Logical and Critical Thinking The University of Auckland

Week 1: Introduction to Logical and Critical Thinking

Start date:

Why do we need to learn Logical and Critical Thinking skills?

The lead educators Tim Dare and Patrick Girard explain why logical and critical thinking matters.
Through this course, they will help us to become good logical and critical thinkers.

1.1 Introduction to the course video (03:10)

1.2 How to use FutureLearn article

1.3 Introduce yourself discussion

1.4 What is logical and critical thinking? video (06:41)

Obstacles to Logical and Critical Thinking

So what are the common obstacles that stop us from becoming good logical and critical thinkers? This
week we learn to recognise the obstacles of bias, heuristics, framing and fallacies.

1.5 Confirmation bias video (04:40)

1.6 Availability heuristic video (04:33)

1.7 Speeding and the time-saving bias article

1.8 Framing problems video (05:41)

1.9 How well do you know your obstacles? quiz

1.10 Common fallacies article

1.11 Identify and share an example discussion

Summary

Let's recap the important concepts covered in Week 1.

1.12 Summary of Week 1 video (03:50)

1.1 Introduction to the course video

Welcome to the University of Auckland's Critical Thinking course. I'm Tim Dare. And I'm Patrick Girard. And we'll be teaching
this course. There are two things that we hope you will learn from this course. First-- how to tell good reasoning from bad
reasoning and how to apply that to your own reasoning and to the reasoning of other people. And second-- how to
construct chains of reasoning or arguments that are logical and, therefore, more likely to convince people. We'll be focusing
on the first of these tasks. But we'll do a bit of the second, as well. And to some extent, the two skills come together.

If you can tell good reasoning from bad, you're more likely to be able to construct good, logical chains of reasoning. But
before we begin, here is some information about the course. The course will last eight weeks. Each week contains a set of
activities in which we introduce relevant material. Some activities are based on videos and some on articles. And there are
corresponding exercises which go with them. The first week discusses what critical and logical thinking are. and shows you
some common obstacles to good reasoning. In weeks two to four, we give you the fundamental logical tools to evaluate
arguments. In weeks five to seven, we will see how these tools are applied in science, law, and morality.

In week eight, we will go over a case study, consolidating what you've learned in the course. You could do the course by
what we might call the minimal route-- just watching the videos and reading the articles. But to really develop proper
logical and critical thinking skills, you will want to be much more involved in the course, to complete the quizzes, to work on
the various exercises and activities that we've prepared for you. And we'd really like you to participate in the discussion
forums. We encourage peer learning. And much of that will take place in the discussion forums. We'll keep an eye on those
forums. But they won't be extensively moderated.

So it's up to you to keep the tone friendly, respectful, and inclusive so that everyone feels comfortable contributing. Make
sure your comments are constructive and respond to the content of the arguments, not to the individual. We'll see that one
of the common errors is what we call the ad hominem fallacy-- attacking the person, not the argument. And of course, we
don't want to do that. The point of promoting a friendly, respectful, and inclusive tone is to encourage you to become
involved and to feel free to say what you think. So do take that opportunity. And while Tim doesn't know what trolling is, I
do. And it won't be tolerated. Well, that's the formalities out of the way.

In the next clip, we're going to explain what critical thinking is. We'll talk about the problems, of course, that critical
thinking might address and what you learn from the course. So get ready for an interesting trip through the tangle of logical
and critical thinking and to learn some important things along the way.

Introduction to the course

This course aims to help you develop and improve your logical and critical thinking skills and to identify common obstacles to effective
logical and critical thinking. The key concepts are illustrated with real-life examples via a combination of videos, articles and interactive
exercises. The course supports peer learning through discussions that encourage the sharing of ideas and experiences from a wide variety
of contexts.

Course structure

We begin with an introduction to logical and critical thinking and common obstacles and fallacies.

In Week 2 Patrick introduces arguments. We learn to identify premises and conclusions – components of a good argument – and by the
end of this week we’ll be able to construct an argument in standard form.

In Week 3 we will learn how to distinguish between deductive and non-deductive arguments and about validity, invalidity, strength and
weakness.

In Week 4 we examine good and bad arguments in more detail, learning how to tell when an argument is sound or cogent, and how to
evaluate an argument.

Weeks 5-7 examine three familiar areas – science, law, and morality – that call upon our logical and critical thinking skills in ways
appropriate to the particular demands of those areas.
Finally in Week 8 we will apply the lessons of the course to an argument “in the wild”, seeing how the skills we have developed over our
eight-week journey can be used in our own lives.

There will also be opportunity to interact with your course facilitator or the lead educators.

The teaching team

•Course Writers and Educators Tim Dare and Patrick Girard.

•Course Mentor Mark Tan.

Course communication

•Comments and discussion: Please use the comments sections to engage with fellow learners and share your experiences. The educators
may also join discussions and conversations at least once every week. If you follow them you can see all their posts. (You will learn about
the ability to ‘follow’ people alongside FutureLearn guidelines on the use of social learning tools in the next step.) Since discussions are an
integral part of this course, here are some tips to effective discussions.

In the comments sections on this course you’ll see a search bar. This is part of a trial to see if it helps you find better conversations. You can
search to see if other learners have been talking about a particular topic on a step, and if not then you can be the first to discuss it. If you
have any feedback on using the search bar please send it to feedback@futurelearn.com.
1.4 What is logical and critical thinking?

We are constantly being given reasons to do and believe things: to believe that we should buy
a product, support a cause, accept a job, judge someone innocent or guilty, that fairness
requires us to do some household chore, and so on. Assessing the reasons we are given to
do or believe these things calls upon us to think critically and logically. Perhaps surprisingly,
however, people are not very good at thinking logically and critically. No matter how clever or
educated we are, or what our walk of life is, we are all rather easily led astray by common
psychological obstacles or reasoning fallacies.

we're going to explain what critical thinking is and what sorts of problems a course in critical thinking might address. And finally, we'll
let you know what we hope you will learn from the course. So first, what's critical thinking? Essentially critical thinking aims to ensure
that we have good reasons for our beliefs. But what does that mean? Well, suppose Patrick and I are discussing whether or not a
colleague of ours called Robin-- just because we don't really have a colleague called Robin-- will come to some philosophy department
meeting to be held this afternoon. So do you think Robin will be there, Patrick? No. I don't think so. Why do you think that?

Meetings always go bad when Robin is there But that's not a good reason to believe Robin won't be at the meeting. At best, it's a
reason to hope he won't be. So what about this reason then? Robin hates meetings, and hardly ever comes to them. Robin only turns
up if there's something important on the agenda. And there's nothing on this afternoon's agenda that touches on anything Robin cares
about. Well, I admit that's a better reason. It does provide stronger logical support if we make the following assumptions. One, that it's
true that Robin almost never comes to meetings because he hates them. Two, that he only turns up if there's something important on
the agenda.

And three, that there's nothing on the agenda that Robin cares about. If those three assumptions hold, then it seems plausible that
Robin won't show up. But it doesn't settle whether or not Robin will be at the meeting. Well, I reckon this reason will settle it. Robin's
in London on sabbatical. We were on Skype together earlier today. That's a better reason to think Robin won't be at the meeting. Of all
the reasons you've given me, it gives the strongest logical support. Think of these as premises.

If the meeting is in Auckland, and if we know that London is in England, and if we know that England is roughly a 24 hour trip from
Auckland, and if we're very confident that Robin is in London, then we can be very confident that Robin won't be at the meeting this
afternoon. Still, can we be absolutely certain that Robin won't be at the meeting. Maybe not. Maybe Robin's a computer hacker, and
has managed to fake a Skype call from London to trick Patrick. Or maybe Robin's a mad scientist and has developed some kind of
transportation device. Seriously, Tim. Come on. Well, yeah, I know. This all seems rather unlikely.

I grant that if your final reason was in fact true, I would have good reason to believe that Robin won't be at the meeting, But it is true.
When we think critically, in the sense we're talking about in this course, we're thinking in ways which ensure, insofar as possible, that
we have good reason for our beliefs. We're trying to come to a true belief about whether or not Robin will be at the meeting, for
instance, in the sense that we're evaluating the reasons which bear upon that belief to see if they're good reasons to believe one thing
rather than another.

Now as we hope the Robin in the meeting case shows, critical and logical thinking can be, and often is, about very ordinary, everyday
issues. I think critically when I weigh up reasons to believe that I should take my car to work rather than go by train. I might consider
the reasons for and against taking my car. The likelihood of traffic jams on the roads. The reliability of the train system. How important
it is that I get to work by a particular time. And which of the options make it more likely that I will get there by that time. But critical
thinking can also be about big questions.

You might, for instance, be worried about privacy in the age of the internet and cyber security. Or you might be concerned about
various conflicts and wars around the world, and whether your country should be involved. Those and other big questions, of course,
are often all over the news. In fact, the small questions and the big questions are often quite closely connected. The reasons which
bear upon whether I should go to work by car or train include reasons like the contribution of private car use to global warming. And
once I start thinking about global warming, I can engage in another round of reasoning about what beliefs I ought to adopt about that.
I might say, for instance, global warming is overrated.

But then I would ask you why you say that. Well, I would respond, I remember summers when I was a boy. They used to go on and on.
Now you just can't count on a decent summer. I don't reckon it's any warmer. But Tim, what you remember from your childhood isn't a
very good reason to doubt the scientific consensus on global warming. Fair enough. In fact, we face constant demands to exercise our
critical thinking skills. All sorts of people tried to persuade us of all sorts of things. That people who write editorials and letters to the
editor, politicians, lecturers, advertisers, evangelists, radio hosts, health authorities, your parents, your children, your friends, and so
on.

And when someone's trying to convince you of something, you should think what reasons have I really been given for believing what
this person wants me to believe? Are they good reasons? This is what we mean by critical and logical thinking. Now here's something
surprising. Since we're all called upon to exercise our critical thinking skills all the time, since we might even think that the capacity to
exercise those skills is part of what makes humans special, you'd think we'd all, or almost all of us, be pretty good at it, that we
wouldn't often make simple errors, and there wouldn't be widespread tendencies to adopt unjustified or bad beliefs. But guess what?

We are all inclined to make certain kinds of errors when we're deciding which beliefs to adopt. We hope that this course will teach you
how to be careful so that you will at least know when to be on the lookout for these corrupting tendencies. In this course, we'll give
you several examples of bad reasoning and we'll give you tools to assess that in a clear way. These tools will safeguard you from
encounters with bad reasoning.

In the subsequent steps for this week, we begin to recognise some common obstacles to logical and critical thinking:

•Confirmation bias - when we tend to only consider what we have already experienced.

•Heuristics - mental shortcuts we use to simplify decision making.

•Framing - when how we are presented with a problem affects the way we see it.

•Common fallacies - some common ways that we use reasoning that are not logical or critical.

1.5 Confirmation bias

Francis Bacon describes confirmation bias so:

“The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things … to support
and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on
the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises or … sets aside and rejects in order that
by this great and pernicious predetermination, the authority of its former conclusions may
remain inviolate”. (Francis Bacon 1602).

We saw in the previous video that we're constantly called upon to use our logical and critical thinking skills. We suggested though that
humans tend not to be very good at logical and critical thinking. In this and other steps this week, we'll give some illustrations of the
ways in which we're rather easily led astray. These are common obstacles to effective, logical, and critical thinking. Here's an example
of an obstacle to good critical thinking. "The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion, draws all things to support
and agree with it.

And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet, these it either neglects and despises
or sets aside and rejects in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination, the authority of its former conclusion may remain
inviolate." Francis Bacon is referring to what we now call the confirmation bias. So once again, Francis, but this time in plain English
please. I mean that humans have a deep seated tendency to prefer information that confirms their existing positions. Once they've
come to a view about something, they see the evidence that supports that view, and they overlook the evidence that doesn't. Is that
plain enough? So how does confirmation bias work in real life?

I'll give you a few examples. Let's start with a forensic case. We think of fingerprints as reliable and objective evidence. Well, following
a notorious misidentification using fingerprint evidence, you'll see the article about that in the materials, researchers carried out a
cunning experiment. They found five very experienced fingerprint experts who, half a decade earlier, had judged that fingerprints
taken from a suspect matched those taken from a crime scene. This time though, they told them that the fingerprints were from the
notorious misidentification case. And now, only one of them stuck with their earlier judgement. Three said there was definitely no
match, and one said there wasn't enough information to decide. So what's going on here?

Why did five very experienced experts change their minds? They fell victim to confirmation bias. When primed to think there was no
match as part of the 2005 research, four of them saw the evidence that confirmed that judgement. That's Bacon's point. Here's a more
everyday case of a kind I imagine we've all come across. Companies all over the world sell mattresses or mattress covers which contain
magnets and which are said to cure all sorts of conditions. New Zealand has a version. Until recently, they had an advertisement, a
radio jingle which went like this. (SINGING) How do you sleep at night with all that nagging pain? How do you sleep at night with all
those aches and pains?

The answer is Woolrest BioMag, because 400,000 Kiwis can't be wrong. After 17 years, our customers are our best endorsement. Yes,
17 years of giving drug free pain relief is well worth celebrating. What should we make of this? The company puts a lot of weight on
testimonials, statements from satisfied customers. Knowing about confirmation bias might make you a bit suspicious of that. Why?
Well, the people who give the testimonials have a hypothesis about the effectiveness of the mattress. They think it'll work; that's why
they've spent $300 to $500 on it. They want it to work so they haven't wasted their money. Suppose, like most of us, they have good
days and bad days.

Sometimes, we're full of energy and leap out of bed, and other days, we feel a bit creaky and find it hard to get going. If you've bought
one of these mattresses though, you notice the good days, and you attribute them to the magnets. That we'll see later in the course,
when we talk about science, is why we do random controlled trials. Suppose you took the magnets out of half of the mattresses, but
didn't tell people whether they had the magnetised or the non-magnetized version. Now, they wouldn't know how to interpret the
evidence to confirm a preexisting opinion. It would be interesting to see if they gave the same testimonials.

1.6 Availability heuristic

We use strategies to allow us to solve problems quickly. A mental shortcut to simplify decision
making is called reasoning heuristic. Most of the time, the reasoning heuristics really are
useful. They allow us to make decisions quickly and efficiently. But sometimes, they’re
obstacles to effective, logical, and critical thinking.
One of the best known is the availability heuristic. We judge the probability of an event by how
quickly and easily examples of that event come to mind, by how available they are to us,
rather than by identifying all of the alternatives and working out the real probabilities.
But availability then can be caused by something other than probability, and that might lead us
to make poor decisions.
Some significant obstacles to effective, logical, and critical thinking come in the form of reasoning heuristics. What is a reasoning
heuristic? We use strategies to allow us to solve problems quickly. A reasoning heuristic is a mental shortcut we use to simplify
decision making. Most of the time, these heuristics really are useful. They allow us to make decisions quickly and efficiently. But
sometimes, they're obstacles to effective, logical, and critical thinking. One of the best known is the availability heuristic. We judge the
probability of an event by how quickly and easily examples of that event come to mind by how available they are to us, rather than by
identifying all of the alternatives and working out the real probabilities.

Are there more English words that start with the letter "r?" Rotunda, robot, rockies, or more that have "r" as their third letter-- terriers
mermaid, border? Are you more likely to be attacked by a vicious dog or to be injured by your TV set? We tend to answer questions
like these by using the availability heuristic. Words which start with the letter "r" are easy to bring to mind than words which have "r"
as their third letter. Anyone who does crosswords knows that. So we tend to think that there are more words that start with "r." Dog
attacks are news worthy, striking, and frightening, so they make the papers, and they stick in our minds.

They're more newsworthy than accidents with furniture, so they're more available to us. Now, it's easy to see why we use the
availability heuristic. It seems plausible that common things will be more available to us. We'll be familiar with them, because we see
them all of the time, and so we might think that availability tracks or indicates probability. A highly probable event, we might suppose,
will be more available than a rare event. But that's not always the case. In fact, there are far more English words with "r" as their third
letter than there are words which start with the letter "r," around 23,000 to 9,000, apparently.

And in the US, at least, for which we have statistics, and where maybe they have larger television sets, many more people are injured
by falling television sets than by dog attacks. Why does availability mislead us in these cases? Well, because the readyness with which
examples of words beginning with "r" or dog attacks come to mind is not caused by commonness or probability. We can think of words
which begin with "r" because we list words that way in the dictionary, and because starting syllables come to mind first. Dog attacks
are easy to bring to mind, because they're striking, even if relatively rare.

In general, events which have had a lot of media coverage, plane crashes, wardrobe malfunctions, terrorist, or shark attacks are likely
to be easy to bring to mind in the days after that coverage, even if they're pretty uncommon really. Availability then can be caused by
something other than probability, and that might lead us to make poor decisions. We might allocate resources to the prevention of
dog attacks rather than to making furniture more secure, to responding to threats of terrorism, rather than to the much greater threat
posed by illnesses such as cancer, to over estimating the risk of the side effects of vaccines, because rare cases are so striking and
moving. The mental shortcuts heuristics provide can be useful.

But if we want to be effective, logical, and critical thinkers, we have to treat them with caution, recognising that they sometimes lead
us astray. So what should we do? Well, if we're making a decision that turns on how likely it is that an event will occur, we should look
for reliable statistics about that event. That's the way to be an effective, logical, and critical thinker.
1.7 Speeding and the time-saving bias article

A lot of effort goes into convincing motorists not to speed, especially around holiday periods. Mainly we try to show that speeding can
have bad consequences, from the cost and inconvenience of getting ticketed all they way through to injury and death.

But there is another reason not to speed that doesn’t get much coverage, and that should convince everyone that once they are
travelling above rather low speeds, accelerating even more doesn’t make much sense.

How can that be? It turns out that the assumption that driving faster will get us where we are going quicker is flawed, and not just
because of the standard concerns about increased risks of an accident.

A 10km trip at 10kph would take an hour. The same trip at 20kph would take half an hour, a quite dramatic time saving. If we are
interested in saving time – in getting where we are going more quickly – perhaps it makes sense to travel at 20kph rather than 10kph if
we can.

Suppose we speed up to 30kph? Now our 10km trip will take 20 minutes. Travelling at 30kph means we get where are going 10
minutes earlier than travelling at 20kph: perhaps that will seem worthwhile too.

Well, suppose we accelerate to a heady 40kph? Now our trip takes 15 minutes. Traveling at 40kph rather than 30kph means we get to
where we are going 5 minutes earlier.

Notice what is happening here. Speeding up does save us time, but less and less as we increase from higher starting speeds.
Accelerating from 10kph to 20kph saves 30 minutes on a 10km journey, but accelerating from 20kph to 30kph – the same speed
increase – saves only 10 minutes, and accelerating from 30kph to 40kph saves only 5 minutes.

The trend is constant, and by the time we get to the speeds we are likely to be interested in, the time savings are tiny. Travelling 10km
at 90kph rather than 80kph saves us only 54 seconds, and at 100kph rather than 90kph only 42 seconds!

Of course the longer the journey the more time we save. The 10km figures are ten times higher over 100km, but still the time saved by
travelling at 100kph rather than 90kph over 100km is a paltry 7 minutes.

It turns out that the common, almost universal, assumption that we will get to where we are going more quickly if we travel at higher
speeds is, if not false, at least much less significant than we might have imagined.

Once set out this seems obvious. Why do we persist in thinking travelling at higher speeds will make a significant difference to journey
times? The tendency to overestimate the time saved by doing tasks more quickly is called the ‘time-saving bias’, and it is one of a
cluster of common reasoning errors all humans are inclined to make. Even people who are perfectly ok with basic maths tend to judge
things like probability and how much time we save if we travel faster on the basis of ‘first impressions’ rather than calculation.

We tend to judge the likelihood of something happening, for instance, by seeing how readily an example of that thing comes to mind,
by how ‘available’ it is to us. Availability may be a pretty good guide to probability: more common things should come to mind more
readily than rare things.

But things readily come to mind not only because they are common but because they are striking, because we have just seen an
example on the news, or because we have some particular reason to care about that thing. People think plane crashes and terrible
sporting accidents are more likely following a high profile example, and parents overestimate the probability of side-effects from
vaccinations because they have an understandable concern about them: they come to mind more readily than they should given their
actual probability.
There is often a good reason for using these ‘heuristics,’ as they’re called. They are quick and fairly reliable and – assuming many of
them have their roots in the early evolution of our cognitive capacities – they probably worked in the environments in which we
evolved. Being able to readily bring to mind food when we contemplated an environment might have been a pretty good way of
estimating the probability of finding it there, and if the availability heuristic occasionally led us to overestimate the likelihood of
running into a sabre-tooth tiger, that may have been no bad thing.

But it is clear that these ‘quick and dirty’ reasoning strategies can also lead us astray. Obviously it’s good to avoid these common
reasoning errors. It helps us develop true beliefs and reject false ones. But it also has practical benefits. In the driving case, it should
lead us to see that driving faster delivers almost no benefits. Once we see that we should feel less frustration when meeting slower
drivers and reduce the risks of accidents or encounters with traffic patrols.

1.8 Framing problems

If we’re thinking well, we might suppose that if we were to make a particular choice on one
occasion, we’d make the same choice if confronted with the same options in the same
circumstances on another occasion.

But we know that people do not always do this and one common reason is the framing effect. The
framing effect can make us respond differently to identical circumstances by changing the framing
of those circumstances, by focusing our attention on particular aspects of the situation.

We are much more likely to choose an option described in positive terms, for instance, than one
described negatively, even when the descriptions are actually the same.

Here's a third example of a common obstacle to effective logical and critical thinking. If we're thinking well, we might suppose that if
we make a particular choice on one occasion, we'd make the same choice if confronted with the same options in the same
circumstances on another occasion. But we know that people do not always do this. And one common reason is the framing effect.
The framing effect can make us respond differently to identical circumstances by changing the framing of those circumstances, by
focusing our attention on particular aspects of the situation. Well, I realise you must be disappointed in your diagnosis, Patrick, and I
know the treatment options don't look very good. But I can offer you a new drug.

But I have to admit it only works in 50% of cases. Cut, cut. No, no, no. It's no good. Let's try it again. [REWINDING SOUNDS] Well, I
realise you must be a bit disappointed in your diagnosis, Patrick. But we've made fantastic progress in this area. And I can offer you a
new drug that has cured 50% of cases. You know, perhaps you wouldn't be fooled by this. The description of the effectiveness of the
drug is the same whether we say it fails 50% of the time or succeeds 50% of the time. But research shows that most people are fooled
by that change in descriptions.

We are much more likely to choose an option described in positive terms than one described negatively, even when the descriptions
are actually the same. We are more likely to pick an option framed as a success. Our doctor-patient case was pretty straightforward.
But here is a famous and more complicated example. Imagine you're a senior health official. And your country is preparing for a
disease outbreak expected to kill 600 people. There are two possible programmes. And you've got to choose which will be adopted. If
we adopt programme A, 200 people will be saved. If we adopt programme B, there's a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved,
and a 2/3 probability that no one will be saved.

Which option do you prefer? Hold that thought.

Now consider the same problem, unusual disease, 600 expected deaths, two programmes to choose from. But now, if we adopt
programme C, 400 people will die. If we adopt programme D, there's a 1/3 probability no one will die, and a 2/3 probability that 600
people will die.

Which do you choose? In the original experiment by the famous psychologists, Tversky and Kahneman, 72% of those asked to choose
between A and B preferred A, and 28% B. 78% of those asked to choose between C and D preferred D, and 22% C. But let's get all four
options back up and look at them more carefully. 200 people will be saved. There's a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and
a 2/3 probability that no one will be saved. 400 people will die. There's a 1/3 probability no one will die, and a 2/3 probability that 600
people will die. We saw that most people preferred A over B, and D over C. But look closely.

A and C are just positive and negative ways of saying the same thing. Of 600 people, 200 will be saved and 400 will die. And B and D
are also saying the same thing in negative and positive terms. Why don't we make consistent choices between these options? The
explanation is that the two choices between A and B and C and D are framed differently. One is put in negative and the other in
positive terms. And we focus on the positive. The framing effect is ubiquitous. And it's not always because we're keen to accentuate
the positive. OK, one more example, and this is my favourite. In another study, 40 people were asked about headaches. And a key
question was framed differently.

Do you get headaches frequently? And if so, how often? Do you get headaches occasionally? And if so, how often? You can probably
guess what happens. If you ask people if they get headaches frequently, they can think of more occasions on which they've had
headaches than if you ask them if they get headaches occasionally. People who got question A reported an average of 2.2 headaches a
week, while people who got question B reported an average of 0.7. The words frequently and occasionally frame the questions
differently, leading people to report the same experience differently. Now, here the framing effect acts as an obstacle to effective
logical and critical thinking.

1.10 Common fallacies

This article is a resource that you may want to return to as the fallacies discussed in it come up throughout the course. Do not feel that
you need to read or master the entire article now. We have provided a related file for you to download.

We’ve discussed some of the deep-seated psychological obstacles to effective logical and critical thinking in the videos. This article sets
out some more common ways in which arguments can go awry. The defects or fallacies presented here tend to be more
straightforward than psychological obstacles posed by reasoning heuristics and biases.

They should, therefore, be easier to spot and combat. You will see though, that they are very common: keep an eye out for them in
your local paper, online, or in arguments or discussions with friends or colleagues. One reason they’re common is that they can be
quite effective! But if we offer or are convinced by a fallacious argument we will not be acting as good logical and critical thinkers.

Species of Fallacious Arguments

The common fallacies are usefully divided into three categories: Fallacies of Relevance, Fallacies of Unacceptable Premises, and Formal
Fallacies. Many of these fallacies have Latin names, perhaps because medieval philosophers were particularly interested in informal
logic. You don’t need to know the Latin names: what’s important is being able to recognize the fallacies.

Fallacies of Relevance

Fallacies of relevance offer reasons to believe a claim or conclusion that, on examination, turn out to not in fact be reasons to do any
such thing.

1. The ‘Who are you to talk?’, or ‘You Too’, or Tu Quoque Fallacy

•Rejecting an argument because the person advancing it fails to practice what he or she preaches.

Doctor: You should quit smoking. It’s a serious health risk.

Patient: Look who’s talking! I’ll quit when you quit.

Responses like that probably sound familiar. But the doctor’s failure to look after her own health is irrelevant to the argument, resting
on a concern for the patient’s health, that the patient should quit smoking.

2. The Red Herring Fallacy.

•An arguer tries to sidetrack his or her audience by raising an irrelevant issue and then claims that the original issue has effectively
been settled by the irrelevant diversion.

There is a good deal of talk these days about the need to eliminate pesticides from our fruits and vegetables. But many of
these foods are essential to our health. Carrots are an excellent source of vitamin A, broccoli is rich in iron, and oranges and
grapefruits have lots of Vitamin C.

Plans to eliminate or reduce pesticides probably don’t entail stopping the production of common vegetables: the suggestion that they
do is an irrelevant red herring.

3. The Strawman Fallacy.

•Someone distorts or caricatures an opponent’s arguments or views, and then attacks the weakened version rather than the real
argument.
 Margaret: “We have to do something about greenhouse gases. The government should raise vehicle fuel efficiency
standards to cut down the amount of CO2 we release over the next 20 years”.

Roger: “Margaret’s solution would be a disaster. It would kill the economy. How would people get to work without cars?”

Roger claims that Margaret is proposing measures that would eliminate cars. Margaret has not said anything equivalent to that. It’s a
strawman.

A positive message from the Strawman: the importance of being charitable.

Showing that a strawman version of a position we oppose may win a debate, but it is unlikely to move us toward the truth. If we can
show that even the strongest version of a position we oppose is flawed, we may make progress.

So good logical and critical thinking leads to the principle of charity: When representing an argument that you do not agree with and
are attempting to evaluate, it is important to represent that argument in a way that is reasonably faithful to the argument as it is made
by the originators, and as strong as possible. We cover the principle of charity in greater details in week 3.

4. The Ad Hominem or ‘At the Person’ Fallacy.

•Rejecting someone’s argument by attacking the person rather than evaluating their argument on its merits.

“Dear Editor, The current campaign against combining drinking with driving is terrorising law-abiding people. Many law-
abiding people are cutting their alcohol consumption because they are afraid of being caught by random breath testing. But
research shows that the average drink-driver in a fatal accident has an average blood alcohol level of more than twice the
legal limit. The current campaign against drinking and driving is failing to achieve what should be our top priority; getting
the heavy and hardened drinkers of the road.” Douglas Myers. CEO, Dominion Breweries.

“Dear Editor, I read Doug Myer’s letter yesterday but he is the CEO of a major brewing company! He has a vested interest in
keeping alcohol sales up, and the anti-drink-driving campaign threatens to reduce alcohol sales. We shouldn’t take any
notice of his views about drinking and driving”.

But if Myer has given arguments in favour of his view, we should evaluate them like any other argument – are they valid? strong?
sound? cogent? (we’ll explain these terms in the course) – rather than writing them off because of facts about him.

Sometimes, however, an arguer’s position may be a reason to examine their arguments more carefully than we might otherwise.

The following does not appear fallacious:

“Burton Wexler, spokesperson for the American Tobacco Growers Association, has argued that there is no credible scientific
evidence that cigarette smoking causes cancer. Given Wexler’s obvious bias in the matter, his arguments should be treated
with care.”

5. Fallacious Appeal to Authority.

•Relying upon the view of apparent (as opposed to genuine) authorities to settle the truth of a statement or argument.

Richard Long, a respected retired New Zealand newsreader featured in advertising campaigns for Hanover Finance. Long
had no financial expertise.

Newsreaders look well informed, but they are essentially presenters. They are well known because they’re on the news: not because
they know about investments. If we rely upon a newsreader’s endorsement to settle which investment fund we should trust, we would
be accepting a claim without adequate evidence. That would be a fallacious appeal to authority.

Appeals to authority also conflict with the basic tenet of good logical and critical thinking which calls upon us to take responsibility for
evaluating the grounds for our beliefs. Adopting a belief merely because someone else simply told us it was true is a way of avoiding
good logical and critical thinking.

Sometimes, however, good logical and critical thinking will itself lead us to rely on genuine authorities. If I can’t assess the investment
option for myself, I might reason that I should trust the advice of a genuine investment advisor. That’s not avoiding logical and critical
thinking: it’s reasoning about a matter related indirectly to the question I’m trying to settle.

When I consider whether I should rely on a genuine authority, I should consider the following questions:
1.Is the authority a genuine authority: are they experts?

2.Are they giving advice in the areas within which they are a genuine authority? (We should listen to actors about acting; not so much
about investing or medicine).

3.Is there a broad consensus among authorities in the area? If not, we should not decide to believe X solely because an authority says X
is true, since other genuine authorities say that X isn’t true.

4.Is the authority speaking sincerely (they might be giving an endorsement because they’re paid to do so) and are they free of obvious
bias?

Only if the answer to all four of these questions is “yes” should we accept a claim because an authority endorses it, and even then, we
should only do so if we are not in a position to evaluate the evidence for the claim ourselves.

6. The Fallacy of Composition.

•Arguing that what is true of the parts must be true of the whole. (All of the parts of the object O have the property P. Therefore, O
has the property P.)

Rugby players Ma’a Nonu, Jerome Kaino and Charles Piatau are all great players. In 2012, they all played for the Auckland
Blues. Therefore, the 2012 Auckland Blues were a great team.

Sadly, for Tim, a long-suffering Blues Fan, the conclusion of this argument was false even though the premises were true.

And, showing that famous philosophers are not immune:

“Should we not assume that just as the eye, hand, the foot, and in general each part of the body clearly has its own proper
function, so man too has some function over and above the function of his parts?” Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

7. The Fallacy of Division.

•Arguing that what is true of the whole must be true of the parts. (The opposite of the fallacy of composition: Object O has the
property P. Therefore all the parts of the object O have the property P.)

Men are, on average, taller than women. Therefore, Tim is taller than Maria Sharapova.

Tim would have to be taller than 188cm/6ft 2in to be taller than Sharapova: he’s not.

8. Equivocation.

•A key word is used in two or more senses in the same argument and the apparent success of the argument depends on the shift in
meaning.

Any law can be repealed by the proper legal authority. The law of gravity is a law. Therefore, the law of gravity can be
repealed by the proper legal authority.

When the two senses of ‘law’ (laws regulating human conduct vs. uniformities of nature) are made explicit, it is apparent that the first
premise is irrelevant, hence a fallacious argument.

And, showing that famous philosophers are not immune again, we see John Stuart Mill arguing that happiness is desirable:

“The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is
audible, is that people hear it… In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is
desirable, is that people do actually desire it… [T]his being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of,
but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good. ” John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism.

But ‘desirable’ is used in two different ways in this passage, to mean ‘can be desired’ (just like ‘visible’ means ‘can be seen’) and
‘worthy of being desired’.

9. Appeal to Popularity.

•Arguing that a claim must be true because lots of people believe it.

Essential Bible Blog’s Top 10 Reason the Bible is True:

 Reason 8. Leader Acceptance. A majority of the greatest leaders and thinkers in history have affirmed the truth and impact
of the Bible.

Reason 9. Global Influence. The Bible has had a greater influence on the laws, art, ethics, music and literature of world
civilization than any other book in history.

Perhaps the Bible is true, but the fact lots of people believe it to be so is irrelevant to whether it is or not. We should investigate and
evaluate their reasons for believing it, rather than taking the mere fact that they believe it as a reason to do so.

But … sometimes a consensus among properly informed people may be a fairly good guide to the truth of a claim: see the
circumstances in which an appeal to authority might not be fallacious.

10. Appeal to Tradition.

•Like appeals to popularity except the appeal is to how long something has been believed, rather than to the number of people who
have believed it

People have believed in astrology for a very long time, therefore, it must be true.

But all of the objections to arguments from majority belief apply here, too.

11. Appeal to Ignorance: Argumentum Ad Ignorantiam.

•The arguer asserts that a claim must be true because no one has proven it false, or that a claim must be false because no one has
proven it to be true.

Note: When we describe someone as ignorant, we often mean it as an insult. Here we use it to describe the situation in which we do
not know (are ignorant of) something. In this sense, the smartest of us are ignorant of quite a lot. (We don’t want any equivocation in
our use of the term ‘ignorant’).

There must be intelligent life on other planets: No one has proven there isn’t.

There isn’t any intelligent life on other planets: No one has proven there is.

Both claims assume that the lack of evidence for (or against) a claim is good reason to believe that the claim is false (or true).
Ignorance – in the sense of a lack of knowledge – features as part of the proof of the conclusion. But in general, the mere fact that a
claim has not yet been proven is not enough reason to think that claim is false.

However, are there some non fallacious appeals to ignorance?

a) If qualified researchers have used well-designed methods to search for something for a long time, without success, and it’s the kind
of thing people ought to be able to find, then the fact that they haven’t found it might constitute some evidence that it doesn’t exist.

b) Some practices (e.g. law – see week 6) require us to reject a claim until a certain standard of proof is met: the presumption that
defendants are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt for example.

12. Appeals to Emotion – e.g., pity, affection.

•An arguer attempts to evoke feelings of pity or compassion, when such feelings are not logically relevant to the arguer’s conclusion.

Student to Lecturer: I know I missed most of the lectures and all of my tutorials. But my family will be really upset if I fail this
course. Can’t you find a few more marks?

Daughter: Can we get a puppy?

Father: No.

Daughter: If you loved me, we’d get a puppy.

That would be an appeal to emotion, in this case love. Note that the persistent child might continue:

Daughter: A puppy would grow up and protect us. Can’t we get a puppy?
 Father: No.

Daughter: If you wanted to keep us safe you’d get a puppy! You don’t care about us!

That would be a strawman, not contemplated by the father or entailed by his actual view, and attacking that. Being able to spot the
common fallacies can be very useful in the home.

Remember, there are three species of fallacies. The Fallacies of Relevance sketched so far attempt to introduce premises that are
irrelevant to the conclusion.

Fallacies of Unacceptable Premises

Fallacies of Unacceptable Premises attempt to introduce premises that, while they may be relevant, don’t support the conclusion of
the argument.

13. Begging the Question.

•In philosophy, unlike in many other areas, ‘begging the question’ does not mean ‘raises a question which must be answered’. In
philosophy, when someone begs the question, they state or assume as a premise the very thing they are trying to prove as a
conclusion.

Arthur: God exists.

Barbara: How do you know?

Arthur: Because it says so in the Bible.

Barbara: How to you know what the Bible says is true?

Arthur: Because the Bible is divinely inspired. Everything it says is true.

The Bible could only be divinely inspired if God existed. So Arthur’s appeal to the Bible to prove the existence of God assumes the very
thing he’s trying to prove.

14. False Dilemma or False Dichotomy.

•Occurs when an argument presents two options and gives the impression that only one of them may be true, never both, and that
there are no other possible options.

Either Shakespeare wrote all the plays attributed to him, or Bacon did. There’s good reason to think Shakespeare didn’t
write all the plays attributed to him. Therefore, Bacon wrote all the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

It’s possible that Shakespeare didn’t write all of the plays attributed to him, but that doesn’t mean Bacon did: there are other
possibilities.

In the Shakespeare/Bacon case the false dilemma was explicit (either Shakespeare wrote all the plays … or Bacon did), but often the
dilemma is implicit.

If I spend all of the week partying, I won’t have time to study and I’ll fail.

If I spend all week studying, I’ll be over-prepared and stressed and I’ll fail.

So I’m going to fail either way. I might as well spend the week partying.

Here the dilemma is unstated – “The only options are to spend all week studying or to spend all week partying” – and once stated it
surely isn’t plausible: the student could spend some of the week studying and some of the week partying?

15. Decision Point Fallacy or the Sorites Paradox.

•Sometimes the conditions that make the use of a term appropriate vary along a continuum and there is no sharp cut off between
circumstances in which the term is correctly applied and those in which it is not.

If an arguer claims that because we cannot identify a precise cut-off or decision point, we cannot distinguish between correct and
incorrect uses of the term, they are arguing fallaciously.

One grain of wheat doesn’t make a heap. Suppose 1 million does. Take one away. Surely we still have a heap: if a million
makes a heap, surely 999,999 does too. One grain can’t turn a heap into a non-heap. Take another away. Surely we still
 have a heap: if 999,999 does, surely 999,998 does too. One grain … etc. Take another away. Surely we still have a heap ….
etc etc etc.

But if one grain doesn’t make a difference, then it seems that we will be forced to conclude that 1 grain does make a heap.
But that means we can’t talk about heaps of wheat at all: we don’t know when we can describe a collection of grains of
wheat as a heap and when we can’t.

At conception an embryo is not a person. At birth, a baby is a person. There is no non-arbitrary way of determining exactly
when the embryo became a person. Therefore, there is no moral difference between the embryo and the baby at birth.

But we can tell the difference between people who are bald and not bald, between heaps and non-heaps, and embryos and babies,
even if we can’t tell exactly when something stopped being one thing and became the other.

16. The Slippery Slope Fallacy.

•Arguers say that an innocent-looking first step should not be taken because once taken, it will be impossible not to take the next, and
the next, and so on, until you end up in a position you don’t want to be in.

Don’t get a credit card. If you do, you’ll be tempted to spend money you don’t have. Then you’ll max out your card. Then
you’ll be in real debt. You’ll have to start gambling in the hope of getting a big win. But you’ll normally lose. Then you’ll have
to steal money to cover your losses. Then your partner will leave you. And you won’t be able to feed the dog, and it’ll die.
And it would be bad if the dog died. So you mustn’t get a credit card.

Slippery Slope arguments are fallacious if it is possible to stop at one of the steps: couldn’t I get a credit card with a maximum, or
exercise a bit of control, or get the local animal protection society to help me feed the dog?

17. Hasty Generalisations.

•Arguer draws a general conclusion from a sample that is biased or too small.

The oldest woman in the world, Jeanne Calment (122 years, 164 days) smoked until her early 110s. Therefore smoking isn’t
really bad for you.

Andrew Wakefield claimed to have shown a correlation between the MMR vaccine, bowel disorders and autism, but –
among other flaws – his research focused on children already thought to have the conditions he claimed were caused by the
vaccine.

The claim that smoking carries significant health risks isn’t falsified by a single case and trials drawing population wide conclusions
must recruit representative study-populations.

18. Faulty Analogies.

•The conclusion of an argument depends upon a comparison between two (or more) things that are not actually similar in relevant
respects, or without pointing out how the two differ and why it does or does not matter. (See reasoning by analogy in Week 6).

I need a new car. My last three cars have all been reliable, and they were blue. So I’m going to buy a blue car.

A letter to the editor following a report someone had been turned away from an after-hours medical clinic because she
couldn’t pay for treatment for her feverish, vomiting child:

“Why do people attend private clinics for medical treatment with insufficient funds to cover fees? Do these same people go
to the petrol station, fill up, toss $5 out the window and say “I’ll be back with the rest later,” or perhaps after dining out one
evening, pay for the meal and promise to return next week, month or year to pay for the wine? I think not. The answer is
simple - don’t go to private clinics.”

Are visits to after-hours medical clinics with a sick child analogous to visits to a gas station or a restaurant?

19. And … the Fallacy Fallacy!

•The fallacy of inferring that merely because an argument contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.

Bob told me that I shouldn’t steal because everyone knows that stealing is wrong, but I recognised immediately that
argument contained the popularity fallacy, so I concluded that it was ok to steal the apple.

The conclusion of an argument may be true, even if the argument contains a fallacy. Finding a fallacy just means that the arguer needs
to look for other, better reasons in support of their conclusion.

Formal Fallacies

The third species of fallacy are Formal Fallacies. Some arguments are fallacious not because of their content – because of what they
say – but because of their form or structure. Any argument with these forms or structures will be invalid, no matter what content we
put into them.

Patrick will talk a little more about the standard forms or structures of arguments in weeks 2 to 4. The most familiar versions have
some number of premises, followed by a conclusion, and if they’re valid (Patrick will talk about that in week 3) the truth of the
premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion.

There are some common argument forms, however, which look quite like the valid versions, but which are not valid. Here we’re just
going to identify two formal fallacies that will come up later in the course.

20. Affirming the consequent.

Suppose I have a guard dog, Brutus, and I’m confident he will bark if an intruder comes into my house.

I might reason like this:

P1 If there’s an intruder, then Brutus will bark.

P2 Brutus hasn’t barked. Therefore,

C There's no intruder.

That’s valid: If it’s true that Brutus will bark if there’s an intruder, and if Brutus hasn’t barked, then there can’t be an intruder.

If the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true too.

But what if I reason like this:

P1 If there’s an intruder, then Brutus will bark.

P2 Brutus has barked.Therefore,

C There's an intruder.

That’s not valid. Why? Well the premises might be true, but the first premise doesn’t say that Brutus will bark if and only if there’s an
intruder.

The first premise can be true – that is it can be the case that Brutus will bark if there’s an intruder – even if Brutus occasionally barks
for other reasons as well.

Notice that you can’t respond here “Oh, the burglar might have fed Brutus tranquilized steak. That’s why he hasn’t barked. There is a
burglar!” That rejects the first premise (If there’s an intruder, Brutus will bark), and we’re seeing what happens if the premises are
true. So here, if the premises are true, the conclusion must follow.

21. Denying the Antecedent.

Suppose I hear barking and reason like this:

P1 If it barks, then it’s a dog.

P2 It's barking.

Therefore,

C It's a dog.

That’s valid. If the premises are true – if it’s true that if it barks it’s a dog and it barks – then the conclusion must be true too.
But what if I reason like this:

P1 If it barks, then it’s a dog.

P2 It's not barking.Therefore

C It isn't a dog.

That’s not valid. The first premise says that if something barks then it’s a dog (i.e., that only dogs bark), but it doesn’t say that every
dog barks. So we can’t be sure that the conclusion of this second argument is true even if the premises are true.

It might be true that something doesn’t bark (i.e., the antecedent is false, or denied, as the second premise says), but is a dog.

Summary of Week 1

So what have we done in this first week?

Essentially, we saw that logical and critical thinking aims to ensure that we have good reasons for our beliefs. And, we’re called upon to
exercise these skills constantly - to adopt and assess beliefs at every turn. However, we are prone to make logical and critical thinking
errors. We looked at some examples of the obstacles and reasoning mistakes which lead us into those errors:

 Common obstacles

 Confirmation bias

 Time-saving bias

 Framing problems

 Common fallacies

Some of these obstacles appear to be deep seated psychological tendencies to reason in certain ways. Our reasoning is infused with
‘affect’ or emotion. Our positive or negative affective reactions to people, things or ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious
thoughts, getting in first, to establish a framework in which subsequent reflection takes place. That sub-conscious affective response
both ‘frames’ our subsequent cognitive processing, and generates initial hypothesis or attitudes which we then tend to give a
privileged status when considering supporting or challenging evidence.

So it’s not surprising that those sorts of obstacles are hard to avoid – at least if we’re relying just on our own cognitive skills. We need
systems – like logic - and perhaps institutional practices – like science – to help us overcome them. We aim to develop good logical and
critical thinkers so in the coming weeks we will give you the tools (eg logic) to meet that responsibility.

So what have we done in this first week? We've seen an initial account of what it is to think logically and critically. Essentially, we saw
that logical and critical thinking tends to guarantee that we have good reasons for our beliefs. Those beliefs might be about small
things, such as whether a colleague is likely to be at a meeting, or bigger things, such as whether we should hire a young and promising
job candidate, or even bigger things, like the plausibility of the iatrogenic global warming hypothesis. And we saw that we're called
upon to exercise these skills constantly, to adopt and assess beliefs all the time.

But perhaps surprisingly-- at least I'm always surprised by it-- we turn out to be prone to making logical and critical thinking errors. And
we looked at some examples of the obstacles and reasoning mistakes which lead us to make those errors. Some of those obstacles
appeared to be deep seated psychological tendencies to reason in certain ways, to assign probability according to availability, how
easy it was to call an event or outcome to mind, to be led by framing to misinterpret evidence or reason for belief, and by our
tendency to prefer evidence which confirms an antecedent hypothesis, and the psychological research that gives a fascinating
explanation for at least some of these problems. Our reasoning is infused with emotion.

Our positive or negative emotional reactions to people, to things, to ideas, arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts,
getting in first to establish a framework in which subsequent reflection takes place. That subconscious emotional response both frames
our subsequent cognitive processing, our thinking, and generates initial hypotheses or attitudes which we then tend to give a privilege
status when considering, supporting, or challenging evidence. So it's not surprising that those sorts of obstacles are hard to avoid, at
least if we're relying just on our own cognitive skills. We need systems like logic, and perhaps institutional practises like science, to help
us overcome them. And remember that we've only looked at a sample of these obstacles. There are lots of them.
We talk about some others in the supporting material. And we've also seen through the week's articles and quizzes that there are
other types of common reasoning errors, the common fallacies-- things like the appeal to authority, the red herring, the slippery slope
fallacy, and so on. Those fallacies aren't called common for nothing. They really are very common. Keep an eye on the letters to the
editor in your local paper, on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, and you'll see them all the time. But although they're common, they
should be easier to avoid. We should be able to check for ourselves whether we're committing those errors.

And bear in mind that the good, logical, and critical thinker always considers the reasons for their beliefs. Always take responsibility for
evaluating the grounds for the beliefs you hold. We aim to give you the tools to meet that responsibility. Over the next three weeks,
we'll introduce a bit of logic that will help with that. At the end of week four, you'll be able to tell if arguments are good or bad. And in
weeks five to seven, we'll show you how this applies in science, morality, and law.
WEEK 2: THE BASICS OF ARGUMENTS

Start date:

This week we learn to identify the different parts of an argument and to present it in standard form.

2.1 INTRODUCING ARGUMENTS VIDEO

2.2 WHAT ARE STATEMENTS? ARTICLE

2.3 WHAT ARE ARGUMENTS? ARTICLE

2.4 HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR STATEMENTS AND ARGUMENTS? QUIZ

The Intricacies of Arguments

An argument is made by a combination of statements. How can you identify an argument when people do
not explicitly state every part of the argument, or use rhetorical moves to express their views?

2.5 WHAT IS THE STANDARD FORM OF AN ARGUMENT? VIDEO

2.6 MISSING PARTS ARTICLE

2.7 HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR STANDARD FORM AND MISSING PARTS? QUIZ

2.8 NON-ARGUMENTS ARTICLE

2.9 ARGUMENT OR NOT? QUIZ

2.10 POHUTUKAWA TREE CASE STUDY VIDEO

2.11 ARGUMENT OR NOT? DISCUSSION

Summary

Let's recap the important concepts covered in Week 2.

2.12 SUMMARY OF WEEK 2 VIDEO

2.1 Introduction arguments

As we discussed in the first week, when someone is trying to convince you of something you should think,
what reasons have I been given for believing what this person wants me to believe? You know what reasons
have been given to you when you can express them in what we call an argument. This is the fundamental
notion in critical thinking. An argument is simply a way to describe the way in which reasons support beliefs.
You shouldn't confuse it with the more common way of using the word argument, as in having an
argument, an angry exchange of diverging views. For us, an argument is a way of expressing and presenting
a view.

Briefly, an argument is a collection of statements, one of which, the conclusion, is supported by the other
ones, the premises. By the end of week four, you will have all required tools to evaluate whether an
argument is good or bad, using this diagram. This week, we will do preparatory work. You learn how to
identify arguments in the wild and reconstruct them in what we call a standard form. A standard form is a
nice way of showing what an argument looks like and allows you to clearly indicate the main point of the
argument, the conclusion, and the reasons, the premises, provided in support of the conclusion.

You'll sometimes have to do some interpretational work when you put arguments in standard form,
because, generally, people do not explicitly state every part of the argument or they use rhetorical moves
to express their views. In those cases, you'll have to reformulate parts of arguments when you put them in
standard form. You'll also need to be able to recognise when views are expressed as arguments. Sometimes
people express their views without providing reasons for them. So your first task this week is to understand
what arguments are and what they're made of, statements. I'll let you first read about statements and
arguments. And I'll come back to tell you how to put them in standard form.

Introducing arguments

An argument is simply a way to describe the way in which reasons support beliefs. This is the fundamental notion in critical thinking.

This week, we aim to help you to:

Distinguish between statements and non-statements.

Distinguish between arguments and non-arguments.

Identify the premises and conclusion of an argument.

Disambiguate sentences.

Discover the missing parts of an argument.

Reconstruct arguments in standard form.

2.2 What are statements?

To talk about statements, we’ll start with some examples of statements and non-statements.

Statements Non-statements

The trains are always late Welcome to the University of Auckland!

Tailgating is a top cause of car accidents How can I stop tailgating?

When the car ahead reaches an object, make sure you

I like bananas because they have no bones can count to four crocodiles before you reach the same
object.

Statements

So what makes something a statement?

 Definition: Statements are the kind of sentences that are either true or false.

As such, a statement is an assertion that something is or is not the case. A statement is true if what it asserts is the case,
and it is false if what it asserts is not the case.

For instance, the statement “The trains are always late” is only true if what it describes is the case, i.e., if it is actually
the case that the trains are always late. This is false in Auckland. Sometimes trains are on time, and sometimes they are
early. Someone may impatiently complain that the trains are always late to express their exasperation with the train
system, but strictly speaking what they say is false.

It is true that bananas have no bones, and I do like bananas, but I like bananas because they are tasty and healthy, not
because they have no bones. I would thus say something false if I said “I like bananas because they have no bones.”
That’s why “I like bananas because they have no bones” is a statement. It is the kind of sentence that is either true or
false – in this case false.

Non-statements

However, it doesn’t make sense to say that the sentence “Welcome to the University of Auckland!” is either true or
false. Wouldn’t you be puzzled if someone answered “true” in response to the greetings? It wouldn’t be an appropriate
answer. “How can I stop tailgating?” is a question; the sentence doesn’t express something that is either true or false.

Finally, “When the car ahead reaches an object, make sure you can count to four crocodiles before you reach the same
object.” is an advice. It advises you to make sure you can count up to four crocodiles (one crocodile, two
crocodiles,…,four crocodiles) before you reach the same object as the car preceding you. Try it! You’ll be a much safer
driver (that’s a true statement!).

More about Statements

So sentences that can be true or false are statements. Quite simple. But things can get more complicated. Let’s see
how.

Something can be a statement even if we don’t know whether it’s true or false. All that matters about statements is
that they are the kind of things that can be true or false, not that we know whether they are true or false. For instance:

 Ivan Slotvsky, the famous Irish builder of Madrid, is eating ham steaks and chutney at this very
moment.
True or false? I don’t know. But it is the kind of thing that could be true or false.

Here’s another one:

 Sometime in the next 39 years, I will have a creepy next door neighbour.

So far, so good. I’ve been lucky and I haven’t had a creepy next door neighbour. But the statement is true if it will be the
case some day that I have a creepy next door neighbour in the next 39 years. Otherwise, the statement is false. But I
don’t know whether the statement is true or false. Regardless, what matters is that this sentence is the kind of thing
that is true or false.

Another example:

 Vero is part of Promina

I have no idea what Vero or Promina are. But the sentence expresses something that is either true or false.

The same statement can be true on some occasions and false in others. That is, statements are not always true or
always false.

Here’s an example:

 I’m a Kiwi.

This statement is true of Tim, and it’s false of Patrick. Or the statement

 Patrick is a happily married man.

was false before Patrick got married, it is true now (while I’m typing this), and it may become false in the future.

Ambiguous Statements

One difficulty with statements is that they may sometimes express two different things. We call those ambiguous
statements. Here’s an example:

 John greeted everybody with a smile.

What are the two states of affairs that this statement may be describing? Try and answer this for yourself before
proceeding.

Answer:

1. John was smiling and then he greeted everybody. In this case, it’s true that he greeted everybody with a smile
- his smile.
2. Maybe there were smiling people and non-smiling people, and John only greeted the ones that were smiling.
3. The sentence “John greeted everybody with a smile” can thus be used to describe two different things. That’s
what makes it ambiguous.

You need to be careful about this. If you use ambiguous statements, you run the risk of having others misunderstand
what you are saying. In some cases, what others think you are saying may be very different from what you were trying
to express. For example, Tim is an early bird. He gets up early every morning, and always before his wife. Now, suppose
he tried to express this by saying:

 I beat my wife up everyday.

That would most certainly be taken the wrong way. Try and make sure you don’t use ambiguous sentences!
Questions and Commands

In the second list of non-statements, we had questions and commands, and those are typically not statements.

 If humans evolved from monkeys, how come we still have monkeys?

This question does not express something that can be true or false. It makes no sense to respond “true” or “false” when
you hear it. It’s not a statement. Notice that a part of the sentence is a statement, namely “humans evolved from
monkeys”. This is a false statement. Humans did not evolve from monkeys. Humans, monkeys, and apes in general,
have a common ancestor that is no longer around. Even though the question contains as a part a false statement, it
doesn’t make the question itself something that is true or false.

Sometimes, however, in a special context, the same question could be used to express a statement. Can you imagine a
context in which someone might use this question to express something that is true or false? If so, then presumably the
person would be using the question to express that it is false that humans evolved from monkeys, since there are still
monkeys. We call questions that are used to express statements rhetorical questions. When you see a rhetorical
question, you should always rephrase it as a statement. In our case, the statement would be something like this:

 Humans did not evolve from monkeys, because we still have monkeys.

Summary

In summary, statements are the kind of sentences that are either true or false. Sentences are ambiguous when they can
be used to express several statements. When you have an ambiguous sentence, you need to decide which statement it
is being used to express. Questions, commands and advice are typically not statements, because they do not express
something that is either true or false. But sometimes people use them rhetorically to express statements. We saw an
example of a question which by itself is not a statement, but can be used to express a statement. When you see
rhetorical questions, always rephrase them as statements.

2.3 What are arguments?

In the previous article, we discussed what statements are. Statements are the kind of sentences that can be true or
false. When someone is trying to persuade you to believe something, they will express this as a statement.

But how do you know if what they are trying to persuade you of is true or false? Unless they just want you to take their
word for it without further discussion—and you probably shouldn’t—they will give you reasons in support of their
views. Those reasons will also be expressed as statements. Together, all those statements form what we call
an argument. This course is all about developing skills to evaluate whether arguments are good or bad. We will talk
about good and bad arguments later. Before that, we need to be clear on what arguments are, and how to recognise
them.

 Definition: An argument is a group of statements some of which, the premises, are offered in support of
another statement, the conclusion.

You can think of the premises of an argument as reasons that are given in support of a view, which is expressed in the
conclusion of the argument.

Let’s see a very simple example of an argument:

Stan was driving his truck over the speed limit. He had no excuse for driving over the speed limit. Furthermore, he was
intoxicated. Therefore, Stan was breaking the law.

We can easily isolate the conclusion:

 Stan was breaking the law.

Notice that we do not include the word ‘therefore’ when we state the conclusion. The word ‘therefore’ is not part of
the statement that forms the conclusion.

All other statements are premises. We have:

 Stan was driving his truck over the speed limit.

 Stan had no excuse for driving over the speed limit.

 Stan was intoxicated.

The word ‘therefore’ is what we call a conclusion indicator. It is very common to use a conclusion indicator to stress the
part of an argument that is being argued for. Arguments can also have premise indicators. Conclusion and premise
indicators are words that are used to make clear which statements are premises and which statements are conclusions
in arguments. Here’s a list of the most common ones.

Conclusion indicators Premise indicators

Therefore Because

Thus Since

Hence Supposing that

Consequently Assuming that

Ergo Given that

Indicator words are not always present in arguments. You may have conclusions that are not accompanied by
conclusion indicators. But typically, the rule of thumb is that if you have a conclusion indicator, then the statement to
which it is attached is the conclusion of the argument. And likewise with premises.

When arguments are given to you in the wild, they’re not always presented in such a clear way. We will show you lots
of examples of arguments, and you will see that they quite often look very messy. This means that you will have to do
some work to identify the conclusion and the premises. And this is generally far from easy. Because of that, we will
represent arguments always in the same format, which we call the standard form of an argument.

2.5 What is the standard form of an argument?

You should now know what statements and arguments are. Basically, statements are sentences that are either true or
false. And arguments are ways of combining statements so as to make a point by providing premises, the reasons,
intended to support a conclusion. When you encounter arguments in the wild, it becomes difficult to isolate the
premises from the conclusion and to isolate sentences that are actually part of the argument. And that's why it's very
useful for us to agree on a systematic way of presenting arguments. And we'll do that before we can analyse them. We
call this a standard form. Before you start evaluating arguments, your first task will be to put them in standard form.

The standard form of an argument is a way of presenting the argument which makes clear which statements are
premises, how many premises there are, and which statements is the conclusion. In standard form, the conclusion of
the argument is listed last. A standard form looks like this-- premise 1, premise 2, and so on for as many premises as
there are-- therefore, conclusion. For example, here's a very simple argument presented in standard form. Premise 1--
I'm having a bad day today. Premise 2-- I only have bad days on Mondays. Therefore, conclusion-- today is Monday. To
illustrate why putting an argument in standard form is useful, let's see the kind of arguments you might encounter in
the wild-- for instance, on YouTube.

For this one, we've used an actor to protect the identity of the original. Hi. I'm Justin. I'm the author of the book Living a
Better Life. And I'm here to tell you my top three reasons for going vegan. Animals from factory farming spend their
entire lives in miserable conditions until the day they are slaughtered. Most won't ever feel the warmth of the sun on
their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they're loaded onto trucks, bound for the slaughterhouses. Their suffering
is unimaginable. Animals from factory farming are treated cruelly. Now, you might think that eggs are OK to eat because
after all, you don't need to slaughter chickens to eat their eggs. Wrong.

Chickens get their beaks cut off with a burning hot blade and with no painkillers. And half of the chickens on farms, the
cockerels, are slaughtered. The fact is, eggs come from hens that are treated cruelly-- all that so that you can enjoy
bacon and eggs. But I only eat fish, some people say. Well, that won't cut it either. The problem is that commercial
fishing is destroying and emptying our oceans. As a result of commercial fishing, 90% of large fish populations have
been exterminated in the past 50 years. When we put the argument in standard form, we have to isolate the
statements that form the conclusion and premises, and we have to reorder them appropriately.

The conclusion here was explicitly stated-- you should go vegan. And Justin clearly announced that he had three reasons
in support of his conclusion. But he seems to have given us many more than three-- or has he? Let's first try to isolate
the three main reasons Justin provided. The first one is about factory farming and the maltreatment of animals. Justin
gave some contextual information about factory farming and provided additional reasons to believe that factory
farming is cruel to animals. However, the reason which directly supports the conclusion is-- Animals from factory
farming are treated cruelly. The second reason Justin provided was about eggs, and the fact that they come from hens
that are also treated cruelly.

Again, he provided additional reasons as to why you should believe this. But the main reason directly used in support of
the conclusion is-- Eggs come from hens that are treated cruelly. For the third and final reason, we again have the same
pattern. Justin talked about the impact of commercial fishing on the oceans and backed up the claim with additional
reasons. But the main reason that directly supports the conclusion that you should go vegan is-- Commercial fishing is
destroying and emptying our oceans. We now have our three reasons and our conclusion. So now we can put the
argument in standard form. Premise 1-- animals from factory farming are treated cruelly. Premise 2-- eggs come from
hens that are treated cruelly.

Premise 3-- commercial fishing is destroying and emptying our oceans. Therefore, conclusion-- you should go vegan.
Call this the main argument. As we've seen, Justin provided reasons to believe each of the premises. Call those sub-
arguments. Now that we've isolated the main argument, the next step would be to look at each sub-agreement and put
them in standard form. We'll ask you to do this as an exercise. But I'd like to stress that it's very important for you to be
able to identify the main argument when you face arguments in the wild. First, identify the main conclusion and the
reasons that are provided to support it. Then work your way down to each sub-argument.

When you get to analyse sub-arguments, you will follow the same pattern. More about this later.

What is the standard form of an argument?

The standard form of an argument is a way of presenting the argument which makes clear which propositions are
premises, how many premises there are and which proposition is the conclusion. In standard form, the conclusion of
the argument is listed last.

In standard form, an argument is presented like this:

P1 Premise 1

P2 Premise 2

P3 And so on for as many premises as there are in the argument.Therefore,

C Conclusion
Example:

P1 I'm on leave this week.

P2 I never answer work emails when I'm on leave. Therefore,

C I'm not answering work emails this week.

2.6 Missing parts

Sometimes when people give you arguments, they will leave out parts of the argument. This may be because those
parts are things that we all know, or maybe they think they don’t need to state every single reason explicitly, or
maybe they have rhetorical reasons for leaving parts out.

If in some part of my argument, I need something simple like

 The Moon is not a planet.

I don’t really need to say this, because I know that you know this. And it would be pedantic or perhaps insulting to tell
you. And sometimes, it’s more effective to leave it out.

Here’s an example of an argument with missing parts, taken from the cabaret song Maybe This Time:

 Everybody loves a winner, so nobody loves me.

The conclusion of this argument is “nobody loves me”. Why? The only reason provided is that “everybody loves a
winner”, but something is missing.

What do you think is missing?

Answer: a premise is missing:

 I’m not a winner.

When the part of an argument that is missing is a premise, we call that statement a ‘suppressed premise’. The
argument in standard form, including the suppressed premise, is:

Notice how we put the second premise in brackets in the standard form to indicate that the premise is suppressed.

One word of advice about suppressed premises: be economical! Don’t add suppressed premises unless they’re really
obvious. You only want to include a suppressed premise in an argument when it is required for the argument, and it’s
obvious that it has been left out on purpose.

Sometimes, another part of an argument that may be missing is the conclusion. We then say that the argument has
a suppressed conclusion. An argument has a suppressed conclusion if it’s not explicitly stated. For example:

 Recently, whilst I was on sabbatical in Scotland, I thought I saw the Loch Ness Monster. Turns out that
all the sightings of the Loch Ness Monster are actually people mistaking logs for non-logs.

What do you think the conclusion is?

  I did not see the Loch Ness Monster.

You might have been tempted to say “the Loch Ness Monster does not exist”, but that would not be right, as the
premises do not seem to provide enough reason for that conclusion.

In standard form, the argument looks like this:

As above, we put the conclusion in brackets to indicate that it was suppressed.

You need to be careful when formulating the suppressed conclusion. You want to find a conclusion that matches the
reasons. You don’t want to put in a conclusion that wouldn’t be supported by the premises. This is not always easy, and
we’ll have a chance to come to examples with suppressed premises and conclusions.

2.8 Non-arguments

You can think of arguments as ways to gather information and to acquire new beliefs. But information is not always
given in the form of arguments. It might be that you’re reading some opinion piece in the newspapers, or maybe
you’re listening to talk-back radio, or you’re talking with your friends on some hot topic, and they’re not really trying
to make a point by using an argument. Sometimes people assert their beliefs without giving reasons; all they do is
tell you what they believe. But stating beliefs is not giving arguments!

Things that may look like arguments but are not, and are thus misconstrued as arguments, are explanations, reports,
instructions, and so on. Let’s look at some of those.

Explanations

 An explanation is a statement or collection of statements asserting why or howsomething is the case.

Like arguments, explanations are typically presented as collections of statements. In explanations, however, statements
are not presented as reasons to believe other statements; they are not presented as premises. Statements in
explanations are trying to make you understand something, not trying to convince you that you should believe it.

Here’s an example:

 In 2014, we introduced a new textbook in the Critical Thinking course taught at The University of Auckland,
and we negotiated with the publishers to have a discount for Auckland University students. It was agreed
with the publisher that the textbook would cost $95, but the book was listed at $130. When students
complained about the price, we called the publisher. Eventually, we understood what happened: the
textbook was more expensive than we expected because the person with whom we had made an
agreement on a reduced price for the University of Auckland had left the company, and the new employee
wasn’t aware of the agreement. At some point, the agreement was lost, and that’s why we didn’t get the
discount.
We gave an explanation to our students to make them understand why the textbook was sold at $130
instead of $95. We weren’t arguing that the book should be sold at $130. We instead gave an argument to
the publisher that they should reduce the price to $95 as negotiated and reimburse students. And they did.

Advice
Like explanations, advice is not an argument, even when expressed as a collection of statements.

Suppose Carol says:

 A good way to stop your dog from getting fleas is to spray them with cider vinegar.

With this advice, Carol isn’t arguing that we should spray our dogs with cider vinegar. (Don’t try it, it doesn’t work!) She
was just giving us a way of trying to get rid of the fleas. The advice, however, could be used as part of an argument,
since it is a statement. The argument could have as a conclusion that “you should spray your dog with cider vinegar”, as
in:

 Your dog has fleas, and a good way to get rid of fleas is to spray your dog with cider vinegar.
Therefore, you should spray your dog with cider vinegar.

But on its own, advice is not an argument.

Instructions

Instructions are not arguments either. Think about instructions to make a cake. You take flour, and then you put in an
egg, and then you put in some milk, and you throw the thing in the oven, and eventually you get a cake. The
instructions are not providing reasons for anything. Generally, instructions are not trying to make a point, they don’t
have conclusions, and therefore, are not arguments.

Argument or not?

It’s not always easy to spot arguments, and it’s not always clear whether or not we have arguments. Here’s an example,
taken from Bobby McFerrin’s song Don’t Worry, Be Happy:

 Listen to what I say. In your life, expect some trouble. When you worry, you make it double. Don’t worry. Be
happy.

Does this passage from the song contain an argument? If it did, we would have a conclusion, maybe something like:

 You shouldn’t worry.

Or maybe:

 You should be happy.

Notice that “don’t worry, be happy” is not a statement, so we need to rephrase it as a proper statement, i.e., as
something that is either true or false.

However, it’s not clear that this passage in the song really is trying to establish a point, though there’s this other part:

 When you worry, your face will frown, and that will bring everybody down. So don’t worry. Be happy. Don’t
worry. Be happy now.

Maybe there’s an argument here. An indication that we may be facing an argument is the indicator word so, a
conclusion indicator. And it seems formulated as reasons that you shouldn’t worry and that you should be happy. So
maybe there’s an argument:

 If you worry, then your face frowns. If your face frowns, that brings everybody down. So if you’re worried,
that brings everybody down. So you shouldn’t worry, and you should be happy.

The lesson to learn from this is that it is not always easy to identify arguments. Sometimes it looks as though some
information is presented as an argument when it is not. Sometimes when people try to express themselves, they are
trying to convince you of something, but they may not succeed in presenting their view as an argument. They may
express their views without providing reasons for believing their views.
2.10 Pohutukawa tree case study

We're seeing that arguments are ways to provide reasons for beliefs. In a way, they are also ways to gather new
information. But sometimes people will give you information without giving you an argument, and it can be quite
difficult in some cases to know if you have an argument or not. To illustrate this, today we'll use a case study. And it's a
story that happened here in Auckland. It involves Auckland transport, Auckland residents, and these Pohutukawa trees.
Now, you're probably wondering, what's so special about Pohutukawa trees? The Pohutukawa tree is a native New
Zealand tree. In summertime, it produces a magnificent crimson flower. Basically, the Pohutukawa tree is an iconic tree
in New Zealand that people love.

And when there are plans to cut down Pohutukawas to make place for concrete, well, people get upset. A two
kilometre long section of the motorway will be widened from three to four lanes, in each direction. There will also be
improvements to the motorway ramps in the Saint Luke's Road, Great North Road intersection, while the over bridge
spanning the motorway will be widened to benefit drivers, walkers, and cyclists. Why did they want to cut down the
trees? Firstly, to make way for the interchange upgrade. As you can see, the trees are in the way. Secondly, 54
submissions were discounted due to a technical error. The one that was selected involved cutting down the trees.

This answers the question by giving an explanation, not an argument. Explanations are also groups of statements. But
unlike arguments, they're not given to establish a point. Explanations are given to try and make you understand
something. They tell you why or how something is the case. They're not given to make you believe it. So when Auckland
Transport explained why the trees needed cutting down, they weren't making a point that the trees deserved the axe.
They were only explaining that a submission had been chosen in which the trees needed to be cut down, because they
were in the way. The local community was not happy with the council's decision, and they decided to contest it.

In manifesting their opposition to cutting down the trees, not everybody expressed their views by providing arguments.
I'm off to see a local cafe owner and seasoned protester. Hi, Lisa. It's a really cool little cafe you got here. We're talking
about the difference between arguments and non-arguments, and we thought we'd use your article to illustrate it.
Would you like to read it for us? Sure. Again, the Auckland Council has failed in its statutory duty to represent the
public, and protect our natural heritage. A secret meeting was held by Auckland Transport to tell the public, who were
not invited, that they had the right to fell six 80-year-old Pohutukawa trees, on Great North Road.

It may be true that they had the duties to protect the trees, but it doesn't mean that they have to protect those trees.
Yes, it does. The thing about the council, is it is controlled by law. And the thing is, the council do not believe they are
controlled by the law. They believe they make the law. But they have a statutory legal duty for any tree over a certain
age. And certainly, these Pohutukawa trees, at 80 years old, fall into protected trees. See, you've just given me an
argument to make me believe that they did fail in their duty. So I'd like to ask you, what was the intention behind that
piece?

Were you trying to provide reasons, or how were you trying to convey the information? I was trying to basically do what
I normally do, which is cause controversy. Because I'm a little bit like a catalyst. I like to run in, light the torch to the
firecracker, and then run out. There is a rhetorical way that you're using those statements to give the information, and
perhaps to get us to believe it. Yes. Well, I'm telling my truth. I'm trying to give people background information. I'm not
trying to get them to believe me.

I'm trying to say, here's a whole lot of little bits of information you might not know that will fill in your reason for
stopping them cutting down the trees. It's quite interesting to see that Lisa actually chose to give the information
without providing reasons as arguments, but she did have the arguments. And perhaps that was the right thing to do,
within the context of the letter to the editor in this journal. Other professors voiced their views by using arguments. In
response to residents' concerns, Auckland Council ultimately decided not to cut down the trees, and changed their
plans to preserve them. The lesson I'd like you to learn from all this is that it's not always easy to identify arguments.

Sometimes people express their views, and they fail to give arguments. Sometimes an explanation is all that's required
to express your view. In this class, though, from now on we will focus on arguments, because they provide us with the
patterns of reasoning which we can identify as being good or bad.
This video was inspired by a letter to the Editor that Lisa Prager published in The Ponsonby News, in February 15,
2015:

Again the Auckland Council has failed in its statutory duty to represent the public and protect our natural heritage. A
secret meeting was held last month by Auckland Transport to tell the public (who were not invited) that they had the
right to fell six 80-year-old pohutukawa trees on Great North Road, opposite MOTAT, in order to widen the road for
increased car use projected in 2026. Meanwhile the chainsaw gangs gag to be let loose as they were in Western Springs
Stadium and in behind the zoo, and the local community board wrings its hands powerless to stop this CCO (Council Un-
controlled Organisation)! Contrary to Auckland becoming the world’s most livable city, the build and natural
environment struggles to survive while greedy developers enjoy corporate welfare at the public’s expense. A
Widespread Auckland rates revolt is one way to get our councilors to listen to us.

2.11 Argument or not?

The Pohutukawa tree case video is inspired by a letter to the editor for a local newspaper. Patrick claims that the
letter does not contain an argument.

Do you agree with Patrick? Why or why not?

If you agree, then tell us how you would present your argument. OR
If you don’t agree and think that there is an argument in the letter, then try and write it in standard form.

Reply to at least one other person’s post and try to provide constructive comments and feedback.

Here’s the letter again:

 Again the Auckland Council has failed in its statutory duty to represent the public and protect our natural
heritage. A secret meeting was held last month by Auckland Transport to tell the public (who were not
invited) that they had the right to fell six 80-year-old pohutakawa trees on Great North Road, opposite
MOTAT, in order to widen the road for increased car use projected in 2026. Meanwhile the chainsaw gangs
gag to be let loose as they were in Western Springs Stadium and in behind the zoo, and the local community
board wrings its hands powerless to stop this CCO (Council Un-controlled Organisation)! Contrary to Auckland
becoming the world’s most livable city, the build and natural environment struggles to survive while greedy
developers enjoy corporate welfare at the public’s expense. A Widespread Auckland rates revolt is one way to
get our councilors to listen to us.

2.12 Summary of Week 2

This week, we've covered the basic topics needed to evaluate arguments. Now you know precisely what we mean by an
argument. An argument is a group of statements, some of which, the premises, are offered in support of others, the
conclusions. And you also know how to put arguments in standard form, and it looks like this, premise one, premise
two, and so on for as many premises as there are in the argument, therefore conclusion. To put an argument in
standard form can be a difficult task, as arguments may be badly presented with missing information, rhetorical moves,
ambiguous sentences, or sub-arguments. Sometimes people fail to express their views as arguments, even though they
succeed in telling you what they think.

I hope you see the importance of having a systematic way of presenting arguments. When you have to evaluate
arguments, your first task will always be to put it in standard form, as well as the sub-arguments. Now that we have this
in place, we can start showing you how to evaluate arguments. We'll do that in the following two weeks. Next week,
we'll focus on the logical analysis of arguments, and we'll talk about the kind of support premises give to conclusions,
and whether they achieve it.
In week four, we will see how to evaluate the content of the premises and see how to give a global evaluation of
arguments, and that's when you'll be able to say whether arguments are good or bad. For now, make sure you practise
your basic skills of putting arguments in standard form. We've provided you with several examples of varying difficulty.
I'll see you next week to talk about logic.

So what have we done in this week?

We’ve defined an argument as a group of statements, some of which, the premises, are offered in support of others,
the conclusions. Very often these may be presented clumsily, with missing information, rhetorical moves, or ambiguous
sentences. That’s why we have learnt to put arguments in standard form:

To put an argument in standard form can be a difficult task but we hope you see the importance of having a systematic
way of presenting arguments. When you have to evaluate arguments, your first task will always be to put it in standard
form – as well as its sub-arguments. And now that we have this in place, we can start showing how to go ahead and
evaluate arguments. We’ll do that in the following two weeks.
WEEK 3: LOGIC AND ARGUMENTS

Start date:

Introduction

This week we look at the various ways in which the premises of an argument can succeed or fail to
provide logical support for the conclusion.

3.1 LOGIC AND ARGUMENTS VIDEO The Basics of Logic

Did you know that arguments can succeed logically even though the statements that form them are entirely rubbish!
How can that be?

3.2 DEDUCTIVE VS NON-DEDUCTIVE ARGUMENTS ARTICLE

3.3 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF GOD VIDEO 3.4 THE VALIDITY AND STRENGTH OF ARGUMENTS
ARTICLE

3.5 THE PRINCIPLE OF CHARITY ARTICLE

3.6 DECIDING WHETHER ARGUMENTS SUCCEED LOGICALLY QUIZ

3.7 CREATING STRONG ARGUMENTS DISCUSSION

Summary

Let's recap the important concepts covered in Week 3.

3.8 SUMMARY OF WEEK 3 VIDEO

3.1 Logic and arguments

0:14Skip to 0 minutes and 14 secondsLast week, you learned the basics of critical thinking. The fundamental concept is
that of an argument. You can now identify arguments in the wild, and you can put them in standard form. This is the
first step in the evaluation of arguments. In the next two weeks, we will start evaluating arguments properly. Crudely,
this week is about the logical aspect of arguments and next week about the content. That's because there are two ways
in which arguments can fail. Either by having a bad logical structure or by having false premises. And it's very important
to be able to separate the two.

0:51Skip to 0 minutes and 51 secondsThis week because we are doing logic, it's important for you to be able to extract
from the content of the premises. Arguments can be logical even though the statements that form them are entirely
rubbish. Logic is not about the content of sentences. It's about how they are related together. Remember that premises
are there to provide support for the conclusion. Well, logic is about investigating whether or not the support is
adequate, irrespective of the truth of the premises. You only inspect the truth of the premises once you know that the
logic is adequate. If the logic is not adequate, it doesn't matter what the premises are about. They won't provide
adequate support for the conclusion.

1:35Skip to 1 minute and 35 secondsThis will be our topic this week, whether arguments have adequate logic. More
specifically this week, you need to learn the important difference between deductive and non-deductive arguments.
And then learn how each kind of argument can succeed logically. Deductive arguments succeed logically when they are
valid. And non-deductive arguments succeed logically when they are strong. You also need to learn about the principle
of charity and learn how to apply it when you're evaluating arguments. To be charitable is to treat others as intelligent
persons and take the best form of their arguments. Failure to be charitable is the source of critical and logical mistakes
that are very common.

2:19Skip to 2 minutes and 19 secondsLearning to be charitable gets you a long way to becoming a good logical and
critical thinker. This week, I'm talking to John Bishop about the importance of the distinction between deductive and
non-deductive arguments as it plays out in the philosophy of religion. You should first read the article on deductive and
non-deductive arguments before you watch the interview.

In arguments, premises are offered to provide support for the conclusion. Logic is about whether or not the support
is adequate. If the logic is not adequate, it doesn’t matter what the premises are about; they won’t provide adequate
support for the conclusion. The first step in evaluating arguments is thus to make sure they succeed logically.

More specifically, you need to learn the important difference between deductive and non-deductive arguments. And
then learn how each kind of argument can succeed logically.

This week, we aim to help you to:

 Distinguish between deductive and non-deductive arguments.

 Distinguish between valid and invalid deductive arguments.

 Distinguish between strong and weak non-deductive arguments.

 Apply the principle of charity in reconstructing arguments.

3.2 Deductive vs non-deductive arguments

Not every argument is offered with the same intention. Sometimes arguments are offered to prove that something is
definitely the case; other times they are offered to show that something is likely or very likely to be true, while
leaving it possible that the conclusion may, improbably, turn out to be false.

Before you can tell whether the premises of an argument provide appropriate support for the conclusion, you need to
decide which standards to use in your evaluation, and this depends on whether you have an argument of the first or the
second kind. The topic for this segment is the distinction between the two, and we will express it as a difference
between deductive and non-deductive arguments.

Remember that arguments are groups of statements some of which, the premises, are offered in support of others, the
conclusions. There are two kinds of support that premises can give for a conclusion: deductive and non-deductive.
When the premises of an argument support the conclusion deductively, we say that the conclusion follows deductively
from the premises. Deductive support is the strongest kind of support that premises can give to a conclusion. When the
premises of an argument support the conclusion to some significant degree, but do not support it deductively, we say
that they support it non-deductively. In this case, the argument is non-deductive.

If you want, you can think of successful deductive arguments as providing conclusive support for their conclusions,
assuming the truth of their premises, whereas successful non-deductive arguments give probable, but not conclusive,
support for their conclusions.

Let’s start with deductive arguments.

 Definition: A deductive argument is an argument for which the premises are offered to provide logically
conclusive support for its conclusion.

If a deductive argument succeeds in providing conclusive support for its conclusion, it would be absurd for the premises
to be true and the conclusion false. The kind of support intended in deductive arguments is infallible, inevitable,
necessary, “bomb-proof”…

There are phrases people may use in arguments to indicate that they are deductive.

Deductive argument indicators

it necessarily follows that …

it logically follows that …

it absolutely, necessarily, or certainly follows that …

Here are some examples of deductive arguments:

 Every witch is a widow. So it necessarily follows that every witch is female.

 It’s good to read the Bible on as many days of your life as possible. Therefore, any day is a good day to start
reading the Bible every day.
 The number of chicks in the pen is less than 10. The number of chicks in the pen is more than 6. It’s not 7 and
it is not 9. The number of chicks in the pen is an integer, because you can’t really have half a chick in the pen.
Certainly, then, the number of chicks in the pen is 8.

A good historical case of deductive reasoning goes back to Euclid. Euclid is the author of The Elements, thirteen books
collating just about everything the Greeks knew in geometry. Starting from a list of postulates—as premises in
arguments—Euclid shows how to prove important theorems, such as the famous Pythagorean Theorem: the square of
the hypotenuse of a triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides (you might remember this from
the equation c2=a2+b2c2=a2+b2):
The way Euclid proved the Pythagorean theorem was a very good instance of deductive reasoning. Euclid argued in such
a way that if all his postulates were true, then the Pythagorean theorem must also be true, with no room for doubt. If
you change the postulates then the Pythagorean theorem may no longer be true. But that doesn’t change the fact that
Euclid’s argument from his five postulates—as premises— to the Pythagorean Theorem offers conclusive support for its
conclusion. Euclid was applying deductive reasoning to geometry.

Many philosophers and scientists over the centuries have tried to mimic Euclid’s style of reasoning by providing
deductive arguments for their views. However, such standards for arguments cannot always be met successfully. And
that’s where non-deductive arguments come into play.

 Definition: A non-deductive argument is an argument for which the premises are offered to provide probable
– but not conclusive – support for its conclusions.

In a good non-deductive argument, if the premises are all true, you would rightly expect the conclusion to be true also,
though you would accept that it may be false.

If you like, think of non-deductive arguments in terms of bets. If the premises of a good non-deductive argument are
true, then you would be happy to bet that the conclusion is also true. The argument would have provided you with the
confidence that your bet is a sensible one, but – since it is a bet, after all – you would accept that the conclusion may
turn out false and you may lose.

As with deductive arguments, there are phrases people may use to indicate that arguments are non-deductive.

Non-deductive argument indicators

it is likely that …

it is probable that …

it is plausible that …

Here are some examples of non-deductive arguments.

 It’s cloudy today, so there’s a high probability that it will rain today.
 The greediest person who was left alone in the room is Aunt Mary. Chances are that Aunt Mary is the one
who stole the apple tart.
 Every observed witch is a widow, so it’s likely that every witch is a widow.
  Only all the observed wizards that we’ve seen so far were widowers. So the next one we expect to be a
widower.

To indicate that an argument is non-deductive in standard form we write “Therefore, probably” as in:

Now, this whole discussion raises a further question: how are we to decide whether arguments are deductive are non-
deductive?

This is a difficult question. Part of the difficulty is that the answer varies with context. Mathematicians only accept
deductive arguments, because they are after certain knowledge. Mathematicians are not going to accept arguments
that are merely strong. They want deductive arguments. But in a court of law, we cannot only expect deductive
arguments. It would be much too demanding and we would almost never be able to put criminals in jail. Instead, cases
have to be established beyond reasonable doubt, so that we are very confident in our conclusions, even though we are
aware that we might be wrong. We need to strike the right balance, as we don’t want it to be too easy to put people in
jail either.

Part of the answer also lies in the principle of charity. The idea is quite simple. Most people are not aware of the
distinction between deductive and non-deductive arguments, and they may try and prove things (deductively) when a
non-deductive argument would be much more suitable. In that case, the principle of charity tells you to treat the
argument as being non-deductive.

3.3 Arguments for and against the existence of God

0:14Skip to 0 minutes and 14 secondsIt's a great pleasure to introduce you to my colleague and good friend, John
Bishop. John, you're a philosopher of religion. Can you tell us what philosophy of religion is about? Well, one thing
philosophers of religion are very interested in is whether it's justifiable for people to commit themselves to the truth of
their religious beliefs. And many philosophers would say that that's only justifiable if they've got good reasons for them.
And in order to have good reasons, they should have arguments which show that their religious beliefs are true. And of
course, when we apply this to the religions that are founded on belief in God, it's all about arguments for and against
God's existence.

0:57Skip to 0 minutes and 57 secondsOK, so then how does the distinction between deductive and non-deductive
arguments play out in this kind of context? Well, we find arguments of both types. Perhaps I can illustrate that, first of
all by thinking about arguments for God's existence. Now, one argument is called the cosmological argument. And
there's a version of it that's recently been revived from mediaeval Islamic theology by the American philosopher,
William Lane Craig. It's called the Kalam cosmological argument. And it's possible to state it very easily in standard form.
It goes like this-- everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the
universe has a cause of its existence.

1:52Skip to 1 minute and 52 secondsSo what kind of challenge might one propose against this argument? Well, given
that it's a deductive argument, one might question whether it really is the case that everything-- literally everything that
begins to exist has a cause of its existence. Possibly that applies only to things within the universe and not to the
universe itself. So that's one possible challenge. Another possible challenge might be to say, well, yes, I think the
argument does succeed. But does it really establish the existence of God? The cause of the universe is something
tremendous, but it does it have to be God? And actually, that gives me an opportunity to bring in a non-deductive
argument, which is known as the fine-tuning argument.

2:39Skip to 2 minutes and 39 secondsThe fundamental physical constants of the universe are within a very narrow
range that is required if the universe is going to be capable of supporting life. The best explanation for this phenomenon
is that those values were set by an intelligence who was acting for a purpose that required the existence of life. And
therefore, given that that is the best explanation, it is probably true that the universe has an intelligent designer. OK,
and because it's a non-deductive argument, it leaves out the possibility that God may not exist, I suppose. Because it's a
non-deductive argument, it doesn't guarantee that God exists, because it allows us to say that it might, perhaps, be an
amazing coincidence-- a matter of chance.

3:44Skip to 3 minutes and 44 secondsAnd that is not ruled out by the argument. So that raises the question, are there
are arguments against the existence of God? Yes, there certainly are. And we can find examples amongst those kinds of
arguments as the difference between deductive and non-deductive arguments. Now, one very common argument
against the existence of God is the argument from evil. And it goes like this-- if God exists, God is both all powerful and
perfectly good. If God is all powerful, God is able to prevent any evil he wishes to prevent. If God is perfectly good, God
wishes to prevent any evil he can prevent. Therefore, if God has both those properties, there is no evil. But we know
from experience that evil exists.

4:44Skip to 4 minutes and 44 secondsHence, it follows that God does not exist. Theists, of course, theist philosophers
have objected to this argument by saying it doesn't succeed, because it leaves out the possibility that God may be
prepared to cause or permit some forms of evil in order to achieve really important goods that would not be achievable
otherwise. But that puts into doubt the deductive version for the argument from evil. That's right. So the atheist
philosophers, however, responded by saying, If an all-powerful and perfectly good God exists, there are no pointless
evils. Probably, there are pointless evils. Therefore, probably there is no all-powerful and perfectly good God. We can
find plenty of instances of evil which seem to be pointless. Like what?

5:49Skip to 5 minutes and 49 secondsAn example comes from an article by William Rowe that has been much
discussed, is of a fawn who's caught in a forest fire and is badly burned, but takes a long time to die in agony over
several days from these burns. And certainly, when we consider an evil like that, it seems inconceivable to us that it
could have any purpose or point that might justify it. Now, of course, we can't absolutely rule out the possibility that it
has some completely unknown purpose to us. It's just on the basis of what we know, it's very probable that it doesn't.

6:29Skip to 6 minutes and 29 secondsAnd that, then, gives us reason for saying that very probably, there are pointless
evils, and therefore, very probably, a God who, if he existed would prevent pointless evils, doesn't exist. OK, so you've
given us examples in the philosophy of religion for arguments both for the existence of God and against the existence of
God. And for each kind of arguments, we had deductive and non-deductive arguments. But I suppose it's not only for
deep questions like the existence of God that the distinction is important. Is that right? I think that is right.

7:08Skip to 7 minutes and 8 secondsI mean, what we've seen in philosophy of religion is that it's important for people
to think carefully about what they're trying to achieve with their arguments, whether they're attempting to provide an
argument strong enough to guarantee the conclusion, or whether what they're trying to do is provide premises that will
make it cogent to think that the conclusion is probably, or highly probably, true. And I agree with you. I think that's
something that people ought to consider in many different contexts, not just in philosophy of religion.

In this video, John Bishop and Patrick discuss various arguments for and against the existence of God, with an
emphasis on the distinction between deductive and non-deductive arguments.

3.4 The validity and strength of arguments

When evaluating arguments, we have two main questions to ask:

1. Do the premises provide enough logical support for the conclusion?

2. Are the premises true?

In this segment, we’ll discuss how to answer the first question. As we mentioned, the answer to this question depends
on whether the argument is deductive or non-deductive.

Validity applies to deductive arguments, strength applies to non-deductive arguments.

Let’s start with deductive arguments and validity.

 Definition: A valid argument is a deductive argument that succeeds in providing decisive logical support.

A valid argument is thus a deductive argument – an argument that attempts to establish conclusive support for its
conclusion – that succeeds.

 Definition: An invalid argument is a deductive argument that fails in providing conclusive support.

For deductive arguments, you answer “yes” to the question “Do the premises provide enough logical support for the
conclusion?” if the argument is valid, and you answer “no” if otherwise.

Take the following deductive argument:

 Patrick’s jeans are blue, therefore, Patrick’s jeans are coloured.

Is it possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false? If my jeans are blue, then they have a colour. If
they have a colour, then they’re coloured. Hence, it is impossible for the premise (Patrick’s jeans are blue) to be true,
and the conclusion (Patrick’s jeans are coloured) to be false. Therefore, the argument is valid.

How about this one?

 If you throw a dice, either it lands on six or it doesn’t. So the dice has a 50% chance of landing on six.

Some people believe that, but this is an invalid argument. What is the probability for a dice to land on six? There are six
faces and the dice is likely to land on any of them. Since six only shows on one face, there’s only a one out of six chance
that the dice will land on six. And one out of six is a lot less than 50%. It is thus possible for the premise of the argument
to be true, but the conclusion false.

Arguments can be valid even if they are rubbish:

 If there is a purple elephant in the hall, then I am a giant turkey. There is a purple elephant in the hall.
Therefore, I’m a giant turkey.

This argument is nonsensical, but it’s valid. If the premises were true, the conclusion would be guaranteed to be true.
You need to be careful here. ‘Valid’ does not necessarily mean good or bad. It just means succeeding in establishing
conclusive support for its conclusion. Of course, the premises of this argument are false. But claiming that an argument
is valid is not to claim that the premises are true. Validity is about succeeding in providing conclusive support for the
conclusion, if the premises were true.

For non-deductive arguments, we don’t talk about valid and invalid arguments, we talk instead about strong and weak
arguments.

 Definition: A strong argument is a non-deductive argument that succeeds in providing probable, but not
conclusive, logical support for its conclusion. A weak argument is a non-deductive argument that fails to
provide probable support for its conclusion.

If an argument is weak, you’d be better off throwing a coin to know if the conclusion is true, and that’s far from
succeeding in providing reasons for a conclusion. So if the conclusion is unlikely to be true when the premises are true,
then the argument is weak. Game over.

But how are we to decide when an argument is strong and not weak?

The answer to this question is contextual. As a lecturer, my standards are very strict. I’m extremely pedantic, and I’m
going to point out every mistake you made. My goal is to make sure that you learn from your mistakes. But if I do that
when I’m at a party with my friends, I would not be very popular, now would I? I need to change my standards there.
When I’m in the court of law, I need to have strong standards, beyond reasonable doubt. So establishing that an
argument is strong in court is quite demanding. We want to minimise the mistakes we make.
Let’s try with some examples. Strong or weak?

 97% of vegetarians are healthy. Madison is a vegetarian. Therefore, Madison is probably healthy.

If the premises are true, what are the chances that Madison is healthy? 97%! She might not be. She might be amongst
the 3% that are not healthy, but it’s quite unlikely. So if the premises are true, it’s very likely that the conclusion is also
true—but it may be false. Hence, this argument is strong.

 Bailey’s father is a plumber, so Bailey’s father has a van.

I think this one is also strong. Here’s my reasoning. Being a plumber is the kind of job that requires you to go around
with tools, and tools that are messy and get dirty and everything, and you don’t want to put it in a nice little car; you
need space. In my experience, plumbers typically have vans. So then it would be quite reasonable to expect Bailey’s
father to have a van if he’s a plumber.

3.5 The principle of charity

Simply put, the principle of charity tells you to treat other people as intelligent people. If you treat people as being
intelligent, you will do a better job at evaluating their arguments.

To illustrate the principle of charity, suppose you’re given this argument:

 Alex: “The human race has managed to land somebody on Mars and split the atom, therefore, we should be
able to do something simpler, like redistributing the world’s substantial food supplies so that the poor get
plenty.”

Here is an uncharitable way to evaluate the argument: the first premise is false. We haven’t managed to land somebody
on Mars. Since it has a false premise, the argument couldn’t be either sound nor cogent. So it’s a bad argument. Game
over.

That’s uncharitable to Alex, because everybody knows that the human race has managed to land somebody, not on
Mars, but on the Moon. Surely Alex also knows that, and must have made a mistake. Instead of dealing with the
argument as if it was about Mars, do a charitable interpretation in which you make the simple correction.

And then with this charitable reading, the argument may be a cogent one:

 The human race has managed to land somebody on the Moon and split the atom, therefore, we should be
able to do something simpler, like redistributing the world’s substantial food supplies so that the poor get
plenty.

The principle of charity is important when you have suppressed information in arguments.

Suppose we give you this argument and ask you to evaluate it:

 Quinn eats regularly at McDonald’s, so Quinn doesn’t care about the environment.

There’s obviously a suppressed premise here. And that premise would be linking Quinn eating at McDonald’s and not
caring about the environment.

In cases like this in which you have a choice, how do you decide what premise to add?

You should:

1. Use whatever evidence you can get about the arguer’s intentions from the stated premises, conclusion and
context.

2. Apply the Principle of Charity:

When faced with an argument which has missing parts, you should reconstruct it in as charitable a way as possible. If
you can avoid it, you shouldn’t add premises that are obviously false - you should add the most plausible premise that
will do the job. And you should add premises which help to link the stated premises to the conclusion in a logical
manner.

Coming back to Quinn, here’s a candidate for a suppressed premise:

With this premise, the argument is valid, but it is unsound, because the suppressed premise as formulated here is false.
It may very well be that some people care a lot about the environment, yet have a weakness for McDonald’s. Maybe
they own an electric car, and go out of their way to recycle as much as they can, and so on. It may be that some people
care a lot about the environment, but indulge in some McDonald’s once in a while.

Following the instruction above, we should avoid adding a false premise, if we can.

Here’s a more charitable option:

First, I made the choice to treat the argument as non-deductive. Although there isn’t all that much information as to
whether the argument is meant to be deductive or non-deductive, it seems more charitable to take it as the kind of
argument that tries to provide strong reasons for believing the conclusion, but is not conclusive.

It would be quite hard, if possible at all, to give a valid argument with the conclusion that Quinn doesn’t care about the
environment based on the fact that Quinn eats regularly at McDonald’s. Hence, the argument stands a better chance if
we treat it as a non-deductive argument.

To treat the argument as being non-deductive also allows us to use a less ambitious suppressed premise. Instead of
talking about all people, we talk about most people, making it explicit that we know some people may care about the
environment even though they eat at McDonald’s, as per our considerations above.

Furthermore, this suppressed premise stands a better chance of being true, attesting to our attempt at choosing a
suppressed premise which does support the conclusion without being obviously false.

Now that we have a charitable reconstruction of the argument, what do you think? Do you think that this is a good
argument? Is it cogent? I’ll leave this for you to decide.

The point is that with this suppressed premise, you’ll have to come up with better justifications for your judgment. If
you succeed, then you’ll have done a good job at showing that this is a bad argument, because we’ve applied the
principle of charity in trying to figure out what its missing part was.

Here’s another example, this time with a suppressed conclusion:

 There are lots of known cases of discrimination against gay academics that are out in their work environment.
Do you really think that it’s safe to be out?
What is the conclusion? Here, it is formulated as a rhetorical question. So we need to reformulate it when writing the
standard form of the argument.

We have options again. Here’s one:

But this reformulation of the argument, treating it as being deductive, makes it invalid. It is actually true that there are
known cases of discrimination against gay academics. A simple Google search will give you some examples.

But this doesn’t guarantee that it’s unsafe for all gay academics to be out in their work environment. In New Zealand,
Canada, most of Europe, and a whole lot of countries, it’s actually just fine for gay academics to be out in their work
environment. So that option would make the argument bad.

Can we be more charitable? Try this one:

Now, we treated the argument as being non-deductive, and we gave a conclusion that is less ambitious, but yet seems
to reflect what was intended in the original argument. The argument might still be a bad argument, and again I leave
this for you to make up your mind about it, but by being charitable, we have formulated the conclusion in a way that
gives it a better chance, and that’s our job as critical thinkers.

Notice that the principle of charity has implications on whether we treat arguments as being deductive or non-
deductive. As a rule of thumb, the principle of charity tells you to treat arguments as being non-deductive, unless the
intention of the argument is clearly deductive.

In fact, most people do not know the distinction between deductive and non-deductive arguments, and you will give
them a better chance of succeeding in giving good arguments if you treat them as non-deductive.

Maybe they can’t prove to you their claims beyond doubt, however, they may have reasons that provide strong
support. Now that you know the distinction, be charitable and take arguments to be non-deductive when it benefits the
arguer. You’ll have to work harder to show that their argument is bad, but you’ll do better work!

Why be so nice?

There’s got to be a limit to this, of course. You don’t want to turn some drongo into Einstein. So there’s a limit to what
you’re prepared to put into their arguments. You’re trying to work out what their argument is, not what the best
possible argument for the position they’re running is.

Still, there are several reasons to be charitable. For one, if you actually believe the conclusion of the argument, you
want the argument to make a good case for it. If you like the argument, then you’ll benefit from giving it a strong
interpretation.

But more importantly – especially if you don’t believe the conclusion – you are better off attacking a stronger version of
the argument. If you’re in a debate with someone and you attack a version of their argument which isn’t as strong as it
could be, the person will just say: “That wasn’t what I meant. You’re not attacking my actual argument, you’re
caricaturing my argument.” So you won’t have got anywhere.
This, by the way, is related to what we call the Strawman fallacy, which consists of distorting or misinterpreting
someone’s view so that it can easily be attacked.

Now, there is a positive message from the Strawman fallacy. And that is just a note that what’s wrong with the
strawman strategy from our point of view is that it isn’t truth conducive. It doesn’t move us toward truth, because you
just rebut an argument that probably no one took very seriously.

If you can show that even the best version of your opponent’s argument is false, then you’ve made some progress.
Quite often, what you see in a good argument is an opponent actually improving the position he or she is going to
attack.

So you see things which say: so and so gives the following arguments for their position. There are some pretty obvious
problems with it. But I can see how they would fix them if they’ve noticed. And so I’m going to fix the arguments for
them. I am also assuming that they would have gone along with these fixes, as they are intelligent people. Sometimes,
they don’t, of course.

Then once you’ve got the argument as good as it can be, bearing in mind, you’re trying to evaluate their argument, not
yours, you then say that even when repaired charitably, the argument is flawed in the following ways.

Then you’ve really shown something, namely that the best version of the argument won’t work. Showing that a
hopeless version is bad, let alone a version that’s not even as good as the one they’ve advanced, doesn’t help.

Since our interest is in arriving at truth rather than simply winning arguments, then you should be charitable.

3.7 Creating strong arguments

 Can you make up an argument involving percentages which is deductive, rather than non-deductive?

 Can you think of a reason why we might sometimes be interested in how strong an argument is without being
particularly worried (at the time) about whether the premises are true?

3.8 So what have we done this week?

0:14Skip to 0 minutes and 14 secondsI hope you've enjoyed my discussion with John Bishop on the distinction between
deductive and non-deductive arguments. It illustrates well how the critical thinking skills you're learning in this class are
central to debates and philosophy. Of course, the scales are not only useful when you think about deep issues like the
existence of God. You need the same skills for any kind of argument you encounter on a daily basis. Let me emphasise
once more how important the principle of charity is for a critical thinker. To be charitable is to treat others as
intelligent. If you're charitable, you'll do a much better job at evaluating arguments. And this is most important if you
don't agree with someone's view.

0:58Skip to 0 minutes and 58 secondsYou'll do a much better job if you can show that the best version of their
argument fails. It might be easier to show that an argument is bad when you're not charitable, but then your evaluation
is worthless. Charity is also important when deciding if arguments are deductive or non-deductive. As a rule of thumb,
treat argument as being non-deductive, unless the intention is clearly deductive. Most people don't know the
distinction between the two and they would benefit from a charitable reading of their arguments as being non-
deductive. The goal is not to prove them wrong but to find the best arguments. This concludes your first introduction to
logic. Next week, we'll cover the remaining material needed to evaluate arguments.

1:44Skip to 1 minute and 44 secondsBasically, if you have an argument that succeeds logically because it is a valid
deductive argument or a strong non-deductive argument, your next step will be to inquire about the truth of the
premises. This week, we didn't care if premises were false and concluded that rubbish arguments are valid, like this one,
Premise 1, if the moon is made of blue cheese, then I'm a zebra. Premise 2, the moon is made of blue cheese therefore,
conclusion, I'm a zebra. The argument is valid, but it's rubbish. However what makes it a bad argument is not a logical
mistake, right? See you next week.

Summary of Week 3

We’ve introduced you to the principle of charity: to be charitable is to treat others as intelligent. This is most important
if you don’t agree with someone’s view. You’ll do a much better job if you can show that the best version of their
argument fails.

We’ve talked about the important distinction between deductive and non-deductive arguments. How do you choose
whether an argument is deductive or non-deductive? Simple: unless the argument clearly indicates that it is deductive,
apply the principle of charity and take it to be non-deductive.

We also learnt to decide when arguments succeed logically.

 A deductive argument succeeds logically if it is valid: it is impossible for the premises to be true and the
conclusion false.

 A non-deductive argument succeeds logically if it is strong: it is improbable for the premises of the argument
to be true and the conclusion false.

Of course, for an argument to succeed logically doesn’t mean that it’s a good argument. It’s all good to know that it’s
impossible (or improbable) for the premises of the argument to be true while the conclusion is false, but are the
premises actually true? This is the next stage in argument evaluation: once you know that argument succeeds logically,
then you go ahead and ask if the premises are true. That’s what we’ll focus on next week.
WEEK 4: GOOD AND BAD ARGUMENTS

Start date:

This week we learn to evaluate arguments. What makes an argument good or bad?

4.1 GOOD AND BAD REASONING VIDEO (01:45)

Good and Bad Arguments

Did you know that good arguments may have a false conclusion? How can that be?

4.2 COUNTER-EXAMPLES ARTICLE

4.3 CAN YOU PROVIDE COUNTER-EXAMPLES? DISCUSSION

4.4 SOUND AND COGENT ARGUMENTS ARTICLE

4.5 HOW TO EVALUATE AN ARGUMENT VIDEO (03:50)

4.6 GOOD AND BAD ARGUMENTS ARTICLE

4.7 IRRELEVANT PREMISES VIDEO (05:42)

4.8 ARE THESE ARGUMENTS GOOD OR BAD? DISCUSSION

4.9 CREATE YOUR OWN ARGUMENT! ASSIGNMENT

4.10 PROVIDE FEEDBACK REVIEW

4.11 THINKING ABOUT YOUR FEEDBACK REFLECTION

Summary Let's recap the important concepts covered in Week 4.

4.12 SUMMARY OF WEEK 4 VIDEO (02:40)

4.1 Good and bad reasoning

0:15Skip to 0 minutes and 15 secondsBy the end of the week, you'll be able to evaluate
arguments as good or bad using this diagram, but don't worry, the next video will explain how to
read it. Before watching it, you need to acquire some more skills. One important skill is to be able
to create counter examples to show that arguments fail logically. A counter example is in principle
easy to understand, but it's a lot harder to be able to create them. For that, you need a lot of
practise, and we have a lot of exercises to help you learn it. If you can come up with a counter
example to an argument, then you know immediately that the argument is bad, because it fails
logically.

0:56Skip to 0 minutes and 56 secondsIf you can't create a counter example, then you need to
inspect the truth of the premises. It's at that point that you start considering what the premises
are about, if they make sense and whether they are true. If you can satisfy yourself that the
premises are true, perhaps because they are backed up by good sub-arguments, then you know
that you have a good argument. If a premise is false or if it's not backed up by a good sub-
argument, then the argument is bad. There are further complications that involve irrelevant
premises, but we'll show you how to identify and cope with them. To get your hands dirty with
arguments, I would like you to evaluate a bunch of them.

1:36Skip to 1 minute and 36 secondsTo be good at it, you need a lot of practise, but once you get
the hang of it, you'll be a kick ass critical thinker.

An argument is good if it succeeds logically (that’s what we learnt last week) and if the premises
are true. Otherwise, it’s bad.

By the end of the week, you will be able to evaluate arguments as being good or bad. In
particular, we will help you to:

 Create and use counter examples to show that arguments are invalid or weak.

 Identify irrelevant premises.

 Distinguish between sound and cogent arguments.

 Evaluate arguments as being good or bad.

4.2 Counter-examples

How do you show that an argument is invalid or weak?

Remember that an argument is valid if it’s impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false, and it is
strong if it’s very unlikely that the premises are true and the conclusion false.

So to show that an argument is invalid, you only need to find a case in which the premises are true and the conclusion
false, whereas to show that it is weak, you have to show that it is quite possible for the premises to be true and the
conclusion false. To do so, you will construct counter-examples.

 Definition: A counter-example to an argument is a situation which shows that the argument can have true
premises and a false conclusion.

If the argument being evaluated is deductive, then we can show it to be invalid and, therefore, bad if we can describe a
counter-example.

Recall this lovely example:

 Everybody loves a winner, so nobody loves me.

In standard form, the argument looks like this – with the suppressed premise:

Here’s a counter-example to this argument:

 Suppose that everybody loves all winners and that I am not a winner (so both premises are true.) Still, the
conclusion can be false if one of the people out there who love all the winners also loves the occasional non-
winner, including me. We can imagine such a person saying: “I love all winners, but I love you too, even
though you’re not a winner.”

Counter-examples and validity

If there are no counter-examples to a particular argument, then it is valid, as it is then impossible to find a situation in
which the premises of the argument are true and the conclusion is false. That means that in every situation in which the
premises are true, then the conclusion is also true, and this is what we need to know to conclude that an argument is
valid.

This is an important link between the concepts of validity and counter-example:

 An argument is valid if and only if there are no counter-examples to the argument.

Counter-examples for Non-deductive Arguments

Can a counter-example be used to show that a non-deductive argument is weak? It can, but only if the counter-example
itself represents a plausible way things might have been.

Since a non-deductive argument acknowledges that the conclusion might be false when the premises are true, but only
in exceptional circumstances, you need to find a counter-example that is not so exceptional.
That is, you need to find a reasonable situation in which the premises are all true and the conclusion false. If you want
to attack a non-deductive argument with a counter-example and do real damage, your counter-example must describe
a situation which not only makes the premises true and the conclusion false, but is also quite likely to come about.

If all you can come up is too far fetched, then you’re probably describing one of the exceptional cases that were
excluded to begin with, and so you would fail to provide a counter-example, and you could conclude that the argument
is strong.

Here’s an example of an argument, one that you may very well have heard before:

 Smoking marijuana is no more dangerous to your health or to society than drinking alcohol is. And drinking
alcohol is legal. Therefore, smoking marijuana should probably become legal.

In standard form, the argument looks like this:

Notice that we have introduced what we considered to be an essential suppressed premise in the standard form. Now,
can we find a plausible counter-example?

Yes we can, here’s one:

 The negation of the conclusion is consistent with the premises. Indeed, we might as well say that alcohol
should become illegal, precisely because the impact of drinking on the society is similar to the impact of
smoking marijuana – maybe even worse!

This constitutes a counter-example, because it is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false, and
given the premises provided, neither situation seems more plausible than the other.

Implausible counter-examples are counter-examples all the same, but they can only show that a deductive argument is
invalid. However, only a plausible counter-example can show that a non-deductive argument is weak.

Deductive or Non-deductive?

You might also think of the search for a counter-example as a method that helps you determine whether an argument is
deductive or non-deductive. If finding a counter-example to an argument makes us want to say that argument is no
good, then the argument must be deductive, because in deductive arguments the premises are intended to give
conclusive support for the conclusion.

On the other hand, if generating a counter-example does not incline us to give up the argument, then it is a non-
deductive argument because non-deductive arguments have conclusions which are only meant to be strongly suggested
by their premises, and leave it open that the conclusion may be false.

Here’s another way of making the point. If the only counter-examples you can find are far-fetched stories, then you may
have an indication to think that the argument is non-deductive.

Here’s an example:

 Wolfgang robbed the safe. Wolfgang’s fingerprints were found on the burgled safe. Lots of money, which was
in the safe, was found hidden in Wolfgang’s house. Wolfgang was seen by several witnesses near the scene of
the burglary when it was committed.
Now, we can come up with counter-examples to the argument:

 Wolfgang didn’t rob the safe. Sigmund did, but he was perfectly disguised as Wolfgang, had a copy of
Wolfgang’s fingerprints that he put on the safe, and hid some of the money in Wolfgang’s house.
 Space aliens robbed the safe and engraved Wolfgang’s fingerprints on the safe with lasers coming out of their
eyes.
 The safe was never robbed. The whole thing was invented by the bank to get back at Wolfgang for switching
banks. They really don’t like it when they lose customers.

So it’s easy to come up with counter-examples, but much harder to come up with plausible counter-examples. This
indicates that the argument is meant to be non-deductive.

4.3 Can you provide counter-examples?

Choose one argument from the list below and provide a counter-example. If the argument is non-deductive, make
sure that your counter-example is plausible. Arguments 4 and 5 are more challenging, but the principle is the same:
show that it is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false.

1. If you want an iPhone, you’ll have to get a job. But you don’t want an iPhone, you probably don’t want a job
either.

2. If you love me, then you will buy me a diamond ring. You will buy me a diamond ring. Therefore, you love me.

3. Only 54 percent of eligible New Zealand voters voted in the 2009 referendum about the repeal of the so-
called anti-smacking legislation. This probably means that nearly half of the members of the eligible voting
population are either happy with the existing law or don’t care about the issue.

4. In May 2009, a gunman in a Napier house killed a policeman, injured two others and kept firing at police who
surrounded the house for over two days. Subsequently, the police admitted that there were probably many
gun-owners without current gun licences and that it was hard to keep track of the number of people who
owned guns illegally. So there has been a call for more effective checks on gun-owners. This is silly. It turns
out that many of the weapons used by the Napier gunman were not his; he stole several over a period of
time.

5. In the second weekend of May 2009, Paul Holmes wrote in his Herald column about the popular practice of
sending TV news reporters to the scene of newsworthy events. He said that reporters on the spot may not
know any more than journalists back in the studio about what is going on, because the reporters on the spot
may not always be able to see things clearly, whereas the studio journalists have the benefit of information
coming in from various feeds. Hence, although John Campbell and his cameraman were on the spot for a
whole day during the Napier siege, I would say that the information and footage they gathered were not
really of much help in understanding what was happening.

Once you have written and posted your counter-examples, have a look at those of your fellow learners and provide
constructive feedback on their counter-examples.

4.4 Sound and cogent arguments

So far we have talked about the kind of support that can be given for conclusions: deductive and non-deductive.

We defined an argument as being valid if it’s a deductive argument for which the premises succeed in providing
conclusive support for the conclusion.

And we defined an argument as being strong if it’s a non-deductive argument in which the premises succeed in
providing strong support for the conclusion.
By that, we mean that, if the premises are true, then the conclusion would be given the appropriate support for also
being true.

But we haven’t said anything yet about whether the premises are true or not. This is what we do when we evaluate
whether arguments are sound or cogent.

Validity and strength of arguments do not on their own tell us whether arguments are good or bad. We’ve actually seen
rubbish arguments that were valid. That’s why we need to introduce two further concepts for arguments: being sound
and being cogent.

Sound Arguments

 Definition: A sound argument is a valid argument that has true premises.

Firstly, a sound argument is a deductive argument. It’s trying to establish conclusive support for its conclusion.
Secondly, the argument is valid: the premises, if true, would guarantee that the conclusion is also true. And on top of all
that, the premises are actually true. Therefore, a sound argument guarantees that its conclusion is true.

We say that a sound argument is a good argument. It is a good argument because it guarantees that the conclusion is
true. It would be irrational for you not to believe the conclusion of a sound argument.

Of course, sound arguments are very rare, because they’re very hard to establish. But, some arguments are sound.

For example:

 The province of Québec is part of Canada. Patrick was born in Québec. Therefore, Patrick was born in Canada.

This is a valid argument. Can you see why?

Furthermore, the premises are true: Québec is indeed part of Canada, and Patrick was indeed born in Québec. Hence,
you can be absolutely certain that Patrick was born in Canada, and you ought to believe that Patrick was born in
Canada. There’s no way around it.

Here are some more examples of sound arguments:

 I drank coffee this morning; therefore, I drank something this morning.

Patrick got married on January 4, 2014. Patrick has not been divorced, and Patrick is not a widower. Therefore, Patrick is
not a bachelor.

It is true that Patrick got married on January 4, 2014, that he has not divorced and that he is not a widower. So Patrick is
not a bachelor because a bachelor is an unmarried male, by definition.

Cogent Arguments

Now, what about non-deductive arguments? For non-deductive arguments, we introduce the notion of a cogent
argument.

 Definition: A cogent argument is a strong non-deductive argument that has true premises.

And again, we say that cogent arguments are good. A cogent argument is by definition non-deductive, which means
that the premises are intended to establish probable (but not conclusive) support for the conclusion.

Furthermore, a cogent argument is strong, so the premises, if they were true, would succeed in providing probable
support for the conclusion. And finally, the premises are actually true. So the conclusion indeed receives probable
support.

Here’s an example:
  Patrick was born in North America and Patrick wasn’t born in Mexico. It’s thus quite probable that Patrick was
born in the USA.

That is a cogent argument. If all you know about Patrick is what’s contained in the premises, and those premises are
true (they are!), then that’s a fairly strong argument, because the population of the USA is over 300 000 000, whereas
that of Canada is under 40 000 000. This means that the odds that Patrick was born in the USA are roughly 88%, which
makes the support for the conclusion quite strong. Furthermore, the premises are true. Therefore, the argument is
cogent, and so it is a good argument.

This means that we can have good arguments that have false conclusions!

Here’s another example:

 I had coffee this morning. Therefore, it’s quite likely that I drank something this morning.

This is a strong argument with true premises, so it is cogent and therefore, good. But the conclusion is not guaranteed.
It may be that I had coffee this morning by eating it, or by some other means. But of course, this is very unlikely, so the
argument is strong, though it’s still possible that the conclusion is false. Still, this is cogent and therefore, a good
argument.

4.5 How to evaluate an argument

0:15Skip to 0 minutes and 15 secondsWhen you're faced with an argument in the wild, here's a diagram that will help
you evaluate it. The first step is to identify the main argument and to put it in standard form. And remember to be
charitable. Once you have your standard form, you have to decide if the argument is to be evaluated as being deductive
or non-deductive. A deductive argument is one that is offered to provide logically conclusive support for its conclusion.
A non-deductive argument is one that is offered to provide probable support for its conclusions, but not conclusive. The
rule of thumb is to treat arguments as being non-deductive unless the intention is clearly deductive. Now, suppose that
you're facing a deductive argument.
1:03Skip to 1 minute and 3 secondsYour first task is to evaluate if the argument succeeds logically. That is, you want to
know if the argument is valid because it's a deductive argument. If the argument is invalid, game over. The argument is
bad and you're done. And the best way to show that an argument is invalid is by providing a counter-example, a
situation in which the premises are true and the conclusion false. If the argument is valid, you need to proceed to the
next step and see if it is sound. If all premises are true, then you have a sound argument. A sound argument is as good
as it gets.

1:42Skip to 1 minute and 42 secondsThe premises give conclusive, logical support for the conclusion and they are all
true, which means that the conclusion is also true. As we've discussed before, some of the premises might be backed up
by sub-arguments. If that's the case, you need to suspend the evaluation of the main argument and evaluate each sub-
argument individually. Suppose you have a sub-argument for a premise and you conclude that this sub-argument is bad.
Then that premise has lost its support and the argument collapses. Game over-- the argument is bad. But if all premises
are true or are backed up by a good argument, then you have a sound argument and you can conclude that it is good.

2:29Skip to 2 minutes and 29 secondsIf you have a non-deductive argument, the procedure is pretty much the same.
You first need to decide if the premises provide the required logical support. But non-deductive arguments are tricky.
What makes an argument strong might depend on the context of evaluation. If you are in a court of law, you want
arguments to be very strong. Otherwise, you might put too many innocent people in jail. But if you're at a party with
your friends and family, you might want to adopt looser standards. To show that an argument is weak, you need to give
a counter-example. But not any counter-example will do. You need to find a credible scenario in which the premises are
true and the conclusion false.

3:14Skip to 3 minutes and 14 secondsIf you can't do that, then the argument is strong and you move on to inspect the
truth of the premises. If all premises are true or backed up by good sub-arguments. Then the argument is cogent and
therefore good. Otherwise, it's bad. How do you know if a premise is backed up by a good sub-argument? Simple--
isolate the sub-argument and use the diagram to evaluate it. And repeat for as many sub-arguments as there are. And
that's how you evaluate arguments as a good critical thinker.

This video shows you how to evaluate arguments in a step-by-step manner:

1. Identify the conclusion and the premises.

2. Put the argument in standard form.

3. Decide if the argument is deductive or non-deductive.

4. Determine whether the argument succeeds logically.

5. If the argument succeeds logically, assess whether the premises are true. For premises that are backed-up by
a sub-arguments, repeat all the steps for the sub-arguments.

6. Make a final judgement: is the argument good or bad?

4.6 Good and bad arguments

We now have all the ingredients to be able to tell when arguments are good or bad. And it’s now quite simple: good
arguments are either cogent or sound, otherwise, they are bad. Easy.

Here’s the diagram we introduced in the previous video to help you while judging arguments:
Let’s see how we can use the diagram with some concrete examples. There are two kinds of arguments: deductive and
non-deductive.

Now, suppose you’re facing a deductive argument. If the argument is invalid, then it’s a bad argument: it’s an argument
that is intended to give conclusive support for it’s conclusion, but fails to do so. Game over.

Think of a student sitting in a mathematics exam and making a crucial mistake in a proof. Then the student’s answer is
invalid and therefore, bad. Of course, a professor might have reasons to think that the student’s answer still deserves
marks (maybe even full marks) even though the student’s answer is bad – in our understanding of ‘bad’.

If the argument is valid, there are two cases:

Firstly, the argument has false premises, in which case it is not sound. Game over, the argument is bad.

For example:

 If there is a purple elephant in the hall, then I am a giant turkey. There is a purple elephant in the hall,
therefore, I’m a giant turkey

Secondly, all of the argument’s premises are true. Then the argument is sound, and is, therefore, good.

For example:

 Liliane is Patrick’s sister, and Patrick is Sylvie’s brother. Therefore, Liliane is Sylvie’s sister.

Otherwise, you may have a non-deductive argument, in which case the argument is either strong or weak. When the
argument is weak, the argument is bad. You could say that the premises fail to provide support for the conclusion
altogether.

For example:

 I have a very strong feeling that my lottery ticket is the winning ticket, so I’m quite confident I will win a lot of
money tonight.

If the argument is strong, there are again two cases:

Firstly, the argument has false premises. In this case, the argument is not cogent. Game over, the argument is bad. For
example:

 If you smoke pot, even only once in your life, you are very likely to start using heroin. You do smoke pot, and
therefore, you will probably start using heroin.
Secondly, all of the argument’s premises are true. Then the argument is cogent, and is, therefore, good.

For example:

 About 97% of climate experts agree that humans are causing global warming. Therefore, probably, humans
are causing global warming.

As you may have noticed, every argument that has false premises is bad.

Let’s look at some examples of arguments and how we evaluate them.

Example 1

If you are a confident driver and have never been in an accident, then driving over the speed limit is not dangerous for
you or others. You are a confident driver and have never been in an accident. Doubtless, then, driving over the speed
limit is not dangerous for you or others.

What’s the conclusion?

 Driving over the speed limit is not dangerous for you or others.

Is the argument deductive or non-deductive?

Deductive, as evidenced by the use of the word `doubtless’.

Is the argument valid?

Yes, the argument is valid, since it’s impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false.

So the argument is valid. Next question:

Is the argument sound?

Now we’re asking if the premises are true. But the first premise is false. It’s not true that if you are a confident driver
and have never been in an accident, that driving over the speed limit is not dangerous for you or others.

Speeding is well known to be one of the main causes of accidents, regardless of the skills and confidence of the
speeding driver. Indeed, there are other drivers on the road, not all of which are confident drivers that have never been
in an accident, and they might react in dangerous ways to the presence of the speeding driver.

Hence, the argument is not sound. Even though the argument is valid, it has a false premise, so it is a bad argument.

Example 2

We left our parrot in the house this morning. The nearest neighbour lives one kilometre away. When we got home from
work, the parrot was gone. It’s most probable that our neighbour stole the parrot.

What’s the conclusion?

 Our neighbour stole the parrot.

Is the argument deductive or non-deductive?

Non-deductive, as evidenced by the words “it’s most probable”. But also, it doesn’t seem like the argument is giving
reasons that would guarantee that the conclusion is true.

Is the argument strong?

Not really. It’s a bit quick to accuse your neighbour of stealing the parrot. Think of other things that could have
happened… maybe it flew out the window!
So the argument is weak. Game over. It’s a bad argument.

Example 3

Here’s a more tricky example:

There’s been a popular revolutionary uprising in Tunisia, which is a North African Arab nation. There’s been a popular
revolutionary uprising in Libya, also a North African Arab nation. There’s been a popular revolutionary uprising in Egypt,
another North African Arab nation. There’s been a popular revolutionary uprising in Bahrain, yet another North African
Arab nation. Finally, there’s been a popular revolutionary uprising in Iran, which is an Arab nation. So there will be a
popular revolutionary uprising in at least one other Arab country in the next few years.

What’s the conclusion?

 There will be a popular revolutionary uprising in at least one other Arab country in the next few years.

Is the argument deductive or non-deductive?

There are no clear indicator words in this argument to help us in making a choice. If we take the argument to be a
deductive one, it would be quite easy to show that it’s invalid. Furthermore, the premises do not seem to be intended
to demonstrate beyond doubt that there will be a popular revolutionary uprising in at least one other Arab country in
the next few years, but rather to suggest that this is quite likely to happen.

We will thus treat the argument as a non-deductive one.

Is the argument strong?

If all the premises happen to be true, given the number of Arab countries there are, we’ll say the argument is
reasonably strong. You might not agree with me, but here’s some explanation. If all premises are true, then they
provide evidence that there’s some political instability that is spreading in that region of the world, and this makes it
quite probable that the spread won’t stop.

You may not agree with me, but for the sake of the exercise, accept for now that the argument is (reasonably) strong.

Is the argument cogent?

That is, are all the premises true? And the answer is ‘no’, because:

 Iran is not an Arab nation.

 Bahrain is not a North African Arab nation.

So at least two premises of the argument are false. Hence, the argument is not cogent, and is, therefore, bad.

Does that mean that the conclusion of the argument is false?

All we can conclude is that the reasons provided in this argument do not give grounds to believe the conclusion, but it
may be that another argument with better premises and the same conclusion is a good one. And regardless of whether
or not there’s a good argument for the conclusion, it may still be that there will be a popular revolutionary uprising in at
least one other Arab country in the next few years. All we can conclude is that the reasons given in this argument are
not enough to make you believe in the conclusion.

Notice that if you didn’t agree that the argument was strong, then you thought it was weak, and a weak argument is a
bad argument, so you would agree that the argument is bad, but we would have different reasons for thinking that the
argument is bad.
4.7 Irrelevant premises

0:15Skip to 0 minutes and 15 secondsNow we'll talk about irrelevant premises, and that's a tricky subject. It's tricky
because it's difficult to decide when a premise is irrelevant. The impact that irrelevant premises can have on arguments
also varies. Sometimes, it makes the argument bad. Sometimes, it doesn't do any damage. Some arguments may be
good even though they have irrelevant premises, and some are bad because they only have irrelevant premises. But
first, what do we mean by an irrelevant premise? A premise in an argument is irrelevant if the truth or falsity of the
premise has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether or not the conclusion is true. Let's see some examples
of arguments that have irrelevant premises.

1:03Skip to 1 minute and 3 secondsWilli is my cat, and she's agreed to take part in this video. Willi is a cat. All cats like
to hide in boxes. Some dogs also like to hide in boxes, therefore Willi likes to hide in boxes. This argument is valid. If all
the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true. The argument is still valid if we remove the third premise.
Some dogs like to hide in boxes is probably true, but it offers no support for the conclusion. Being present doesn't make
the argument valid, and the argument is still valid even if we remove it. The third premise does no proper work in the
argument.

1:54Skip to 1 minute and 54 secondsContrast this with the following argument about buildings here in Auckland. The
Sky Tower is taller than the Vero building. The Vero building is taller than the Metropolis. Therefore, the Sky Tower is
taller than the Metropolis. The argument is sound. It's valid, and both its premises are true. And the premises are
relevant to the conclusion. If you remove either premise, the argument becomes invalid. For instance, the Sky Tower is
taller than the Vero building, therefore the Sky Tower is taller than the Metropolis. Hence, for deductive arguments, a
premise is relevant if removing it makes a valid argument invalid. But what happens to valid arguments when they have
irrelevant premises?

2:45Skip to 2 minutes and 45 secondsLet's try the same example again, but this time, we'll add an irrelevant premise.
The Sky Tower is taller than the Vero building. The Vero building is taller than the Metropolis. The Metropolis is on the
moon. Therefore, the Sky Tower is taller than the Metropolis. The third premise is irrelevant. If you remove it, the
argument is still valid. But it's false, so strictly speaking, the argument is not sound. As you can see, irrelevant premises
do not make arguments bad by making them invalid. They make them bad when they are false. So what should you do
with irrelevant premises? Apply the principle of charity and remove them from the argument. Call this, pruning an
argument.

3:32Skip to 3 minutes and 32 seconds[FOOTSTEPS] For non-deductive arguments, the idea is pretty much the same. A
premise is irrelevant if having it in the argument does not make it stronger and removing it from the argument does not
make it weaker. We'll use this theatre as an example. Here at the Maidment theatre at the University of Auckland,
there is limited wheelchair access. Row H in the stalls, as indicated on the seating plan, has space for wheelchairs.
Please contact our box office, and we will book these seats for you. The circle is not wheelchair accessible. Consider the
following argument. All theatre-goers should be treated equally. All theatre-goers should have equal access to the
circle. The best views from the theatre are from the circle.

4:22Skip to 4 minutes and 22 secondsThe circle does not have wheelchair access. Therefore, probably, wheelchair
users don't have access to the best views in the theatre. The argument is strong. However, the same conclusion is
equally supported from all but the first two premises. Remove P1 and P2, and the argument is just as good. The
conclusion says that wheelchair users don't have access to the best views, but it doesn't say if this is a good or a bad
thing. P1 and P2 are about how theatre-goers should be treated, not about whether they all have access to the best
views. If you prune the argument, you will be left with-- the best views are from the circle. The circle does not have
wheelchair access.

5:08Skip to 5 minutes and 8 secondsTherefore, probably, wheelchair users don't have access to the best views in the
theatre. And the cogency of the argument is no longer threatened by the first two premises. A debate about them
would also be pointless, because they are irrelevant. Finally, irrelevant premises are sometimes the main culprit of
logical and critical thinking mistakes, and they have their own fallacies. You might want to revise the ad hominem and
red herring fallacies before you proceed.

A premise in an argument is irrelevant if the truth or falsity of the premise has no bearing whatsoever on the
question of whether or not the conclusion is true.
This video discusses how to decide when premises are irrelevant, and what to do with irrelevant premises.

4.8 Are these arguments good or bad?

Choose two arguments, decide if they are good or bad, and explain your answer. Arguments 5 and 6 are more
challenging, but the procedure is the same. Make sure you correctly identify the main argument first; this may
simplify your task.

1. If fish are mammals, then they’re warm-blooded. However, fish aren’t, in fact, warm-blooded, so it follows
that they’re not mammals.

2. It seems like we should park on another street. Last time we parked on this street we got towed. We don’t
want to get towed again.

3. Smokers are very fit people. After all, they spend a lot of time outside in all weather and they walk long
distances to get to places where they are allowed to smoke.

4. If we stop smokers from smoking in bars, then smokers will also be stopped from smoking everywhere else.
We do not want to prohibit people from smoking everywhere. Therefore, we should not support a ban on
smoking in bars.

5. We need not accept the views of older people who think that electronica, drum-and-bass and other current
pop styles are degenerate and devoid of creativity. For a start, the views of younger people are just as worth
taking seriously as those of older people. On top of that, people’s musical tastes tend to become permanently
fixed when they are in their 20s and 30s, so once they are older than this, they are unlikely to be listening
objectively to new musical styles. In addition to all that, people (and especially people from age 40 up) have
always complained about the music of the youth and yet history soon shows that they were wrong to think it
was hopeless.

6. New Zealand only has snow for a fairly short time in a fairly small number of regions. So very few New
Zealanders are likely to get much of an opportunity to become competent in the sports that are done at the
Winter Olympics. Because of this, it is likely that New Zealand will never have a really good Winter Olympic
Team. And if New Zealand will never have a really good Winter Olympic Team, it’s a waste of time for New
Zealand to bother entering. The conclusion is obvious!

4.9 Create your own argument!

Time to get your hands dirty!

In this activity, you will have to create your own argument, evaluate someone else’s argument, and receive feedback
from others on your argument.

Below is a list of statements that we have used as conclusions of various arguments you’ve seen in the course so far.
Your task in this activity is to provide a good argument that has one of them as a conclusion. We expect a short
argument, of the like you’ve seen so far. Your argument shouldn’t exceed 100 words. Try and find no more than 5
premises which you think make the best case for the conclusion you chose.

 You shouldn’t cut down protected trees.

 You love me.

 We should support a ban on smoking in bars.

 The Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist.

  You shouldn’t worry and you should be happy.

 Aunt Mary is the one who stole the apple tart.

 It will not rain today.

 The dice has a 50% chance of landing on six.

 We should be able to redistribute the world’s substantial food supplies so that the poor get plenty.

 Quinn doesn’t care about the environment.

The emphasis here is on sharing your reflections with your fellow learners, so it’s an informal exercise and a chance to
give support and feedback to others.

After you submit your assignment, it will be read and commented upon by another person taking the course. You will
then be asked to read and comment on someone else’s piece. You will be notified by email once your assignment has
been reviewed and will then be able to reflect on what you’ve learned before moving on from this activity.

If you don’t want to take part in this assignment please don’t submit anything in this box.

Please note: you will not be able to edit your work after clicking ‘Submit’, so please check it carefully before submitting.
It is a good idea to write your assignment in a text editor beforehand, in case you lose your internet connection, and
then paste your final submission into the assignment box when you are ready.

ASSIGNMENT GUIDELINES

The reviewers will be asked to give you feedback on the following aspects of your assignment, so you should consider
these when writing:

 Use indicator words that clearly indicate which statements are premises, and which is the conclusion.

 Use indicator words that make it explicit whether your argument is deductive or non-deductive.

 Do your best to find true premises that give appropriate logical support for your conclusion.

4.10 Provide feedback

Now we’d like you to review the work of another learner on this course and provide them with your feedback.

Use the three criteria to evaluate the piece, ensuring that you are constructive and supportive.

What does it mean to provide feedback?

Remember to be fair and balanced in your feedback and evaluate against the criteria given. You are there to help each
other to develop your ideas further.

What does it mean to receive feedback?

Feedback can come in many different formats. Most commonly, it comes from authority figures such as teachers and
lecturers, sometimes in written format, but also in general conversation. However, it is also valuable to hear what other
people think too; friends, peers and relatives who might be able to add a fresh perspective to your ideas.

What if my work is criticised?

Even if the feedback feels like it is overly negative to you, use it as an opportunity to rethink your work by reflecting on
how you can improve it. Do not take any criticism personally.
ASSIGNMENT GUIDELINES

You’re going to be asked to give feedback on the following aspects of the author’s assignment:

 Use indicator words that clearly indicate which statements are premises, and which is the conclusion.

 Use indicator words that make it explicit whether your argument is deductive or non-deductive.

 Do your best to find true premises that give appropriate logical support for your conclusion.

4.12 Summary of Week 4

0:14Skip to 0 minutes and 14 secondsYou now have all the tools required to evaluate arguments, which makes you part
of the elite of critical thinkers. What you have learned can be inspected by your ability to answer the following
questions when you go back to the real world and encounter some passage. What statements does this passage
contain? If it's an argument, what's the conclusion? And what are the premises? If it's an argument, does it have any
suppressed premises? If so, what are they? How does the argument look like in standard form with all its premises
made explicit? Is the argument deductive or non-deductive? If it's deductive, is it valid? If it's non-deductive, how strong
is it? Are the premises true?

1:11Skip to 1 minute and 11 secondsSo is it a good or a bad argument? If you wanted to study argument evaluation
further, you could do one of two things. You could study deductive logic. Deductive logic is a mathematical field of
studies that goes into the gritty details of arguments and focuses on their form. Logicians-- that is, people specialised in
logic-- are professionals in evaluating the validity of arguments. You've seen, in this course, how to show that
arguments are invalid. You provide a counter example. But how do you show that arguments are valid? How can you
make sure that there are no counter examples? Well, that's the kind of questions logicians try to answer. You could also
study non-deductive logic.

2:03Skip to 2 minutes and 3 secondsHere, it is statisticians and experts in probabilities that lead the field. Non-
deductive arguments are only intended to give probable support for their conclusion and probabilities is the kind of
mathematics you need to get at the heart of it, but you don't need to become an expert in either of those fields to
apply the skills you've learned. You will have plenty of chances to apply your new skills when you encounter arguments
in the wild. Tim will show you how this applies to various arguments as they show up in science, law, and morality.

So what have we done so far?

You now have all the tools required to evaluate arguments, which makes you part of the elite of critical thinkers. What
you have learned can be inspected by your ability to answer the following questions, when you go back to the real
world and encounter some passage.

1. What, if any, statements does this passage contain?

2. If it’s an argument, what’s the conclusion? And what premises are supplied?

3. If it’s an argument, does it have any suppressed premises? If so, what are they?

4. How does the whole argument look in standard form with all premises made explicit?

5. Is the argument deductive or non-deductive?

6. If it’s deductive, is it valid? If it’s non-deductive, how strong is it? Can you think of a (plausible) counter-
example?

7. Are the premises true?

8. So, is it a good or a bad argument?

In the rest of the course, we will show you how you can do so by looking at various arguments as they show up in
science, law, and morality.
WEEK 5: SCIENCE

Start date:

Introduction and the scientific method

This week we look at how good logical and critical thinking is applied in science.

5.1 SCIENCE AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD VIDEO (04:48)

5.2 VERIFICATION AND FALSIFICATION VIDEO (05:14)

5.3 SCIENCE AND FALSIFICATION VIDEO (02:25)

5.4 INFERENCE TO THE BEST EXPLANATION VIDEO (05:25)

5.5 RANDOM CONTROLLED TRIALS VIDEO (05:34)

5.6 SCIENTIFIC THEORIES ARTICLE

When good science goes wrong

Making the distinction between showing a claim to be true and showing it to be false.

5.7 SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE ARTICLE

5.8 INFERENCE TO ANY OLD EXPLANATION ARTICLE

5.9 CLEVER HANS: CUEING AND THE OBSERVER EFFECT ARTICLE

Summary

Let's recap the important concepts covered in Week 5.

5.10 SUMMARY OF WEEK 5 ARTICLE

5.11 LOGICAL AND CRITICAL THINKING IN SCIENCE QUIZ

5.12 LEFT-HANDED PRESIDENTS DISCUSSION