Chapter 6, Part A. Constructing and Appraising Arguments
Chapter 6, Part A. Constructing and Appraising Arguments
Learning Objectives
- Understand the distinction between ‘relations among ideas’ and ‘matters of fact’
- Understand the nature of categories or classes
- Be able to identify subject and predicate in propositions
- Be able to distinguish between the four types of categorical propositions (a, e, i, and o)
- Be able to distinguish between distributed and undistributed subjects and predicates
- Be able to identify minor, major, and middle terms
- Be able to apply the six rules of categorical syllogisms.
New Concepts to Master
- Truth-preserving
- Categories and classes
- Syllogism
- Major premise
- Minor premise
- Quantifier
- Subject term
- Copula
- Predicate term
- The universal affirmative
- The universal negative
- The particular affirmative
- The particular negative
- Distribution
- Minor, major, and middle term.
Chapter Orientation
Welcome to Chapter 6. By this point, you know quite a bit about arguments and logic in a general sense, but in this chapter, we’ll look closely at several specific types of arguments and why and when they do and don’t work.
This chapter will most likely be the hardest one in this book. It contains the most technical information that students typically struggle with. Things do get easier for our final two chapters, but this one will take some time to absorb and properly understand (stick with it – the payoff is well worth it). I expect you’ll need to go over this chapter more than once, as well as watch the videos (located in the additional resources in Chapter 6 Part B) several times, before you master this material.
As you’re progressing through the material, some of you might wonder why you need to learn all of these technicalities. The reason is that they expose the mechanics of propositions and arguments necessary for understanding why and how they work, and more importantly – why and how they don’t work. Kind of like learning some of the technicalities of an engine to help you understand how to diagnose and resolve its problems. Beginning in Chapter 2, I pointed out that the conclusions of sound deductive arguments are necessarily certain. I showed the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning. I explained what formal and informal fallacies were and how you might spot them. I also discussed the necessity of falsification for scientific reasoning and the fact that confirmation in scientific reasoning is logically fallacious. While you might have taken all of this on faith, as you should have learned by now, trusting me blindly is never a very good idea. So this chapter (while a little heavy and dry) will give you the actual reasons why all of those things I said are true.
There’s quite a bit of grammar in this chapter. This might also seem strange in a critical thinking text, however, how we express our propositions and how we organise them into arguments makes all the difference to the validity of our inferences. Two groups of statements that, o