Counterargument Paper
Instructor Guidance
Welcome to week three! This week we will jump ahead to the inductive method of logical reasoning. If you will remember, inductive movements go from general to particular, and the logic of induction operates in the realm of probability. In inductive reasoning you are not certain about the answer with the given information, but you can make an educated guess. You will come across inductive arguments all the time in everyday life. Just think about buying a car. Most of us judge whether or not to buy a certain kind of car based upon past experiences that we have had or our friends have had. If the past two cars that I bought were a Ford, and they fell into pieces after a couple of years, then odds are I will not buy a Ford again when I am perusing the car lot. There are several different kinds of inductive argument.
One major type of inductive argument (like the one I just mentioned) is the argument from analogy or analogical inductive argument. An analogy is where you compare the property of one thing to the property of another. You can spot these when they are in written form because “like” English principles of speech, an analogy compares two things together using “like” or “as”. For example, “Men are like parking spots. All the good ones are taken, and the rest are handicapped.” This was a funny analogy that my sister used to say when she was single. What is the “target” of the analogy and what is the “property” in question being related. It is obvious in this example that men are the targets of the analogy (and the butt of my sister’s joke). The properties in question are availability and desirability because since in the one instance the good guys are already taken by other women, and in the second instance the remaining men are not of good quality. You will probably be able to spot these analogous thought processes in your everyday thinking if you stop and think about it. Inductive arguments are not valid (like deductive arguments) they are strong or weak depending on the logic. For analogical arguments, it is the closeness of the properties being compared between the two things that matters. If you were comparing someone who hurt your feelings to Adolf Hitler, then the analogy would be pretty weak.
Another form of inductive reasoning is “inductive generalization”. This is where you take a sample or piece from a class of things and “generalize” about the whole group or class. If you are shopping for an apple at the grocery store and the first five apples you pull out are completely rotten, then you might generalize that the whole bin is spoiled. We would be more inclined to affirm that the whole bin is spoiled if there were only ten apples than if there were 100 apples. This is because the larger the sample size of the generalization the stronger the induction. This is most true when you consider scientific studies or social science surveys. You want the cancer study to have used a sample group of larger than ten people when determining if a new drug is effective in treatment (this could be a “hasty generalization” or an “overgeneralization”). This is also true of the sample being representative of the group or class. If would be pointless using a rotten orange to generalize about a bin of apples. So, whether you induct on a formal level like in a scientific study or informally like deciding to buy a car, the process always works by probability.
Chapter eleven discusses different kinds of causal reasoning and what to look out for when presented with an argument. There are a couple of issues in causal reasoning that are important to look at for this week’s discussion board. First, let us revisit a few of the fallacies that addressed the first two weeks. A “post hoc” fallacy makes the error of assuming that since happened after something else, that there is a direct link between the two. Sometimes I like to call this the superstitious fallacy since there is no logical reason why walking under a ladder would be connect with something bad happening to you later. Superstitions arise due to change coincidences like this and you want a causal reason for something. This is related to another causal reasoning fallacy: anecdotal reasoning. This is where you defend a claim X by citing a couple of examples X happening. You may have heard the expression “that’s anecdotal evidence” before in a court case on TV. Sometimes anecdotal reasoning can see close to the truth and sometimes it is far from it. For example "my grandfather smoked like a chimney and died healthy in a car crash at the age of 99" does not disprove the proposition that "smoking markedly increases the probability of cancer and heart disease at a relatively early age". In this case, the evidence may itself be true, but does not warrant the conclusion. So, how do we determine the strength of causal reasoning?
There are two major types of causal reasoning: relevant difference reasoning and common thread reasoning. In the first instance, the relevant difference in a situation has to deal with the events uniqueness as event. A good example is in Parker and Moore where you wake up with a headache after a heavy night of drinking. If you have ever had a hangover before (or friend’s who have), then you know that this particular day would not be very different of a scenario. If you woke up every day in the last year without a headache (and had not gone out the night before and had too much to drink) then this day would appear as an odd day. There is enough of a cause and effect “relevant difference” here to warrant the conclusion. The second type of causal argument, the “common thread” one, is termed so because, well, we see a common thread at work. If ten people showed up at a hospital at the same time with five of the same symptoms and they all came from the same party, you might assume they all caught the same sickness. The danger in common thread reasoning is sometimes to ignore other threads of reasoning that could also be a factor. With a little bit of awareness and critical thinking though, we can intuit strong cases for a causal claim being true. This does not carry the valid strength of a deductive claim, but it is probably the true.
