PHIL 210 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Deductive Reasoning, Temporality, Modus Tollens
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4 Jun 2020
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PHIL 210-Critical Thinking
Book Notes
Chapter 1 The parts of public thinking deductive argument
Study notes 3
▪ Modal Logics
• Extension of Classical Logic
• Complications factored in
o Belief
o Knowledge
o Obligation
o Possibility
o Temporality
➢ All this to say logic is not monolithic
➢ Non-Technical Side
o There are uses for the word logic that can cause confusion, if they are run together in the
technical sense
▪ Used casually as loose synonym for “sensible” or “plausible”
• Not only applied to inferences but to people and their choices
o Ex: “you’d rather have cold hands than wear gloves? That’s just not
logical”
o “if he’s athletic, then its logical to think that he’s tried skiing at some
point”
o “she’s very logical, so se probably doesn’t like art, poetry, and music”
o Non-technical claims of what is logical and illogical can be best understood
as statements of agree and disagree
What isn’t an Argument?
➢ Fallacious Argument: bad argument
o If a chair has 3 legs so it was poorly balanced, would it be a chair?
▪ Yes, its not a good chair, but we might say it’s a lousy chair. But still a chair.
o What if it had 2 legs, a whole in the middle and no back rest, would It be a chair?
▪ We might say it’s a broken chair, or maybe not a chair anymore
➢ So what isn’t an argument?
o The term argue sometimes includes; assertions, insisting, repeating, declaiming,
vowing, defining, stipulating.
▪ These aren’t argument
➢ Explanation vs Arguments
o Subtle distinction between arguments and explanations
➢ Explanation: form of reasoning; aim to make better sense of something already believed
o Can have implicit elements