The Art of Reasoning | Audiobook: A Practical Guide to Logic & Argument

One point seven. Prepositions and word meaning. Consider the following statements. Most cars have four wheels. The Empire State Building is over one thousand feet tall. Jack is a Baptist. The theory of relativity in physics has been well confirmed by experiments. Each of these statements has a linguistic form as an English sentence, and each of sentences has a meaning. It expresses a thought. The...

Definitions do not appear out of thin air. It’s up to us to construct our own. To come up with definitions that satisfy the rules we’ve learned, we need a procedure we can follow—a technique for constructing definitions. Of the six rules of definition, the first three are the most important. If you can find a genus and differentia that, together, are neither too broad nor too narrow, and that stat...

If we’re looking for a definition, why not just use the dictionary? Isn’t that what dictionaries are for? Well, yes and no. A dictionary is a good place to begin our search for a definition. But dictionaries are concerned with words. They often give nothing more than synonyms and rarely provide the full context we need to understand the concept that a word expresses. To define a concept, we usuall...

Concepts serve as mental file folders that help us organize our knowledge about classes of similar things. Definitions tell us what is in the folder. In the case of simple, relatively concrete concepts such as table or running, we can get along pretty well without definitions. We can tell just by South whether something is a table, whether someone is running, but most concepts are more abstract an...

So far, we have treated classification as if it were always a matter of sorting things into categories or dividing a genus into a species. Two ways of describing the same operation. And this is indeed the task we face when we start from scratch. But we do not always start from scratch. We often deal with concepts that reflect pre-existing classifications. And the task we face is to locate the conc...

What is classification? Classification is the process of sorting items into categories. The whole set you’re classifying — animals, college courses, tools, or anything else — is the genus ; your job is to subdivide that genus into species so each item has a clear place. There are often many possible ways to divide a genus, but some divisions are better than others. The rules of classification help...

Part one: Language and reasoning. Part one is concerned with the basic elements and standards of reasoning. Later sections will deal with the details of specific forms of reasoning, but here we will cover the elements and standards that pertain to reasoning in general, and that will be of value in all your studies as well as everyday life. Language is the medium in which we think, communicate, and...

What Is Logic? This book is about thinking , and more precisely, it is about the role of logic in thinking. In its broadest sense, thinking refers to anything happening in our minds—memories, daydreams, questions, worries, or plans. But in a narrower and more purposeful sense, thinking means activities such as solving a problem, planning an action, preparing for an exam, or defending a position in...