Exam 1: Basic Logical Concepts

The process of arriving at and affirming one proposition on the basis of one or more other propositions is called:

"If undergraduate education in the Humanities is to be successful, students must take courses in a broad range of areas including history, literature, philosophy, and art." This is an example of:

(1) The government should enact legislation permitting euthanasia. (2) Without this legislation people are denied their autonomy. (3) People have the right to die with dignity and ought to be able to choose to live or die. What is the conclusion of this passage?

An argument with a false premise cannot be valid.

"Either cigarette smoking in eating establishments should be banned or these estab- lishments should have designated smoking areas." This is an example of:

(1) If you raise prices even a little, fewer people will buy your product.(2) If fewer people buy your product, your scale of production will become smaller.(3) If your scale becomes smaller, you won't be able to pay the same low bulk prices for sup-plies that you get now, and (4) if you pay higher prices for your supplies, your costs will go up.(5) If that happens, your profits will go down." What is the conclusion of this passage?

An invalid deductive argument is always unsound.

In correct reasoning,

In which of the following subjects is reasoning outside the concern of logicians?

In logic, the truth of the premises must be established before any other analysis can occur.

Matching: -A __________ proposition makes only one assertion.

No valid deductive argument can be made any stronger by adding more premises, no matter what the premises state.

Matching: -The _________ of an argument is the proposition that is affirmed on the basis of other propositions in the argument

Matching: -An argument is ________ when it is valid and all of its premises are true.

"Women's liberation is solely the product of technological advances in the control of reproduction and the social need to have more bodies to tend to the machines produced by technology." This is an example of:

"In this area, a lot of snow usually means we'll have a cool summer.We've had a lot of snow this winter (even though it wasn't very cold).I think we'll have a cool summer." This is:

Matching: -An inductive argument claims to support its conclusion only with some degree of _________.

If a passage does not contain a conclusion, it cannot be an argument.

"Cigarette smoking should be banned in all public eating and drinking establishments because second-hand smoke has been shown to be detrimental to one's health." This is an example of:

Matching: -______________ arguments are never evaluated in terms of validity.