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The premises of inductive argument are all the particular facts that go together to serve as a collection of evidence. Those facts provide the basis for making a reliable generalization about them.
The whole scientific enterprise rests squarely upon inductive reasoning. Scientists are continually gathering up specific bits of data to see what larger patterns can be discerned from them.
By way of brief review: An argument expresses the heart of reasoning, the inferential move; in its simplest form it invites us to accept one idea as true on the basis of another.
Only a supported statement is worthy of the term “conclusion.” An unsupported statement is a mere opinion, which we are free to take or leave at face value.
Once we are confident we are dealing with a bona fide argument, we would want to look immediately to the premises that support its conclusion. First and foremost, are the premises true?
In the final analysis, the force of an argument depends on the extent to which it reflects the objective order of things. We argue well because first we reason well, and the purpose of both arguing and reasoning is to enable us to perform more freely and purposefully in the world.
Do the premises show that it is reasonable to accept the conclusion, either as a necessary truth or a highly probable one? Your premises must measure up with respect to two counts, truth and strength.
That premises must be true is obvious. Only someone who deliberately sets out to deceive would put forward a premise that is blatantly false.
A premise may be substantially true but not precisely true.
Even in an instance when you have several premises, all of which, say, effectively support your conclusion because of their directness, it is best not to use all of them. Limiting the number of premises gives your argument sharper focus and therefore greater impact.
That last point calls to mind a time-honored admonition: Know your audience. In this regard, it is well to remember that, while logic is a science, it is also an art. An argument has a dual purpose: to produce true conclusions and to persuade an audience.
To succeed in the latter we have to present our argument in a way that suits the audience in front of us. That’s where the artistry comes in.
There is a place for skepticism in sound reasoning, but it should be selectively employed. A distinction has to be made between skepticism as a permanent attitude, which is to be avoided at all costs, and skepticism as a fitting, even necessary, response to a particular situation.
But skepticism as a permanent attitude, a philosophical point of view, is deadly. It subverts the reasoning process before it even gets started, transforming it into a process of mis-reasoning.
A truth that is merely theoretical, and to which we do not have access, is, for all practical purposes, nonexistent.
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An agnostic is someone who maintains that he lacks enough knowledge regarding a particular issue to be able to make a definite judgment about it.
The agnostic, unlike the skeptic, neither denies the existence of truth nor its attainability. He simply claims ignorance as to the truth of a certain matter.
The person who succumbs to evasive agnosticism uses ignorance as an excuse rather than a reason. Such ignorance is the result of indifference or laziness.
A cynic is someone who makes emphatically negative estimates without sufficient evidence. A naïve optimist is someone who makes emphatically positive estimates without sufficient evidence. Both represent illogical positions. Both the cynic and the naïve optimist act out of prejudice (the word comes from the Latin praejudicare, “to judge beforehand”), because they make up their mind about a particular matter before it has been fully encountered and seriously engaged with, not to say intelligently assimilated.
