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Divine fallacy (argument from incredulity) – arguing that, because something is so phenomenal or amazing, it must be the result of superior, divine, alien or paranormal agency. [20] Double counting – counting events or occurrences more than once in probabilistic reasoning, which leads to the sum of the probabilities of all cases exceeding ...
While a logical argument is a non sequitur if, and only if, it is invalid, the term "non sequitur" typically refers to those types of invalid arguments which do not constitute formal fallacies covered by particular terms (e.g., affirming the consequent). In other words, in practice, "non sequitur" refers to an unnamed formal fallacy.
An example is a probabilistically valid instance of the formally invalid argument form of denying the antecedent or affirming the consequent. [12] Thus, "fallacious arguments usually have the deceptive appearance of being good arguments, [13] because for most fallacious instances of an argument form, a similar but non-fallacious instance can be ...
An argument that is not valid is said to be "invalid". An example of a valid (and sound) argument is given by the following well-known syllogism: All men are mortal. (True) Socrates is a man. (True) Therefore, Socrates is mortal. (True) What makes this a valid argument is not that it has true premises and a true conclusion.
The expression was popular in the early days of computing. The first known use is in a 1957 syndicated newspaper article about US Army mathematicians and their work with early computers, [4] in which an Army Specialist named William D. Mellin explained that computers cannot think for themselves, and that "sloppily programmed" inputs inevitably lead to incorrect outputs.
Being a valid argument does not necessarily mean the conclusion will be true. It is valid because if the premises are true, then the conclusion has to be true. This can be proven for any valid argument form using a truth table which shows that there is no situation in which there are all true premises and a false conclusion. [2]
In deductive reasoning, a sound argument is an argument that is valid and all of its premises are true (and as a consequence its conclusion is true as well). An argument is valid if, assuming its premises are true, the conclusion must be true. An example of a sound argument is the following well-known syllogism: (premises) All men are mortal.
The following argument indicates the unsoundness of affirming a disjunct: Max is a mammal or Max is a cat. Max is a mammal. Therefore, Max is not a cat. This inference is unsound because all cats, by definition, are mammals.