In
most argumentative situations, the key to achieving agreement on the conclusion is achieving
acceptance of the premises. The arguer typically starts with premises that the skeptic is likely to
accept or that a rational person ought to accept. Upon acceptance of the premises, assuming that
other criteria of a good argument are satisfied, the opponent is logically led to the acceptance of the
conclusion.
 Second, since it is notoriously difficult to establish the absolute truth of any statement, it
would be an impractical requirement of a good argument that its premises must be true in
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 any absolute sense. Indeed, if such a condition were enforced, there would be very few good
arguments. The most that we can legitimately expect is what a reasonable person would accept as
true.
 Third, an analysis of our language suggests that in many ordinary contexts, what we typically
mean by the word “true” would be more appropriately expressed by the phrase “accepted as
true.” Consider, for example, the contradictory testimony from courtroom witnesses, each of whom
is allegedly telling the truth. A better way to describe what is happening there is that each witness is
presumably telling what he or she honestly accepts as true. Fourth, even if a premise were true in
the absolute sense, it may be unacceptable to a particular audience because that audience may not
be in a position to determine its truth. For example, the evidence for a premise may be inaccessible
to them in that it is too technical for them to understand. The truth of the premise would therefore
not add anything to the practical force of the argument. An argument can be a good one only if the
premises are accepted or recognized as true.
4. The Sufficiency Principle: The four principle of a good argument is the sufficiency principle,
which requires that one who presents an argument for or against a position should attempt to
provide relevant and acceptable reasons of the right kind, that together are sufficient in number
and weight to justify the acceptance of the conclusion. The feature of the sufficiency principle that is
most difficult to apply is the assignment of weight to each piece of supporting evidence. Indeed,
disagreement over this issue probably causes most of the problems in informal discussions. What one
participant regards as the most important piece of evidence, another may regard as trivial by comparison
with other possible evidence. It is not likely that we will come to closure in a dispute until we come to
some kind of agreement about the relative weight to give to the kinds of relevant and acceptable
evidence used in support of a conclusion. One should ask several questions when applying the
sufficiency test to a particular argument.
 First, are the reasons that are given, even if they are relevant and acceptable, enough to drive one
to the arguers proposed conclusion?
 Second, is the evidence presented flawed by some kind of faulty causal analysis?
 Three, is some key or crucial evidence simply missing from the argument that must be
included as one of the premises in order for one to accept the arguments conclusion? Answer
to these questions will tell us if the premises are sufficient.
5. The Rebuttal Principle: The last principle of a good argument is the rebuttal principle. This
principle requires that one who presents an argument for or against a position should include in
the argument an effective rebuttal to all anticipated serious criticisms of the argument that may be
brought against it or against the position it supports. Since an argument is usually presented against
the background that there is another side to the issue, a good argument must meet that other side
directly. An argument cannot be a good one if it does not anticipate and effectively refute or blunt the
force of the most serious criticisms against it and the position that it supports. A complete argument
might even refute the arguments mustered in behalf of alternate positions on the issue in question. One
must ask and answer several questions in applying the rebuttal principle to an argument.
 First, what are the strongest arguments against the position being defended?
 Second, does the argument address the counterarguments effectively?
 Third, what potentially serious weaknesses in the argument for the position might be
recognized by an opponent?
 Fourth, does the argument itself recognize and address those possible weaknesses?
 Finally, does the argument show why arguments for alternative positions on the issue are
flawed or unsuccessful?
 Arguments can fail to meet the rebuttal principle in several ways and those wishing to avoid the
responsibility of rebuttal commonly use several diversionary tactics. For example, arguments that
misrepresent the criticism bring up trivial objections or a side issue, or resort to humor or ridicule are
using devices that clearly fail to make effective responses. The same can be said of those arguments that
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 ignore or deny the counterevidence against the position defended. Finally, some arguers try to avoid
responding to a criticism by attacking the critic instead of the criticism. All of these approaches are
clear violations of our obligation to respond honestly to the arguments of our opponents.
Principles of Critical Thinking
Having discussed the major principles of a good argument, let us now see the principles of a critical thinking
as parts of the codes of intellectual conduct.
1. The Fallibility Principle: This principle requires that each participant in a discussion of a
disputed issue should be willing to accept the fact that he or she is fallible, which means that one
must acknowledge that one‟s own initial view may not be the most defensible position on the
question. To employ the fallibility principle in a discussion is consciously to accept the fact that you are
fallible, that is, that your present view may be wrong or not the most defensible view on the matter in
dispute. If you refuse to accept your own fallibility, you are, in effect, saying that you are not willing to
change your mind, even if you hear a better argument. This is pretty strong evidence that you do not
intend to play fairly, and there is no real point in continuing the discussion. An admission of fallibility,
however, is a positive sign that you are genuinely interested in the kind of honest inquiry that may lead
to a fair resolution of the issue. Given the great number of issues that divide us and the large number of
different positions on each of those issues, it is more likely that a person would turn out to be wrong on
more issues than right.
2. The Truth Seeking Principle: This principle requires that each participant should be
committed to the task of earnestly searching for the truth or at least the most defensible position
on the issue at stake. Therefore, one should be willing to examine alternative positions seriously, look
for insights in the positions of others, and allow other participants to present arguments for or raise
objections to any position held on an issue. The search for truth is lifelong endeavor, which principally
takes the form of discussion, wherein we systematically entertain the ideas and arguments of fellow
seekers after truth, while at the same time thoughtfully considering criticisms of our own views. If we
really are interested in finding the truth, it is imperative not only that we assume that we may not now
have the truth, but that we listen to the arguments for alternative positions and encourage criticism of our
own arguments. We probably all want to hold only those opinions that really are true, but the
satisfaction of that interest comes at a price - a willingness to look at all available options and the
arguments in support of them. Otherwise, we might miss the truth completely. The problem, of course,
is that most of us want the truth to be what we now hold to be the truth.
3. The Clarity Principle: This principle requires that the formulations of all positions, defenses,
and attacks should be free of any kind of linguistic confusion and clearly separated from other
positions and issues. Any successful discussion of an issue must be carried on in language that all the
parties involved can understand. Even if what we have to say is perfectly clear to ourselves, others may
not be able to understand us. A position or a criticism of it that is expressed in confusing, vague,
ambiguous, or contradictory language will not reach those toward whom it is directed, and it will
contribute little to resolving the issue at hand.
4. The Burden of Proof Principle: This principle requires that the burden of proof for any
position usually rests on the participant who sets forth the position. If, and when, an opponent
asks, the proponent should provide an argument for that position. Just as a person is generally held
accountable for his or her own actions, one who makes a positive or negative claim about something has
what is called the burden of proof. In many cases, of course, one does not have to supply such proof, for
we are not always challenged to defend our claims. But if the claimant is asked, why? Or how do you
know that is true? He or she is logically obligated to produce reasons on behalf of the claim. An
exception to this rule is a situation in which the claim in question is well established or uncontroversial.
In such a case, the burden of proof might rest on the one who wishes to challenge that claim. One has
the responsibility to provide evidence for one‟s conclusion and for any questionable premise, if asked to

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 do so. To ask others to accept your claim without any support, or to shift the burden of proof to them by
suggesting that your position is true unless they can prove otherwise, is to commit the fallacy of arguing
from ignorance,” for you are, in this way, making a claim based on no evidence at all.
5. The Principle of Charity: This principle requires that if a participant‟s argument is
reformulated by an opponent, it should be carefully expressed in its strongest possible version that
is consistent with what is believed to be the original intention of the arguer. If there is any question
about that intention or about any implicit part of the argument, the arguer should be given the benefit of
any doubt in the reformulation and/or, when possible, given the opportunity to amend it. Good
discussion in general and argumentation in particular impose an ethical requirement on their
participants. But there is also a practical reason for being fair with one another‟s arguments. If we
deliberately create and then attack a weak version of the original argument, we will probably fail to
achieve the very goals that discussion is designed to serve. If we are really interested in the truth or the
best answer to a problem, then we will want to evaluate the best version of any argument set forth in
support of one of the options. Hence, if we don‟t deal with the best version now, we will eventually have
to do so, once an uncharitable version has been corrected by the arguer or others. We would do well,
then, to be fair about it in the first place by letting our opponents amend any portion of our
reconstruction of their arguments.
6. The Suspension of Judgment Principle: This principle requires that if no position is defended
by a good argument, or if two or more positions seem to be defended with equal strength, one
should, in most cases, suspend judgment about the issue. If practical considerations seem to require a
more immediate decision, one should weigh the relative benefits or harm connected with the
consequences of suspending judgment and decides the issue on those grounds. If suitable evidence is so
lacking that one has no good basis for making a decision either way, it may be quite appropriate to
suspend judgment on the matter and wait until there is more of a basis for decision. This alternative
should not, however, be seen as a clever way to avoid the psychological fright of making a difficult
decision or of moving into unfamiliar territory.
7. The Resolution Principle: This principle requires that an issue should be considered resolved if
the argument for one of the alternative positions is a structurally sound, one that uses relevant and
acceptable reasons that together provide sufficient grounds to justify the conclusion and that also
include an effective rebuttal to all serious criticisms of the argument and/or the position it
supports. Unless one can demonstrate that the argument has not met these conditions more successfully
than any argument presented for alternative positions, one is obligated to accept its conclusion and
consider the issue to be settled. If the argument is subsequently found by any participant to be flawed in
a way that raises new doubts about the merit of the position it supports, one is obligated to reopen the
issue for further consideration and resolution. If the purpose of rational discussion is ultimately to decide
what to do or believe, then coming to closure should happen more often than it does. There are many
good arguments out there, and if good arguments resolve issues, why are not more issues resolved? How
much more discussion is needed, just because some refuse to recognize the force of a good argument?
Unfortunately, very few controversial issues ever come to rational resolution. If you have doubts about
this, then ask yourself when the last time was that you allowed the force of argument to change your
mind about an important issue even though changing one‟s mind in the face of a good argument should
not be a difficult thing to do for a genuine truth-seeker.
 No argument, however, is regarded as permanently successful. There is always the possibility that new
evidence will come to light that will raise new doubts about a position hold on what were thought to be
good grounds. Under these conditions, further examination is always appropriate. Pride in holding a
position defended by a good argument in the past should not become an obstacle to reopening the issue in
the present if conditions warrant it. The new doubts, however, should not be the same old doubts in new
clothing. Reopening the issue should come only as a consequence of uncovering new or reinterpreted
evidence not considered in the earlier treatment of the issue.

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Characteristics of Critical Thinking
 What then distinguishes a critical thinker from the uncritical one? Let us discuss some characteristics
of Critical and Uncritical Thinkers.
Basic Traits of Critical Thinkers
 A critical thinker simply is a person who exhibit some feature of critical thinking. There are some
dispositions and attitudes, skills and abilities, habits and values that every critical person should
manifest. Some of the key intellectual traits of critical thinkers are.
 Honest with themselves, acknowledging what they don't know, recognizing their limitations,
and being watchful of their own errors.
 Regard problems and controversial issues as exciting challenges.
 Strive for understanding, keep curiosity alive, remain patient with complexity, and are ready to
invest time to overcome confusion.
 Base judgments on evidence rather than personal preferences, deferring judgment whenever
evidence is insufficient. They revise judgments when new evidence reveals error.
 Are interested in other people's ideas and so are willing to read and listen attentively, even
when they tend to disagree with the other person.
 Recognize that extreme views (whether conservative or liberal) are seldom correct, so they
avoid them, practice fair-mindedness, and seek a balance view.
 Practice restraint, controlling their feelings rather than being controlled by them, and thinking
before acting.
Basic Traits of Uncritical Thinkers
 Every critical person manifests some dispositions and attitudes, skills and abilities, habits and
values. What about the uncritical thinker? Some traits of uncritical thinkers are:
 Pretend they know more than they do, ignore their limitations, and assume their views are
error-free.
 Regard problems and controversial issues as nuisances or threats to their ego.
 Are inpatient with complexity and thus would rather remain confused than make the effort to
understand.
 Base judgments on first impressions and gut reactions. They are unconcerned about the
amount or quality of evidence and cling to their views steadfastly.
 Are preoccupied with themselves and their own opinions, and so are unwilling to pay attention
to others' views. At the first sign of disagreement, they tend to think, "How can I refute this?"
 Ignore the need for balance and give preference to views that support their established views.
 Tend to follow their feelings and act impulsively.
 Key intellectual traits of critical thinkers with the relevant traits of uncritical
thinkers:
 First, critical thinkers have a passionate drive for clarity, precision, accuracy, and other critical
thinking standards while uncritical thinkers often think in ways that are unclear, imprecise,
and inaccurate. In addition to this, critical thinkers are sensitive to ways in which critical thinking
can be skewed by egocentrism, socio-centrism, wishful thinking, and other impediments, while
uncritical thinkers often fall prey to egocentrism, socio-centrism, relativistic thinking, unwarranted
assumptions, and wishful thinking.
 Second, critical thinkers are skilled at understanding, analyzing, and evaluating arguments and
viewpoints whereas uncritical thinkers often misunderstand or evaluate unfairly arguments
and viewpoints. Moreover, critical thinkers reason logically, draw appropriate conclusions from
evidence and data, while uncritical thinkers are illogical, and draw unsupported conclusions from
these sources.
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  Third, critical thinkers are intellectually honest with themselves, acknowledging what they do
not know and recognizing their limitations while uncritical thinkers pretend they know more
than they do and ignore their limitations. Furthermore, critical thinkers listen open-mindedly to
opposing points of view, welcome criticisms of beliefs and assumptions, whereas uncritical thinkers
are closed-minded, and resist criticisms of beliefs and assumptions.
 Fourth, critical thinkers base their beliefs on facts and evidence rather than on personal
preferences or self-interests, while uncritical thinkers often base beliefs on mere personal
preferences or self-interests. Again, critical thinkers are aware of the biases and preconceptions that
shape the way they perceive the world, whereas uncritical thinkers lack awareness of their own biases
and preconceptions.
 Fifth, critical thinkers think independently and are not afraid to disagree with group opinion
whereas uncritical thinkers tend to engage in “groupthink” uncritically following the beliefs
and values of the crowd. Moreover, critical thinkers have the intellectual courage to face and assess
fairly ideas that challenge even their most basic beliefs whereas uncritical thinkers fear and resist
ideas that challenge their basic beliefs.
 Finally yet importantly, critical thinkers pursue truth, are curious about a wide range of issues
and have the intellectual perseverance to pursue insights or truths despite obstacles or
difficulties whereas uncritical thinkers are often relatively indifferent to truth and lack
curiosity, tend not to persevere when they encounter intellectual obstacles or difficulties.
Barriers to Critical Thinking
 There are a number of factors that impede a critical thinking. Some of the most common barriers to critical
thinking are: Lack of relevant background information, poor reading skills, bias, prejudice,
superstition, egocentrism (self-centered thinking), sociocentrism (group-centered thinking), peer
pressure, conformism, provincialism (narrow, unsophisticated thinking), narrow-mindedness,
closed-mindedness, distrust in reason, relativistic thinking, stereotyping, unwarranted
assumptions, scapegoating (blaming the innocent), rationalization (inventing excuses to avoid facing
our real motives).
 Five impediments that play an especially powerful role in hindering critical thinking: egocentrism, socio-
centrism, unwarranted assumptions, relativistic thinking, and wishful thinking.
1. Egocentrism: Even highly educated and intelligent people are prey to egocentrism. Egocentrism is
the tendency to see reality as centered on oneself. Egocentrics are selfish, self-absorbed people who
view their interests, ideas, and values as superior to everyone else‟s. All of us are affected to some
degree by egocentric biases. Egocentrism can manifest itself in a variety of ways. Two common forms
are self-interested thinking and the superiority bias.
 Self-interested thinking is the tendency to accept and defend beliefs that harmonize with one‟s
self-interest. Almost no one is immune to self-interested thinking. Self-interested thinking, however
understandable it may seem, is a major obstacle to critical thinking. Everyone finds it tempting at
times to reason that “this benefits me, therefore it must be good”; but from a critical thinking
standpoint, such “reasoning” is a sham. Implicit in such thinking is the assumption that
“What is most important is what I want and need.” But why should I, or anyone else, accept
such an arbitrary and obviously self-serving assumption? What makes your wants and needs more
important than everyone else? Critical thinking condemns such special pleading. It demands that
we weigh evidence and arguments objectively and impartially.
 Superiority bias (also known as illusory superiority or the better-than average effect) is the
tendency to overrate oneself to see oneself as better in some respect than one actually is. If you
are like most people, you probably think of yourself as being an unusually self-aware person who is
largely immune from any such self-deception. If so, then you too are probably suffering from
superiority bias-when it hurts.

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 2. Socio-centrism: It is group-centered thinking. Just as egocentrism can hinder rational thinking
by focusing excessively on the self, so socio-centrism can hinder rational thinking by focusing
excessively on the group. Socio-centrism can distort critical thinking in many ways. Two of the
most important are group bias and conformism.
 Group bias is the tendency to see one‟s own group (nation, tribe, sect, peer group, and the
like) as being inherently better than others. Social scientists tell us that such thinking is
extremely common throughout human history and across cultures. Just as we seem naturally
inclined to hold inflated views of ourselves, so we find it easy to hold inflated views of our family,
our community, or our nation. Conversely, we find it easy to look with suspicion or disfavor on
those we regard as “outsiders”. Most people absorb group bias unconsciously, usually from early
childhood. It is common, for example, for people to grow up thinking that their society‟s beliefs,
institutions, and values are better than those of other societies. Although most people outgrow
nationalistic biases to some extent, few of us manage to outgrow them completely. Clearly, this
kind of “mine-is- better” thinking lies at the root of a great deal of human conflict, intolerance, and
oppression.
 Conformism refers to our tendency to follow the crowd - that is, to conform (often
unthinkingly) to authority or to group standards of conduct and belief. The desire to belong, to
be part of the in- group, can be among the most powerful of human motivations. This desire can
seriously cripple our powers of critical reasoning and decision-making. Authority moves us. We are
impressed, influenced, and intimidated by authority, so much so that, under the right conditions, we
abandon our own values, beliefs, and judgments, even doubt our own immediate experience. As
critical thinkers, we need to be aware of the seductive power of peer pressure and reliance on
authority and develop habits of independent thinking to combat them.
3. Unwarranted assumptions and stereotypes: An assumption is something we take for
granted something we believe to be true without any proof or conclusive evidence. Almost
everything we think and do is based on assumptions. If the weather report calls for rain, we take an
umbrella because we assume that the meteorologist is not lying, that the report is based on a scientific
analysis of weather patterns, that the instruments are accurate, and so forth. There may be no proof that
any of this is true, but we realize that it is wiser to take the umbrella than to insist that the weather
bureau provide exhaustive evidence to justify its prediction. An unwarranted assumption is something
taken for granted without good reason. Such assumptions often prevent our seeing things clearly.
 One of the most common types of unwarranted assumptions is a stereotype. The word
stereotype comes from the printing press era, when plates, or stereotypes, were used to produce
identical copies of one page. Similarly, when we stereotype, as the word is now used, we assume
that individual people have all been stamped from one plate, so all politicians are alike, members of
ethnic groups, professors, women, teachers, and so forth. When we form an opinion of someone
that is based not on his or her individual qualities but, rather, on his or her membership in a
particular group, we are assuming that all or virtually all members of that group are alike. Because
people are not identical, no matter what race or other similarities they share, stereotypical
conceptions will often be false or misleading.
 Typically, stereotypes are arrived at through a process known as hasty generalization, in
which one draws a conclusion about a large class of things(in this case, people) from a small
sample. If we meet one South African who talk a lot, we might jump to the conclusion that all
South Africans talk a lot. Or we might generalize from what we have heard from a few friends or
reading a single news story. Often the media advertisements, the news, movies, and so forth
encourage stereotyping by the way they portray groups of people. The assumptions we need to
become most conscious of are not the ones that lead to our routine behaviors, such as carrying an
umbrella or going to class, but the ones on which we base our more important attitudes, actions, and
decisions. If we are conscious of our tendency to stereotype, we can take measures to end it.

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 4. Relativistic thinking: Relativism is the view that truth is a matter of opinion. There are two
popular forms of relativism: subjectivism and cultural relativism.
 Subjectivism: is the view that truth is a matter of individual opinion. According to
subjectivism, whatever an individual believes is true, is true for that person, and there is no
such thing as “objective” or “absolute” truth, i.e., truth that exists independent of what
anyone believes. For example, suppose Abdella believes that abortion is wrong and Obang
believes that abortion is not always wrong. According to subjectivism, abortion is always wrong
for Abdella and not always wrong for Obang. Both beliefs are true for them. And truth for one
individual or another is the only kind of truth there is.
 Cultural relativism: This is the view that truth is a matter of social or cultural opinion. In
other words, cultural relativism is the view that what is true for person A is what person A‟s
culture or society believes is true. Drinking wine, for example, is widely considered to be wrong
in Iran but is not generally considered to be wrong in France. According to cultural relativism,
therefore, drinking wine is immoral in Iran but is morally permissible in France. Thus, for the
cultural relativist, just as for the subjectivist, there is no objective or absolute standard of truth.
What is true is whatever most people in a society or culture believe to be true. Relatively few
people endorse subjectivism or cultural relativism in the pure, unqualified forms in which we have
stated them. Almost everybody would admit, for example, that 1 + 1 = 2 is true, no matter who
might be ignorant or deluded enough to deny it. What relativists usually claim, therefore, is not
that all truth is relative, but that truth is relative in some important domain(s).
 By far the most common form of relativism is moral relativism. Like relativism generally, moral
relativism comes in two major forms: moral subjectivism and cultural moral relativism. Moral
subjectivism is the view that what is morally right and good for an individual, A, is whatever A
believes is morally right and good. Thus, if G/Meskel believes that premarital sex is always wrong,
and Eden believes that it is not always wrong; according to moral subjectivism, premarital sex
is always wrong for G/Meskel and is not always wrong for Eden. The other major form of moral
relativism is cultural moral relativism, the view that what is morally right and good for an individual,
A, is whatever As society or culture believes is morally right and good. Thus, according to cultural
moral relativism, if culture A believes that polygamy is wrong, and culture B believes that polygamy
is right, then polygamy is wrong for culture A and right for culture B. Cultural moral relativism is a
very popular view.
 There are two major reasons people seem to find it so attractive. One has to do with the nature
of moral disagreement and the other concerns the value of tolerance. Ethics, obviously, is very
different from mathematics or science. In mathematics and science, there are arguments and
disagreements, but not nearly to the extent there are in ethics. In ethics there is widespread
disagreement, the disagreements often go very deep, and there seems to be no rational way to resolve
many of them. What this shows, some people conclude, is that there is no objective truth in ethics;
morality is just a matter of individual or societal opinion. Another reason people find cultural moral
relativism attractive is that it seems to support the value of tolerance. Throughout history terrible,
wars, persecutions, and acts of religious and cultural imperialism have been perpetrated by people who
firmly believed in the absolute righteousness of their moral beliefs and practices. Cultural moral
relativism seems to imply that we must be tolerant of other cultures moral beliefs and values. If culture
A believes that polygamy is wrong, and culture B believes that it is right, then culture A must agree
that polygamy is right for culture B, no matter how offensive the practice may be to culture A.
 Despite these apparent attractions, however, there are deep problems with cultural moral
relativism. First, does the fact that there is deep disagreement in ethics show that there is no
objective moral truth that ethics is just a matter of opinion? Think about another area in which
there is deep, pervasive, and seemingly irresolvable disagreement; religion. People disagree
vehemently over whether God exists, whether there is an afterlife, and so forth; yet we do not conclude
from this that there is no objective truth about these matters. It may be difficult to know whether God
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 exists. But whether he exists is not simply a matter of opinion. Thus, deep disagreement about
an issue does not show that there is no objective truth about that issue. Second, cultural moral
relativism does not necessarily support the value of tolerance. Relativism tells us that we should
accept the customs and values of our society. Thus, if you live in an intolerant society, relativism
implies that you too should be intolerant. Does this mean that cultural moral relativism has nothing at
all to teach us? No. The fact that people disagree so much about ethics does not show that moral truth
is simply a matter of opinion, but it should make us cautious and open-minded regarding our own
ethical beliefs. If millions of obviously decent, intelligent people disagree with you, how can you be
sure that your values are the correct ones? In this way, relativism can teach us an important lesson
about the value of intellectual humility. But we do not need relativism which is a false and confused
theory - to teach us this lesson. We can learn it just by opening our hearts and minds and thinking
critically about the challenges of living an ethical life.
5. Wishful thinking: Wishful thinking refers to a state of believing something not because you had
good evidence for it but simply because you wished it were true. Have you ever been guilty of
wishful thinking? If so, you are not alone. Throughout human history, reason has done battle with
wishful thinking and has usually come out the loser. People fear the unknown and invent
comforting myths to render the universe less hostile and more predictable. They fear death and
listen credulously to stories of healing crystals, quack cures, and communication with the dead. They
fantasize about possessing extraordinary personal powers and accept uncritically accounts of psychic
prediction and levitation,
Benefits of Critical Thinking
 Critical thinking has many benefits that include the following points:
 Skills and dispositions critical thinking teaches us how to raise and identify fundamental
questions and problems in the community.
 It will teach us to reformulate these problems clearly and precisely.
 It will teach us how to gather and assess relevant information; develop reasoned conclusions and
solutions, testing them against relevant criterion and standards.
 It teaches us how to be open minded to alternative system of thought, recognize and assess your own
assumptions, implications and practical consequences, how to communicate effectively with others in
figuring out solutions to complex problems.
Critical Thinking in the Classroom
 When they first enter university, students are sometimes surprised to discover that university education
seem less interested in how beliefs are acquired than they are in whether those beliefs can withstand
critical scrutiny. The question is not much about what you know, but how you acquire what you know
and whether your ideas stands critical examination. In university, the focus is on higher-order
thinking: the active, intelligent evaluation of ideas and information. For this reason critical thinking
plays a vital role in universities. In a critical thinking chapter, students learn a variety of skills that can
greatly defending one‟s own well-supported arguments and beliefs. In addition, critical thinking can
help us critically evaluate what you are learning in class. During your university career, your
instructors will often ask you to discuss critically some argument or idea introduced in class. Critical
thinking teaches a wide range of strategies and skills that can greatly improve our ability to
engage in such critical evaluation. We will also be asked to develop your own arguments on
particular topics or issues. In moral and civic education class, for example, you might be asked to
write a paper addressing the issue of whether ethnic federalism is good or bad. To write such a paper
successfully, you must do more than simply find and assess relevant arguments and information. You
must also be able to marshal arguments and evidence in a way that convincingly supports your view.
The systematic training provided in a course in critical thinking can greatly improve that skill as
well. Critical thinking is a transferable thinking skill. These skills will be taught in ways that
expressly aim to facilitate their transfer to other subjects and contexts. If we learn how to
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 structure argument, judge the credibility of sources or make a reasonable decision by the methods of
critical thinking for instance, it will not be difficult to see how to do these things in many other
contexts such as in class rooms and personal life; this is the sense in which the skills we teach in this
text are transferable.
Critical Thinking in Life
 Critical thinking is valuable in many contexts outside the classroom.
 First, critical thinking can help us avoid making foolish personal decisions. All of us have at one
time or another made decisions about what profession to choose, what relationships to enter into, what
personal behavior to develop, and the like that we later realized were seriously misguided or irrational.
Critical thinking can help us avoid such mistakes by teaching us to think about important life decisions
more carefully, clearly, and logically.
 Second, critical thinking plays a vital role in promoting democratic processes. In democracy, it is
the people who have the ultimate say over who governs and for what purposes. Citizens should vote,
should evaluate different public policies, and collectively determine their fate and et cetera. It is vital,
therefore, that citizens decisions be as informed and as rational as possible. Many of today‟s most
serious societal problems environmental destruction, poverty, ethnic conflicts, decaying the morality
of societies, high level of corruption, violating basic human rights, displacement, to mention just a few
have largely been caused by poor critical thinking.
 Third, critical thinking is worth studying for its own sake, simply for the personal enrichment it
can bring to our lives. One of the most basic truths of the human condition is that most people, most
of the time, believe what they are told. Throughout most of recorded history, people accepted without
question that the earth was the center of the universe, that demons cause disease that slavery was just,
and that women are inferior to men. Critical thinking honestly and courageously pursued can help free
us from the unexamined assumptions and biases of our upbringing and our society. It lets us step back
from the prevailing customs and ideologies of our culture and ask, this is what I have been taught, but
is it true? In short, critical thinking allows us to lead self-directed, examined lives. Such personal
liberation is, as the word itself implies, the ultimate goal of education. Whatever other benefits it
brings, education can have no greater reward.
Topics for Critical Reflection and Writing
 Like any other skills, critical thinking is developed through practical exercises of reflecting and
writing on various topics with the guidance of experienced instructors. While practicing critical
thinking learners are expected to construct sound/cogent arguments with logical evidences free from
any fallacy. Examples of topics for critical reflection and writing include:
 God, immortality and faith: Is God like human being? Can God allow innocents suffering? Is soul
immortal? Why?
 Liberty, equality and justice: Is liberty the highest value? Is equality the highest social value? Is
capitalism leading to justice? Why?
 Happiness, obligation and values: Can you understand happiness? Is morality relative? Is
happiness the standard of morality? Do you have obligation to practice moral principles? Is society
the source of values? Why?
 Free will, mind and identity: Are you free? Are you responsible for your actions? Is your mind
your brain? Can you create your identity? Why?
 Knowledge, science and truth: Does science give you real knowledge? Is experience the source of
all knowledge? Is certainty the standard of knowledge? Is truth subjective? Why?

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 CHAPTER FIVE
INFORMAL FALLACIES
 A fallacy is a defect in an argument (or, a mistake frequently committed in reasoning) that consists
in something other than merely false premises. It can be committed in many ways, but usually it
involves either a mistake in reasoning or the creation of some illusion that makes a bad argument appear
good (or both). That is, a fallacy is often committed because of the problem in the reasoning process
or the form of the argument, or defects in the contents of the statements used as premises or a
conclusion. For that matter, both deductive and inductive arguments may contain fallacies.
Types of Fallacies
 Fallacies are usually divided into two groups: Formal and informal. Depending on the kind of the
problems or defects they contain, (i.e., the problems or defects that make them fallacious), arguments
may commit either a formal or an informal fallacy.
 A formal fallacy is fallacy committed due to a structural defect of argument. Because the
problem that causes them is a structural defect, formal fallacies may be identified through mere
inspection of the form or structure of an argument.
 An informal fallacy, on the other hand, is a fallacy, which is committed due to a defect in the very
content of an argument, other than in its structure of form. Because they have the ability to hide
their true argumentative forms, informal fallacies cannot be identified through mere inspection
of the form or structure of an argument. Only a detail analysis to be applied on the content of
an argument can reveal the source of the trouble.
 Formal fallacies are found only in deductive arguments that have identifiable forms, such as
categorical syllogisms, disjunctive syllogisms, and hypothetical syllogisms. The following categorical
syllogism contains a formal fallacy:
 All tigers are animals. All mammals are animals. Therefore, all tigers are mammals.
 All A are B. All C are B Thus, All A are C.
 Through mere inspection of this form, one can see that the argument is invalid. In distinguishing formal
from informal fallacies, remember that formal fallacies occur only in deductive arguments. Thus, if
a given argument is inductive, it cannot contain a formal fallacy.
Informal fallacies
 Informal fallacies are those mistakes in reasoning process of an argument that cannot be recognized
by analyzing the structure of an argument, but only through analysis of the content of the
argument. Only the meaning of the words, how the statements are constructed and how inferences are
made that reveals three faulty reasoning. Consider the following example:
All factories are plants.
All plants are things that contain chlorophyll.
Therefore, all factories are things that contain chlorophyll.
 A cursory inspection of this argument might lead one to think that it has the following form:
All A are B.
All B are C. Hence, All A are C
 Since this form is valid, one might conclude that the argument itself is valid. Yet the argument is clearly
invalid because it has true premises and a false conclusion. An analysis of the content that is, the meaning
of the words reveals the source of the trouble. The word “plants” is used in two different senses. In the

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 first premise it means a building where something is manufactured, and in the second it means a life form.
Thus, the argument really has the following invalid form: All A are B. All C are D. Thus, All A are D.
 Since the time of Aristotle, logicians have attempted to classify the various informal fallacies. Aristotle
himself identified thirteen and separated them into two groups. The work of subsequent logicians
has produced dozens more, rendering the task of classifying them even more difficult. The
presentation that follows divides twenty two informal fallacies into five groups: (A) fallacies of
relevance, (B) fallacies of weak induction, (C) fallacies of presumption, (D) fallacies of ambiguity,
and (E) fallacies of grammatical analogy.
A. Fallacies of Relevance
 Fallacies of relevance are those which are committed chiefly due to a provision premises that are
logically irrelevant to the conclusion. Unlike the others, the fallacy of missing the point is committed
due to an irrelevant conclusion. They contain eight fallacies: (1) Appeal to force, (2) Appeal to
pity, (3) Appeal to people, (4) Argument against the person, (5) Accident, Straw man, (6) Missing
the point, and (8) Red Herring. The fallacies of relevance share the common characteristic that the
arguments, in which they occur, have premises that are logically irrelevant to the conclusion. Yet the
premises are relevant psychologically, so the conclusion may seem to follow from the premises, even
though it does not follow logically.
1) Appeal to Force (Argumentum ad Baculum: Appeal to the “Stick”)
 It occurs when an arguer poses a conclusion to another person and tells that person either implicitly
or explicitly that some harm will come to him if he does not accept the conclusion. In other words it
occurs when a conclusion defended by a threat to the well-being of those who do not accept the
conclusion. This fallacy always involves a threat by the arguer to the physical or psychological well-
being of the listener. But this threat is logically irrelevant to the subject matter of the conclusion even
though it seems psychologically relevant. Consider the following argument in which the arguer uses
unjustified physical threat on the listeners.
Mr. Kebde you accused me of fraud and embezzlements. You have to drop the charge you filed
against me. You have to remember that I am your ex-boss; I will torture both you and your family
members if you do not drop your case. Got it?
 This is a fallacious argument; the arguer is threatening the listener to abandon his charge. The above
argument can be re-written to expose the faulty reasoning most clearly.
Mr. Kebede you have to drop your charge, otherwise you will face accident.
 You can see that the conclusion is supported by force. The threat “accident” has no logical bearing on the
conclusion however (you have to drop your charge).
2) Appeal to Pity (Argumentum ad Misericordiam)
 The appeal to pity is the attempt to support a conclusion merely by evoking pity in one‟s
audience when the statements that evoke the pity are logically unrelated to the conclusion. The
appeal to pity is not, generally speaking, very subtle. But if the arguer succeeds in evoking
sufficiently strong feelings of pity, he or she may distract the audience from the logic of the situation
and create a desire to accept the conclusion. The appeal to pity fallacy has the following form.
 Premises: You have reason to pity this person, thing or situation (or group). Conclusion: You should do X
for the benefit of this person (or group), although doing X is not called for logically by the reason given.
Consider the following argument.
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 The Headship position in the department of accounting should be given to Mr. Oumer Abdulla.
Oumer has six hungry children to feed and his wife desperately needs an operation to save her
eyesight.
3) Appeal to the People (Argumentum ad Populum)
 Nearly everyone wants to be loved, esteemed, admired, valued, recognized, and accepted by
others. Feeling of being part of community and belongingness are some of the most important
humans needs. The appeal to the people strikes these desires and needs to get acceptance for
conclusion. Or the appeal to the people is an attempt to persuade a person (or group) by appealing to
these desires and needs. Two approaches are involved in appeal to people fallacy: direct and
indirect.
 The direct approach occurs when an arguer, addressing a large group of people, excites the
emotions and enthusiasm of the crowd to win acceptance for his or her conclusion. The
objective is to arouse a kind of mob mentality. This is the strategy used by nearly every
propagandist and demagogue. Because the individuals in the audience want to share in the
camaraderie, the euphoria, and the excitement, they find themselves accepting any number of
conclusions with ever-increasing fervor.
 In the indirect approach, the arguer aims his or her appeal not at the crowd as a whole but
at one or more individuals separately, focusing on some aspect of their relationship to the
crowd. The indirect approach is very common in most advertising industries. There are three
recognizable forms in indirect approach: Bandwagon, Vanity, and Snobbery.
I. Bandwagon fallacy
 Bandwagon fallacy is a kind of fallacy that commonly appeals to the desire of individuals to
be considered as part of the group or community in which they are living. One of the
characteristics of community or group is that they share some values and norms. Not only they share
but also every individual are expected to manifest group conformity to these shared values.
Bandwagon fallacy just uses these emotions and feelings to get acceptance for a certain
conclusion. For instance, consider the following example. The majority of people in Ethiopia
accept the opinion that child circumcision is the right thing to do. Thus, you also should accept
that child circumcision is the right thing to do. This argument presents appeal to bandwagon and if the
person considers that child circumcision is the right thing to do because the majority of people accepts
it, then this argument commits the fallacy of bandwagon.
II. Appeal to Vanity
 The appeal to vanity often associates the product with someone who is admired, pursued, or
imitated, the idea being that you, too, will be admired and pursued if you use it. For example,
BBC may show the famous footballer, Frank Lampard, wearing Addidas shoe, and says: Wear this
new fashion shoe! A shoe, which is worn only by few respected celebrities! ADIDDAS SHOE!!! The
message is that if you wear the shoe, then you, too, will be admired and respected, just like the famous
footballer, Frank Lampard.
III. Appeal to Snobbery Fallacy
 Before discussing about snobbery fallacy, let us look into the meaning of snob. Snob means a person
who admires people in higher classes too much and has no respect for people in the lower classes
or a person who thinks individuals from higher social classes are much better than other people

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 because they like things many people do not like. Appeal to snobbery fallacy is based on this
desire to be regarded as superior to others. The newly produced Gebeta Guder wine is not for
everyone to drink. But you are different from other people, aren‟t you? Therefore, the newly produced
Gebeta Guder wine is for you.
 As you can see, it is a kind of advertisement and it appeals to the desire of, particularly of those who
are most famous and successful people, to be different from the mass; it appeals their desire to be
different from the demos. And if the individuals want to be part of those who perceive themselves as
different from the mass, then he can easily be cheated by this advertisement.
4) Argument against the Person (Argumentum ad Hominem)
 This fallacy always involves two arguers. One of them advances (either directly or implicitly) a
certain argument and the other then responds by directing his or her attention not to the first
person‟s argument but to the first person himself. When this occurs, the second person is said to
commit an argument against the person fallacy. The argument against the person occurs in three
forms: the ad hominem abusive, the ad hominem circumstantial, and the tu quoque.
I. Ad Hominem Abusive Fallacy
 In the ad hominem abusive, the second person responds to the first person‟s argument by verbally
abusing the first person. The following is the form of ad hominem argument: Premise: A is a person of
bad character. Conclusion: A„s argument should not be accepted. Consider the following example.
In defending animal rights, Mr. Abebe argues that the government should legislate a
minimum legal requirement to any individuals or groups who want to farm animals. He
argues that this is the first step in avoiding unnecessary pain on animals and protecting them
from abuse. But we should not accept his argument because he is a divorced drunk person
who is unable to protect even his own family.
 The conclusion of the argument says that we should reject the idea of legislating a minimum legal
requirement to protect animals. But what reason is offered to support the conclusion? That Abebe is a
drunk and divorced person is the only reason given. But it is impossible to conclude that we should reject
legislation a minimum legal requirement to protect animals from the idea that Abebe is a drunk and
divorced person. This is just an explicit and direct personal attack.
II. Ad Hominem Circumstantial Fallacy
 The ad hominem circumstantial begins the same way as the ad hominem abusive, but instead of
heaping verbal abuse on his or her opponent, the respondent attempts to discredit the opponent‟s
argument by alluding to certain circumstances that affect the opponent. By doing so the respondent
hopes to show that the opponent is predisposed to argue the way he or she does and should therefore not
be taken seriously. Consider the following example:
Haileselassie I of Ethiopia argued in the League of Nations that member states should give
hand to Ethiopia to expel the fascist Italy from the country. But the member states should not
listen to the king. Haileselassie I argue in this way because he wants to resume his power once
the Italian are expelled from Ethiopia.
 This argument is fallacious because the arguer does not pay serious attention to the substance of the
argument of the king. He just tried to discredit the idea of the king by association it with the circumstance
with the Italian evacuation. He did not attack directly why member states should not help the country.

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III. The tu quoque (you too) fallacy
 The tu quoque (you too) fallacy begins the same way as the other two varieties of the ad hominem
argument, except that the second arguer attempts to make the first appear to be hypocritical or
arguing in bad faith. The second arguer usually accomplishes this by citing features in the life or
behavior of the first arguer that conflict with the latter‟s conclusion. This fallacy has the following form:
“How dare you argue that I should stop doing X; why, you do (or have done) X yourself.” See the
following example:
Patient to a Doctor: Look Doctor, you cannot advise me to quit smoking cigarette because you
yourself is a smoker. How do you advise me to quit smoking while you yourself are smoking?
 The argument is fallacious because whether the doctor smokes is irrelevant to whether this premises
support the conclusion that the patient should quit smoking cigarette; and the fact that the doctor himself
smokes does not make smoking right. Smoking is wrong whether the advisor himself did the action or not.
5) Accident
 The fallacy of accident is committed when a general rule is applied to a specific case it was not
intended to cover. Typically, the general rule is cited (either directly or implicitly) in the premises
and then wrongly applied to the specific case mentioned in the conclusion. Consider the following
example:
Freedom of speech is a constitutionally guaranteed right. Therefore, John Q. Radical should not
be arrested for his speech that incited the riot last week.
 In this example, the general rule is that freedom of speech is normally guaranteed, and the specific case is
the speech made by John Q. Radical. Because the speech incited a riot, the rule does not apply.
6) Straw Man
 The straw man fallacy is committed when an arguer distorts an opponent‟s argument for the
purpose of more easily attacking it, demolishes the distorted argument, and then concludes that the
opponent‟s real argument has been demolished. By doing so, the arguer is said to have set up a straw
man and knocked it down, only to conclude that the real man (opposing argument) has been knocked
down as well. The following are the main features of straw man fallacy.
 First there are two individuals or groups discussing about some controversial issues by
criticizing;
 Second the critic however does not rationally criticize the main or the substantive argument of
the opponent. Rather he criticizes ideas which are the misrepresentation of the main content of
the argument. He does so for easy attacking the argument.
 Third the critic concludes, by criticizing the misrepresented ideas that he knock down the main
ideas. Consider the following argument.
Mr. Belay believes that ethnic federalism has just destroyed the country and thus it should be replaced
by geographical federalism. But we should not accept his proposal. He just wants to take the country
back to the previous regime. Geographical federalism was the kind of state structure during Derg and
monarchical regime. We do not want to go back to the past. Thus, we should reject Mr. Belay‟s
proposal.
 When the fallacy of straw man occurs readers should keep in mind two things.
 First, they have to try to identify the original argument, which is misrepresented by the critic.

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  Second, they should look for what gone wrong in the misrepresentation of the argument. Is the
critic exaggerated the original argument or is he introduced a new assumption which is not presumed
by the original argument.
7) Missing the Point (Ignoratio Elenchi)
 It occurs when the premises of an argument support one particular conclusion, but then a different
conclusion, often vaguely related to the correct conclusion, is drawn. Whenever one suspects that
such a fallacy is being committed, he or she should be able to identify the correct conclusion, the
conclusion that the premises logically imply. Consider the following argument.
The world is in the process of globalizing more than ever. The world economy is becoming more
and more interconnected. Multinational companies and supra national institutions are taking
power from local companies and national governments. The livelihood of people is randomly
affected by action and decision made on the other side of the planet and this process benefits
only the rich nations at the expense of the poor. What should be done? The answer is obvious:
poor nations should detach themselves from the process.
8) Red Herring
 It is committed when the arguer diverts the attention of the reader or listener by changing the
subject to a different but sometimes subtly related one. He or she then finishes by either drawing
a conclusion about this different issue or by merely presuming that some conclusion has been
established. By so doing, the arguer purports to have won the argument.
 The fallacy gets its name from a procedure used to train hunting dogs to follow a scent. A red herring
(smoked and dried fish species) is dragged across the trail with the aim of leading the dogs astray.
Since red herrings have an especially potent scent (caused in part by the smoking process used to
preserve them), only the best dogs will follow the original scent.
 To use the red herring fallacy effectively, the arguer must change the original subject of the
argument without the reader or listener noticing it. One way of doing this is to change the
subject to one that is subtly related to the original subject. Consider the following argument to
understand the point clearly.
The editors of Addis Flower newspaper have accused our company of being one of the
city‟s worst water polluters. But Addis flower newspaper is responsible for much more
pollution than we are. After all, they own a Paper Company, and that company
discharges tons of chemical residues into the City‟s River every day.
 A second way of using the red herring effectively is to change the subject to some flashy, eye-
catching topic that is virtually guaranteed to distract the listener‟s attention. Topics of this sort
include sex, crime, scandal, immorality, death, and any other topic that might serve as the subject of
gossip. Here is an example of this technique:
Professor Conway complains of inadequate parking on our campus. But did you know
that last year Conway carried on a torrid love affair with a member of the English
Department? The two used to meet every day for clandestine sex in the copier room.
Apparently they didn‟t realize how much you can see through that fogged glass window.
Even the students got an eyeful. Enough said about Conway.
 The red herring fallacy can be confused with the straw man fallacy because both have the effect
of drawing the reader/listener off the track. This confusion can usually be avoided by
remembering the unique ways in which they accomplish this purpose. In the straw man, the arguer
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 begins by distorting an opponent‟s argument and concludes by knocking down the distorted argument.
In the red herring, on the other hand, the arguer ignores the opponent‟s argument (if there is one) and
subtly changes the subject. Thus, to distinguish the two fallacies, one should attempt to determine
whether the arguer has knocked down a distorted argument or simply changed the subject. Also keep
in mind that straw man always involves two arguers, at least implicitly, whereas a red herring often
does not.
 Both the red herring and straw man fallacies are susceptible of being confused with missing the
point, because all three involve a similar kind of irrelevancy. To avoid this confusion, one should
note that both red herring and straw man proceed by generating a new set of premises, whereas
missing the point does not. Straw man draws a conclusion from new premises that are obtained by
distorting an earlier argument, and red herring, if it draws any conclusion at all, draws one from new
premises obtained by changing the subject. Missing the point, however, draws a conclusion from the
original premises. Also, in the red herring and straw man, the conclusion, if there is one, is relevant to
the premises from which it is drawn; but in missing the point, the conclusion is irrelevant to the
premises from which it is drawn. Finally, remember that missing the point serves in part as a kind of
catchall fallacy, and a fallacious argument should not be identified as a case of missing the point if one
of the other fallacies clearly fits.
B. Fallacies of Weak Induction
 If premises do not support the conclusion strongly then the resulting argument will be labeled as
Weak Induction. The fallacy of weak induction violates the principles of sufficiency, which states
that whenever a person presents an argument for or against a position, he/she should attempt to
provide relevant and acceptable reasons of the right kind, that together are sufficient in number
and weight to justify the acceptance of the conclusion. Therefore, the fallacies of weak induction
occur not because the premises are logically irrelevant to the conclusion, as is the case with the
eight fallacies of relevance, but because the connection between premises and conclusion is
not strong enough to support the conclusion.
 There are different kinds of fallacies of weak induction and the following are the most important
ones: (9) Appeal to Unqualified Authority, (10) Hasty Generalization, (11) False Cause, (12)
Weak Analogy, (13) Slippery Slope, and (14) Appeal to Ignorance. In each of these fallacies, the
premises provide at least a shred of evidence in support of the conclusion, but the evidence is not
nearly good enough to cause a reasonable person to believe the conclusion. Like the fallacies of
relevance, however, the fallacies of weak induction often involve emotional grounds for believing
the conclusion.
9) Appeal to Unqualified Authority (Argumentum ad Verecundiam)
 The appeal to unqualified authority (or ad verecundiam fallacy) is an appeal to an authority when
the reliability of the authority may be reasonably doubtable. When an appeal to unreliable
authority is made, the arguer assumes, without sufficient warrant, that the authority in question
is reliable. When there is legitimate doubt about whether an authority is reliable, then the appeal to
authority is fallacious. Ad verecundiam fallacies are common in advertising when celebrities who
lack the relevant expertise endorse products. Consider the following example.
The famous artists, artist Woriku said that Vera Pasta is the most nutritious food. So
Vera pasta must be the most nutritious food.

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  Artist Worku could be good artists but we want to know whether he is an expert on nutrition and the
argument leave us in doubt about that.
 A more subtle appeal to unreliable authority occurs when a well-known expert in one field is
cited as an expert in another field even though he or she lacks expertise in it. This form of fallacy
is especially subtle if the two fields are related. Consider the following example.
Prof. Kebede, who is an expert in animal science, argued that, in more complex societies,
there is higher level of division of labor and in less complex societies; there is less division
of labor.
 This argument as you can see is flawed. This is because the expert‟s field of specialization and the
conclusion he made are unrelated. He is an expert in biology but he gives us a witness on society.
10) Appeal to Ignorance (Argumentum ad Ignorantiam)
 When the premises of an argument state that nothing has been proved one way or the other
about something, and the conclusion then makes a definite assertion about that thing, the
argument commits an appeal to ignorance. The issue usually involves something that is
incapable of being proved or something that has not yet been proved. Observe the following
example:
People have been trying for centuries to provide conclusive evidence for the claims that
Haileselassie I of Ethiopia is the descendant of King David of Israel and no one has ever
succeeded. Therefore, we must conclude that Haileselassie I of Ethiopia is not the descendant
of King David of Israel.
 Conversely, the following argument commits the same fallacy:
People have been trying for centuries to prove the claims that Haileselassie I of Ethiopia is not
the descendant of King David of Israel, and no one has ever succeeded. Therefore, we must
conclude that Haileselassie I of Ethiopia is in fact the descendant of King David of Israel.
11) Hasty Generalization (Converse Accident)
 Hasty generalization is a defective form of argument from inductive generalization. A
generalization is an argument that proceeds from the knowledge of a selected sample to some
claim about the whole group. Because the members of the sample have a certain characteristic, it is
argued that all the members of the group have that same characteristic. For example, if we wanted to
know the opinion of the student body at a certain university about whether to adopt a law prohibiting
the use of face book in campuses, we could take a poll of 10 percent of the students. If the results of
the poll showed that 80 percent of those sampled favored the law, we might draw the conclusion that
80 percent of the entire student body favored it. These illustrate the use of statistics in inductive
argumentation.
 The problem that arises with the use of samples has to do with whether the sample is representative of
the population. Samples that are not representative are said to be biased. Depending on what the
population consists of, whether machine parts or human beings, different considerations enter into
determining whether a sample is biased. These considerations include (1) whether the sample is
randomly selected, (2) the size of the sample, and (3) psychological factors.
 A sample is random if and only if every member of the population has an equal chance of being
selected. The requirement that a sample be randomly selected applies to practically all samples, but
sometimes it can be taken for granted. The randomness requirement must be given more attention

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 when the population consists of discrete units. The randomness requirement presents even greater
problems when the population consists of human beings. Consider the following examples.
Addis Zemen Gazeta carried an interview to know the reading skill among young people.
It has found out that, among ten young people it interviewed, none of them read a book
for the last two years. The conclusion is obvious: all young people in the country do not
have the culture of reading books.
 In this argument, a conclusion about a whole group is drawn from premises that mention only a few
instances. Because such small, atypical samples are not sufficient to support a general conclusion, the
argument commits a hasty generalization.
12) False Cause Fallacy
 False cause fallacy is a defective and flawed form of argument from causality. Before discussing
about false cause, we need to discuss about causal inference first. Argument from causality is a kind
of argument which argues either from the knowledge of causes to the knowledge of effects or
from the knowledge of the effect to the knowledge of causes. In such argument two things are
presented as having causal connection.
 The fallacy of false cause occurs whenever the link between premises and conclusion depends on
some imagined causal connection that probably does not exist. Whenever an argument is suspected
of committing the false cause fallacy, the reader or listener should be able to say that the conclusion
depends on the supposition that X causes Y, whereas X probably does not cause Y at all. There are
many varieties of false cause fallacy. Perhaps the most common form is post hoc, ergo propter
hoc, which means in Latin after this, therefore because of this. This form of the false cause fallacy
occurs whenever an arguer illegitimately assumes that because event X preceded event Y, X caused Y.
Here is an example:
Since I came into office two years ago, the rate of violent crime has decreased
significantly. So, it is clear that the longer prison sentences we recommended are
working.
 The longer prison sentences may be a causal factor, of course, but the mere fact that the longer
sentences preceded the decrease in violent crime does not prove this. Many other possible causal
factors need to be considered. Nevertheless, this kind of reasoning is quite common and lies behind
most forms of superstition.
 The second type of fallacy are called non causa pro causa (not the cause for the cause). This
variety is committed when what is taken to be the cause of something is not really the cause at all
and the mistake is based on something other than mere temporal succession.
Successful business executives are paid salaries in excess of $100,000. Therefore, the best
way to ensure that Ferguson will become a successful executive is to raise his salary to at
least $100,000.
 In this argument success as an executive causes increases in salary “not the other way around” so the
argument mistakes the cause for the effect.
 A third variety of the false cause fallacy, and one that is probably committed more often than
either of the others in their pure form, is oversimplified cause. This variety occurs when a
multitude of causes is responsible for a certain effect but the arguer selects just one of these
causes and represents it as if it were the sole cause. Consider the following example.

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 In Ethiopia, the grades of fresh students in universities have been dropping for several
years. What accounts for this? Well, during these same years, the average time students
spend on Facebook (per day) has increased.
 So, the cause is obvious: students are spending much of their time surfing on facebook when they need
to be reading instead.
 The increase in time spent surfing on face book is a likely contributor to a drop in scores of fresh
students. But insufficient evidence is provided for the conclusion that the time spent surfing on face
book is the sole cause. Other factors may be at work, such as a decrease in parental involvement or
deficiencies in the university system.
 The oversimplified cause fallacy is usually motivated by self-serving interests. Sometimes the arguer
wants to take undeserved credit for himself or give undeserved credit to some movement with which
he or she is affiliated. At other times, the arguer wants to heap blame on an opponent or shift blame
from himself or herself onto some convenient occurrence.
13) Slippery Slope Fallacy
 Slippery slope fallacy is a defective form of argument from slippery slope. It cites allegedly
foreseeable consequences of a proposed action as the premise, and the conclusion is then inferred
that this course of action is or is not recommended. This form of reasoning can be used in a positive
or negative way, as an argument to respond to a proposal that has been put forward when two parties
are having a dialogue on what to do. In argument from positive consequences, a policy or course of
action is supported by citing positive consequences of carrying out this policy or course of action. In
argument from negative consequences, a policy or course of action is argued against by citing negative
consequences of carrying it out.
 A slippery slope argument is a species of negative reasoning from consequences, used where two
parties are deliberating together and one warns the other not to take a contemplated action,
because it is a first step in a sequence of events that will lead to some horrible outcome. What is
distinctive about the slippery slope argument as a special subtype of argument from consequences is
that there is said to be a connected sequence of actions, such that once the first action in the series is
carried out, a sequence of other actions will follow, so that once the sequence starts there is no
stopping it, until (eventually) the horrible outcome comes about. This particularly horrible outcome is
the final event in the sequence and represents something that would very definitely go against goals
that are important for the participant in the deliberation who is being warned, for example, it might be
his personal safety or security.
 The characteristic idea of the slippery slope argument is that once you take that first action in
the sequence, it is like pushing off from the top of an Olympic ski-jump run. Once you have
kicked off, turning back becomes harder and harder. At some ill-defined point or grey area, there is no
turning back. Once you are into this area, there is only one way to go: faster and faster down the slope
until you hit the bottom. So if you don‟t want to go careening down the slope out of control and hit the
bottom (with disastrous consequences of personal injury), the message is that you had better not take
that first step at all.
 Slippery slope fallacy occurs when the arguer assumes that a chain reaction will occur but there
is insufficient evidence that one (or more) events in the chain will cause the others; when there is
no actual or real connection among the chain of events. The chains of causes are supposedly like a

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 steep slope - if you take one step on the slope; you will slide all the way down and since you don‟t
want to slide all the way down, don‟t take the first step. Consider the following example.
Against cultural, social and religious norms of Ethiopia, a Chinese firm was authorized to
run donkey slaughter house in Bishoftu. But this company should be closed. If donkeys
are continuously slaughtered and exported, then Ethiopian who works in the abattoir will
start to eat donkey meat. Then members of the family of these workers will be the next to
eat donkey meat. This gradually leads their neighbors and the village to accept the same
practice. Finally, the whole country will follow which in turn leads to the total collapse of
Ethiopian food culture.
 The links in this alleged chain are weak. This is not to say that donkey slaughter house is risk free
practice. It is only to say that, logically speaking, when causal connections are claimed, there needs to
be sufficient evidence that the connections are genuine. And to claim that opening donkey slaughter
house in the country necessary leads to adopting donkey meat as a culture is plainly to make a claim
that is insufficiently supported by the evidence.
 The fallacy of slippery slope is a variety of the false cause fallacy. Deciding whether a slippery
slope fallacy has been committed can be difficult when there is uncertainty whether the alleged
chain reaction will or will not occur. But many slippery slopes rest on a mere emotional conviction
on the part of the arguer that a certain action or policy is bad, and the arguer attempts to trump up
support for his or her position by citing all sorts of dire consequences that will result if the action is
taken or the policy followed.
14) Weak Analogy
 Weak analogy is a defective or flawed argument from analogy. Argument from analogy is a very
commonly used kind of case-based reasoning, where one case is held to be similar to another
case in a particular respect. Since the one case is held to have a certain property, then the other case,
it is concluded, also has the same property.
 Two things, situations or cases could be similar to each other in certain respects, but dissimilar
in other respects. While one case may be generally similar to another, it does not mean that the
two cases will be similar in every respect. If they were similar in every respect, they would be
identical case. However, two cases can be generally similar, even though there are quite
important differences between them. Consider the following example.
After ingesting one milligram of substance alpha per day for ninety days, white mice
developed genetic abnormalities. Since white mice are similar in many ways to humans, it
follows that substance alpha probably produces genetic abnormalities in humans.
 This argument compares two cases, the effects of some substances on human and mice. It argues that
this substance produce genetic abnormalities on mice, then postulates comparable consequences on
humans. It is built onto an argument from analogy; based on a comparison between the two cases. Of
course, the two cases are different in certain respects, but by comparing them, it puts forward a
plausible argument.
 The fallacy of weak analogy is committed when the analogy between things, situations and
circumstance is not strong enough to support the conclusion that is drawn. Evaluating an
argument having this form requires a two-step procedure: (1) Identify the attributes a, b, c, that the
two entities A and B share in common, and (2) determine how the attribute Z, mentioned in the

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 conclusion, relates to the attributes a, b, c, . . . If some causal or systematic relation exists between Z
and a, b, or c, the argument is strong; otherwise it is weak. Consider the following example
When an individual is diagnosed as having cancer, every effort is made to kill the
cancerous growth, whether by surgery, radiation treatment, or chemotherapy. But
murderers and kidnappers are cancerous growths on society. Therefore, when these
criminals are apprehended and convicted, they should be treated like any other cancer
and eliminated by capital punishment.
 This argument is based on a similarity between the growth of cancer in human body and the existence
of criminals in society. It is true that when a certain cell is identified as cancer every effort would be
made to kill it because it is impossible to rehabilitate the cell and the only safe measure is to kill the
cell. But this is not true in human being. Even if a criminal is bad for society, society avoids crime not
by killing criminals but by educating and rehabilitating individual criminals. Thus this analogy is
fallacy because the conclusion is based on weak or inadequate analogy between a human being and a
cell.
C. Fallacies of Presumption
These fallacies arise not because the premises are irrelevant to the conclusion or provide insufficient
reason for believing the conclusion but because the premises presume what they purport to prove. The
fallacies of presumptions include (15) begging the question, (16) complex question, (17) false dichotomy,
and (18) suppressed evidence.
15) Begging the Question (Petitio Principii)
 The fallacy of begging the question is committed whenever the arguer creates the illusion that
inadequate premises provide adequate support for the conclusion by leaving out a possibly false
(shaky) key premise, by restating a possibly false premise as the conclusion, or by reasoning in a
circle. The actual source of support for the conclusion is not apparent, and so the argument is
said to beg the question. After reading or hearing the argument, the observer is inclined to ask, “But
how do you know X? Where X is the needed support?”
 The first, and most common, way of committing this fallacy is by leaving a possibly false key
premise out of the argument while creating the illusion that nothing more is needed to establish
the conclusion. Consider the following example:
 Murder is morally wrong. This being the case, it follows that abortion is morally wrong.
 Of course humans and apes evolved from common ancestors. Just look how similar they are.
 It‟s obvious that the poor in this country should be given handouts from the government.
After all, these people earn less than the average citizen.
 The first of these arguments begs the question; how do you know that abortion is a form of murder?
The second begs the question; does the mere fact that humans and apes look similar imply that they
evolved from common ancestors? The third begs the questions; just because the poor earn less than the
average citizen, does this imply that the government should give them handouts?
 These questions indicate that something has been left out of the original arguments. Thus, the first
argument is missing the premise, abortion is a form of murder; the second is missing the premise; if
humans and apes look similar, then they have common ancestors; and so on. These premises are
crucial for the soundness of the arguments. If the arguer is unable to establish the truth of these
premises, then the arguments prove nothing. The same form of begging the question often appears in

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 arguments concerning religious topics to justify conclusions about the existence of God, the
immortality of the soul, and so on. Consider the following example:
The world in which we live displays an amazing degree of organization. Obviously this
world was created by an intelligent God.
 This argument begs the question; how do you know that the organization in the world could only have
come from an intelligent creator? Of course the claim that it did come from an intelligent creator may
well be true, but the burden is on the arguer to prove it. Without supporting reasons or evidence, the
argument proves nothing.
 The second form of petito principii occurs when the conclusion of an argument merely restates a
possibly false premise in slightly different language. In such an argument, the premise supports
the conclusion, and the conclusion tends to reinforce the premise. Consider the following example:
Capital punishment is justified for the crimes of murder and kidnapping because it is
quite legitimate and appropriate that someone be put to death for having committed such
hateful and inhuman acts.
 In the above argument, saying that capital punishment is justified‖ means the same thing as saying that
it is legitimate and appropriate, and in the second argument, the premise and the conclusion say
exactly the same thing. However, by repeating the same thing in slightly different language, the arguer
creates the illusion that independent evidence is being presented in support of the conclusion, when in
fact it is not.
 The third form of petito principii involves circular reasoning in a chain of inferences having a
first premise that is possibly false. Here is an example:
Harar brewery clearly produces the finest beer in Ethiopia. We know they produce the
finest beer because they have the best chemist. This is because they can afford to pay
them more than other brewery. Obviously they can afford to pay them more because they
produce the finest beer in the country.
 Upon encountering this argument, the attentive reader is inclined to ask; where does this reasoning
begin? What is its source?. Since the argument goes in a circle, it has no beginning or source, and as a
result it proves nothing. Of course, in this example the circularity is rather apparent, so the argument is
not likely to convince anyone.
16) Complex Question
 The fallacy of complex question is committed when two (or more) questions are asked in the
guise of a single question and a single answer is then given to both of them. Every complex
question presumes the existence of a certain condition. When the respondent‟s answer is added to the
complex question, an argument emerges that establishes the presumed condition. Thus, although not
an argument as such, a complex question involves an implicit argument. This argument is usually
intended to trap the respondent into acknowledging something that he or she might otherwise not want
to acknowledge. Consider the following example:
 Have you stopped cheating on exams? Where did you hide the corpse of the person you killed? Let us
suppose the respondent answers yes to the first question and under the bed to the second. The
following arguments emerge: You were asked whether you have stopped cheating on exams. You
answered “yes”. Therefore, it follows that you have cheated in the past. You were asked where you
hide the body of the person you killed. You replied “under the bed.”

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  It follows that you were in fact killed the person. On the other hand, let us suppose that the respondent
answers “no” to the first question and “nowhere” to the second. We then have the following
arguments: You were asked whether you have stopped cheating on exams. You answered “no.”
Therefore, you continue to cheat. You were asked where you hide the body of the person you killed.
You answered “nowhere.” It follows that you have destroyed the corpse. Obviously, each of the
questions is really two questions: Did you cheat on exams in the past? If you did cheat in the past,
have you stopped now? Where did you hide the corpse of the person you killed? If you were killed it,
where did you hide it? If respondents are not sophisticated enough to identify a complex question
when one is put to them, they may answer quite innocently and be trapped by a conclusion that is
supported by no evidence at all; or, they may be tricked into providing the evidence themselves. The
correct response lies in resolving the complex question into its component questions and answering
each separately.
 The fallacy of complex question should be distinguished from another kind of question known in
law as a leading question. A leading question is one in which the answer is in some way suggested in
the question. Whether or not a question is a leading one is important in the direct examination of a
witness by counsel. for example: leading questions differ from complex questions in that they involve
no logical fallacies that is, they do not attempt to trick the respondent into admitting something he or
she does not want to admit. To distinguish the two, however, it is sometimes necessary to know
whether prior questions have been asked.
17) False Dichotomy
 The fallacy of false dichotomy is committed when a disjunctive (either . . . or . . .) premise
presents two unlikely alternatives as if they were the only ones available, and the arguer then
eliminates the undesirable alternative, leaving the desirable one as the conclusion. Such an
argument is clearly valid, but since the disjunctive premise is false, or at least probably false, the
argument is typically unsound. The fallacy is often committed by children when arguing with their
parents, by advertisers, and by adults generally. Here are three example:
Either you are going to buy me a new car or I will divorce you. You do not want me
divorce you. Thus, you have to buy me a new car.
 In the above argument, the arguer does not consider a third possible alternative that would be
presented.
 The fallacious nature of false dichotomy lies in the illusion created by the arguer that the
disjunctive premise presents jointly exhaustive alternatives. If it did, the premise would be true
of necessity. For example, the statement “Either Awash River is in Afar, or it is not in Afar.” presents
jointly exhaustive alternatives and is true of necessity. But in the fallacy of false dichotomy, the two
alternatives not only fail to be jointly exhaustive, but they are not even likely. As a result, the
disjunctive premise is false, or at least probably false. Thus, the fallacy amounts to making a false or
probably false premise appear true. If one of the alternatives in the disjunctive premise is true, then
fallacy is not committed. For example, the following argument is valid and sound:
Either Abay River is in Ethiopia or it is in South Africa. River Abay is not in South
Africa. Therefore, River Abay is in Ethiopia.
 False dichotomy is otherwise called “false bifurcation” and the “either-or fallacy.” Also, in most cases
the arguer expresses only the disjunctive premise and leaves it to the reader or listener to supply the
missing statements.

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18) Suppressed Evidence
 A cogent argument is an inductive argument with good reasoning and true premises. The
requirement of true premises includes the provision that the premises not ignore some important
piece of evidence that outweighs the presented evidence and entails a very different conclusion. If
an inductive argument does indeed ignore such evidence, then the argument commits the fallacy of
suppressed evidence. Consider the following argument:

Somalia is a good place for investment for the following reasons. First there are cheap
raw materials. Second there is cheap labor. Third there is good market for our product.
Forth there is a port that helps us to export our product. Thus we have to consider
investing in Somalia.
 If the arguer ignores the fact that there is no peace and stability in Somalia then the argument commits
a suppressed evidence fallacy. This fallacy is classified as a fallacy of presumption because it works
by creating the presumption that the premises are both true and complete when in fact they are not.
 Perhaps the most common occurrence of the suppressed evidence fallacy appears in inferences based
on advertisements. Nearly every advertising neglects to mention certain negative features of the
product advertised. As a result, an observer who sees or hears an advertisement and then draws a
conclusion from it may commit the fallacy of suppressed evidence. Example:
The advertise for Kentucky Fried Chicken says, “Buy a bucket of chicken and have a
barrel of fun!” Therefore, if we buy a bucket of that chicken, we will be guaranteed to
have lots of fun.
 The advertise fails to state that the fun does not come packaged with the chicken but must be supplied
by the buyer. Also, of course, the advertise fails to state that the chicken is loaded with fat and that the
buyer‟s resultant weight gain may not amount to a barrel of fun. By ignoring these facts, the argument
based on the advertising is fallacious.
 Another way that an arguer can commit the suppressed evidence fallacy is by ignoring important
events that have occurred with the passage of time that render an inductive conclusion improbable.
Here is an example:
During the past fifty years, Poland has enjoyed a rather low standard of living.
Therefore, Poland will probably have a low standard of living for the next fifty years.
 This argument ignores the fact that Poland was part of the Soviet bloc during most of the past fifty
years, and this fact accounts for its rather low standard of living. However, following the collapse of
the Soviet Union, Poland became an independent nation, and its economy is expected to improve
steadily during the next fifty years.
 Yet another form of suppressed evidence is committed by arguers who quote passages out of context
from sources such as the Bible, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights to support a conclusion that the
passage was not intended to support. Consider, for example, the following argument against gun
control:
The Second Amendment of the American Constitution states that the right of the people
to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. But a law controlling handguns would
infringe the right to keep and bear arms. Therefore, a law controlling handguns would be
unconstitutional.

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  In fact, the Second Amendment reads, “A well- regulated militia being necessary to the security of a
free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the
amendment states that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed when the arms are necessary for the
preservation of a well-regulated militia. Because a law controlling handguns (pistols) would have little
effect on the preservation of a well-regulated militia, it is unlikely that such a law would be
unconstitutional.
 The suppressed evidence fallacy is similar to the form of begging the question in which the arguer
leaves a key premise out of the argument. The difference is that suppressed evidence leaves out a
premise that requires a different conclusion, while that form of begging the question leaves out a
premise that is needed to support the stated conclusion. However, because both fallacies proceed by
leaving a premise out of the argument, there are cases where the two fallacies overlap.
D. Fallacies of Ambiguity and Grammatical Analogy
 These fallacies arise from the occurrence of some form of ambiguity in either the premises or the
conclusion (or both). An expression is ambiguous if it is susceptible to different interpretations
in a given context. When the conclusion of an argument depends on a shift in meaning of an
ambiguous word or phrase or on the wrong interpretation of an ambiguous statement, the
argument commits a fallacy of ambiguity. The fallacies of ambiguity includes (19) equivocation
and (20) amphiboly.
 The fallacies of grammatical analogy include composition and division. Arguments that commit these
fallacies are grammatically analogous to other arguments that are good in every respect. Because of
this similarity in linguistic structure, such fallacious arguments may appear good yet be bad. In this
lesson, we will discuss the four fallacies.
Fallacies of Ambiguity
 These fallacies arise from the occurrence of some form of ambiguity in either the premises or the
conclusion (or both). An expression is ambiguous if it is susceptible to different interpretations
in a given context. When the conclusion of an argument depends on a shift in meaning of an
ambiguous word or phrase or on the wrong interpretation of an ambiguous statement, the
argument commits a fallacy of ambiguity.
19) Equivocation
 The fallacy of equivocation occurs when the conclusion of an argument depends on the fact that
a word or phrase is used, either explicitly or implicitly, in two different senses in the argument.
Such arguments are either invalid or have a false premise, and in either case they are unsound.
Consider the following example:
Some triangles are obtuse. Whatever is obtuse is ignorant. Therefore, some triangles are
ignorant.
Any law can be repealed by the legislative authority. But the law of gravity is a law.
Therefore, the law of gravity can be repealed by the legislative authority.
We have a duty to do what is right. We have a right to speak out in defense of the
innocent. Therefore, we have a duty to speak out in defense of the innocent.
 In the first argument, “obtuse” is used in two different senses. In the first premise it describes a certain
kind of angle, while in the second it means dull or stupid. The second argument equivocates on the
word “law”. In the first premise it means statutory law, and in the second it means law of nature. The

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 third argument uses “right” in two senses. In the first premise right means morally correct, but in the
second it means a just claim or power.
20) Amphiboly
 The fallacy of amphiboly occurs when the arguer misinterprets an ambiguous statement and
then draws a conclusion based on this faulty interpretation. The original statement is usually
asserted by someone other than the arguer, and the ambiguity usually arises from a mistake in
grammar or punctuation, a missing comma, a dangling modifier, an ambiguous antecedent of a
pronoun, or some other careless arrangement of words. Because of this ambiguity, the statement may
be understood in two clearly distinguishable ways. The arguer typically selects the unintended
interpretation and proceeds to draw a conclusion based upon it. Here are some examples:
The tour guide said that standing in Mesqel Square, the new federal police building could
easily be seen. It follows that the Empire State Building is in Greenwich Village.
John told Henery that he had made a mistake. It follows that John has at least the
courage to admit his own mistakes.
 The premise of the first argument contains a dangling modifier. Is it the observer or the building that is
supposed to be standing in Greenwich Village? The factually correct interpretation is the former. In
the second argument the pronoun “he” has an ambiguous antecedent; it can refer either to John or
Henery. Perhaps John told Henery that Henery had made a mistake. Ambiguities of this sort are called
syntactical ambiguities.
 Two areas where cases of amphiboly cause serious problems involve contracts and wills. The drafters
of these documents often express their intentions in terms of ambiguous statements, and alternate
interpretations of these statements then lead to different conclusions. For examples:
Mrs. Zenebu stated that in her will that “I leave my house and my clothes to Lemma and
Mengistu.” Therefore, we conclude that Lemma gets the house and Mengistu gets the car.
 In the first example, the conclusion obviously favors Lemma. Mengistu is almost certain to argue that
the gift of the clothes and the house should be shared equally by her and Lemma. Mrs. Zenebu could
have avoided the dispute by adding either “respectively” or “collectively” to the end of the sentence.
 Amphiboly differs from equivocation in two important ways. First, equivocation is always traced
to an ambiguity in the meaning of a word or phrase, whereas amphiboly involves a syntactical
ambiguity in a statement. The second difference is that amphiboly usually involves a mistake
made by the arguer in interpreting an ambiguous statement made by someone else, whereas the
ambiguity in equivocation is typically the arguer‟s own creation. If these distinctions are kept in
mind, it is usually easy to distinguish amphiboly from equivocation. Occasionally, however, the two
fallacies occur together, as the following example illustrates:
The Great Western Cookbook recommends that we serve the oysters when thoroughly
stewed. Apparently the delicate flavor is enhanced by the intoxicated condition of the
diners.
 First, it is unclear whether “stewed” refers to the oysters or to the diners, and so the argument commits
an amphiboly. But if “stewed” refers to the oysters it means “cooked”, and if it refers to the diners it
means “intoxicated”. Thus, the argument also involves an equivocation.
E. Fallacies of Grammatical Analogy

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  The fallacies of grammatical analogy are grammatically analogous to other arguments that are
good in every respect. Because of this similarity in linguistic structure, such fallacious arguments
may appear good yet be bad.
21) Composition
 The fallacy of composition is committed when the conclusion of an argument depends on the
erroneous transference of an attribute from the parts of something onto the whole. In other
words, the fallacy occurs when it is argued that because the parts have a certain attribute, it
follows that the whole has that attribute too and the situation is such that the attribute in
question cannot be legitimately transferred from parts to whole. Examples:

Each player on this basketball team is an excellent athlete. Therefore, the team as a whole
is excellent. Each atom in this piece of chalk is invisible. Therefore, the chalk is invisible.
Sodium and chlorine, the atomic components of salt, are both deadly poisons. Therefore,
salt is a deadly poison.
 In these arguments, the attributes that are transferred from the parts onto the whole are
designated by the words “excellent,” “invisible” and “deadly poison,” respectively. In each case the
transference is illegitimate, and so the argument is fallacious. Not every such transference is
illegitimate, however. Consider the following arguments:
Every atom in this piece of chalk has mass. Therefore, the piece of chalk has mass. Every
component in this picket fence is white. Therefore, the whole fence is white.
 In each case, an attribute (having mass, being white) is transferred from the parts onto the whole, but
these transferences are quite legitimate. Indeed, the fact that the atoms have mass is the very reason
why the chalk has mass. The same reasoning extends to the fence. Thus, the acceptability of these
arguments is attributable, at least in part, to the legitimate transference of an attribute from parts onto
the whole.
 Further caution is required by the fact that composition is sometimes confused with hasty
generalization. The only time this confusion is possible is when the “whole” is a class (such as the
class of people in a city or the class of trees in a forest), and the “parts” are the members of the class.
In such a case, composition proceeds from the members of the class to the class itself. Hasty
generalization, on the other hand, proceeds from the specific to the general. Because it is sometimes
easy to mistake a statement about a class for a general statement, composition can be mistaken for
hasty generalization. Such a mistake can be avoided if one is careful to keep in mind the distinction
between these two kinds of statements. This distinction falls back on the difference between the
collective and the distributive predication of an attribute. Consider the following statements:
Statement One: Fleas are small. Statement Two: Fleas are numerous.
 The first statement is a general statement. The attribute of being small is predicated distributive; that
is, it is assigned (or distributed) to each and every flea in the class. Each and every flea in the class is
said to be small. The second statement, on the other hand, is a statement about a class as a whole, or
what we will call a “class statement.” The attribute of being numerous is predicated collectively; in
other words, it is assigned not to the individual fleas but to the class of fleas. The meaning of the
statement is not that each and every flea is numerous but that the class of fleas is large.

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  To distinguish composition from hasty generalization, therefore, the following procedure should
be followed. Examine the conclusion of the argument. If the conclusion is a general statement-
that is, a statement in which an attribute is predicated distributive to each and every member of
a class- the fallacy committed is hasty generalization. But if the conclusion is a class statement
that is, a statement in which an attribute is predicated collectively to a class as a whole- the
fallacy is composition. Example:
Less gasoline is consumed by a car than by a truck. Therefore, less gasoline is consumed
in the United States by cars than by trucks.
 At first sight this argument might appear to proceed from the specific to the general and, consequently,
to commit a hasty generalization. But in fact the conclusion is not a general statement at all but a class
statement. The conclusion states that the whole class of cars uses less gas than does the whole class of
trucks (which is false, because there are many more cars than trucks). Since the attribute of using less
gasoline is predicated collectively, the fallacy committed is composition.
22) Division
 The fallacy of division is the exact reverse of composition. As composition goes from parts to
whole, division goes from whole to parts. The fallacy is committed when the conclusion of an
argument depends on the erroneous transference of an attribute from a whole (or a class) onto
its parts (or members). Examples:
Salt is a non-poisonous compound. Therefore, its component elements, sodium and
chlorine, are non-poisonous.
The Royal Society is over 300 years old. General Merid Hussein is a member of the Royal
Society. Therefore, General Merid Hussein is over 300 years old.
 In each case the attribute, designated respectively by the terms “non-poisonous,” and “over 300 years
old,” is illegitimately transferred from the whole or class onto the parts or members. As with the
fallacy of composition, however, this kind of transference is not always illegitimate. The following
argument contains no fallacy:
This piece of chalk has mass. Therefore, the atoms that compose this piece of chalk have
mass.
 Just as composition can sometimes be confused with hasty generalization (converse accident), division
can sometimes be confused with accident. As with composition, this confusion can occur only when
the “whole” is a class. In such a case, division proceeds from the class to the members, while accident
proceeds from the general to the specific. Thus, if a class statement is mistaken for a general
statement, division may be mistaken for accident. To avoid such a mistake, one should analyze the
premises of the argument. If the premises contain a general statement, the fallacy committed is
accident; but if they contain a class statement, the fallacy is division.

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