7.5%3 valid or invalid? explain with answer
Answers
Explanation:
In addition to helping you see logic as a practical tool, one of the most important goals of this chapter is to begin the process of having you understand what logic is and what it is not. Many students will probably enter this class believing that being logical means being always right and successful. Similarly, they will want to think of valid and invalid arguments in black and white terms. That validity is always associated with truth and invalidity is always associated with falsehood. It is difficult, but very important, to see that the practical value of logic is less immediate and more abstract. In this regard, every effort should be made to see that valid arguments do not guarantee truth unless you start with it in the premises, and that valid arguments may have false conclusions but that this implies a test of the premises.
Related to this understanding is the transformation that should be made in many students from what I call categorical thinking to hypothetical thinking. Most students, and probably most people for that matter, react very holistically to a controversy, argument, discussion, or claim. One of the reasons students have trouble with the notion of validity is that the examples in Chapter 1 require that they not react to an argument as a whole, but separate the reasoning from the content. They must judge the premises hypothetically, pretending momentarily that they are true rather than deciding immediately and conclusively whether they believe they are true.