Logic

How about "...as Australia is to New Zealand", because a smaller but still substantial island, a near neighbor in a "galaxy" of island nations in a specific section of a very large body of...

Deductive reasoning involves going from a general idea to a more specific idea. Scientific experiments, for example, often involve deductive reasoning. In this type of reasoning, one starts with a...

The most likely answer is that this is an example of A, an ad hominem attack. This is because the argument does not offer any proof of what it is saying. It just denounces the characteristics of...

Logical arguments generally take the form of an "if-then" statement or a series of such arguments. These statements have a clause that typically begins with the word "if" and a second clause that...

This argument is valid. The fact that it is valid, however, does not necessarily mean that it is true. A syllogism (which this argument is) is valid when its conclusion must be true if both...

You got an A in physics when you bought a new car-the car caused your A. This is an example of Post hoc, ergo propter. This logical fallacy makes the assumption that because Event B follows Event...

First, one should avoid logical fallacies in any argument or defense of a stance. When analyzing literature, the first important logical decision is to separate fact from fiction, to remind...

Logic can do very little for us in this debate. This is because most of the major issues in this debate have to do with things that cannot be proven right or wrong through logic. This debate...

Decision-making, a complex mental process involving many elements—the gathering of data, the weighing of the legitimacy and validity of the information, determining if more information is needed,...

Inductive reasoning is connected to the idea of leading because, in inductive reasoning, observations lead to conclusions. When we use inductive reasoning, we take facts that we have observed and...

Logical thinking is just one of the capabilities of the human mind. John Keats as part of his explanation of Romantic poetry, coined the phrase "negative capabilities" to describe the mind's...

Although the Greeks, as people today, used deductive reasoning informally in many different ways to apply general principles to specific circumstances, the more technical treatments of deductive...

These two avenues to logical conclusions differ in specific ways. Deductive (de: from; ductive: drawn) gets to a conclusion by moving from known data to new data: inductive (in: toward; ductive:...

Because logic deals not with facts per se, but relationships among propositions, it cannot be used to analyze simple assertions. For example, if you state "the moon is made of green cheese", you...

There are two aspects to determining whether an argument is correct. The first is called "material truth" and the second "logical validity". A statement is materially true if it corresponds with...

Logic is the process of reasoning from a known or given to a concluding truth; it is closely aligned with rhetoric, in that an argument usually is designed to convince or to sway by means of...

There are several premises in this logical progression which could alter it in a very profound manner. There are two premises which stick out to me as being needed for this logical...

Human reasoning works two ways, one by induction and one by deduction. Induction starts from particulars and moves to general claims and deduction starts with general principles and moves to...

This is a variant on what is normally framed as the paradox of the village barber who shaves all men who do not shave themselves. The paradox has historically been used as an argument for the...

The human mind builds “structures” to make sense of the information coming in though the senses. One of these is the idea of dimensions, space locators to describe or otherwise deal with the...

The main limitation of formal logic is that it applies to matters which are either true or false, and which can be known, at least in theory, with some degree of certainty. These are not, however,...

The main part of this debate that cannot be decided by logical analysis is the part about what is and is not desirable. We can logically discuss the extent to which prayer in school would violate...

In philosophy, the term "modal" is often used to refer to modal logic. Traditional syllogistic logic focused, for the most part, on things which were certain and happened all of the time. This is...

The Greek Philosophers did a good job of classifying and clarifying the way we use our brains. Logic is, etymologically, connected with how we use words (logos), and fallacies (falsehoods) can be...

Chains of logic or reasoning can have two types of problems. they can be materially incorrect (have the facts wrong) or they can be logically invalid (the conclusions do not follow from the...

When one asks whether statements in the form "he said X" are facts or inferences, one is actually asking about two different statements, one being a claim that someone said a certain thing and the...

Truth in argument has two components, material truth or accuracy (correspondence with some external state of affairs) and formal validity (correct logical relationships among parts of an argument)....

Imagine the statement: "I think that a racoon got into my neighbor's garbage last night." Assume I am making the statement based on the spilled garbage on her driveway, my knowledge of the behavior...

Symbolic logic typically makes use of the lower case letters p, q, r, s, and t to represent statements. Various symbols are then used to related these symbols or statements. We want to translate a...

To understand the answer to this, you must first understand the difference between enthymeme and syllogism. One is the full form of a categorical proposition argument while the other is a shortened...

An enthymeme is a curtailed or truncated syllogism the major or minor term of which is implied, therefore omitted. The enthymeme [has] either the major or minor premise ... left implied. (Silva...

A deductive argument is one that takes general concepts and relates them to a specific case. For example, we know that all human beings are mammals. We know that I am a human being. Therefore,...

In order to write arguments in the forms of modus ponens and modus tollens, it's important to understand the formal differences between the modes. The modus ponens "affirms by affirming". In other...

Inductive argument, in which you make conclusions based on some observations and then “induce” the results of other facts, is a logical tool used by science every day. The problems with your...

A deductive argument is one that starts with general premises and moves to specific conclusion. It is generally formed by positing that something true of a class must be true of all individuals...

An inductive argument is one that starts with one specific case and tries to generalize from there. This is in contrast to a deductive argument in which a person starts with a general rule and...