PHIL 24320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Prime Number, Validity, Hillary Clinton
Document Summary
Argument = an ordered pair consisting of a premise and a conclusion. In any argument have to have at least one premise. Ex: the number 3 is prime; therefore, some number is prime. (1 premise) Only an argument if both premise and conclusion are declarative statements (could b true or false). Ex: not open the door. or can you open the door. but you can open the door. Because we have partial knowledge and we want to increase it. You want arguments that could lead to truth. But the trouble is, there is no source of reasoning that is guaranteed to lead to truth, because if at least one of your premises is false, the conclusion is false. Therefore, the best you can do for a safe argument, is to have a conditional guarantee. An argument is logically valid if and only if it could never happen that all its premises are true but it"s conclusion is not true.
