A. Page 21.
True: 1, 8, 11, 13, 15, 17.
False: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20.
B. Pages 21-23.
1. Premise: Verification consists always in the occurrence of an expected sense-datum.
Conclusion: In so far as physics or common sense is verifiable, it must be capable of interpretation in terms of actual sense-data alone.
2. Premise: The more different manifestations you observe of one phenomenon, the more deeply you understand the phenomenon.
Conclusion: The more clearly you see the vein of sameness running through all those different things.
3. There is no argument in this passage.
4. Premise: Fresnel's view of the dependency involved here is endorsed in contemporary physics.
Premise: Fresnel's mathematics for articulating the dependency is enshrined in elementary tests and is embedded in a richer mathematical framework in advanced discussions.
Conclusion: By contemporary lights, it is hardly surprising that his discussions of interference and diffraction were so strikingly successful.
5. Premise: I have not said anything that would rule out the possibility of someone’s treating considerations as authoritative that would ordinarily be regarded as amoral, or morally
eccentric, or even immoral.
Conclusion: A complementary objection would be that I have exaggerated the degree to which a fine-grained naturalistic view can accommodate traditional ideas about the authority of
morality and it might be said that I have not given any reason to think that the considerations that are authoritative for an individual will always be moral considerations, in any plausible sense of that term.
6. Premise: There is a long philosophical tradition of distinguishing between necessary and contingent truths.
Premise: The distinction is often explained along the following lines: a necessary truth is one which could not be otherwise, a contingent truth one which could be; or, the negation of
a necessary truth is impossible or contradictory, the negation of a contingent truth possible or consistent; or a necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, a contingent truth is true in the actual world but not in all possible worlds.
Premise: Such accounts aren't fully explanatory, in view of their 'could (not) be otherwise,' '(im)possible,' 'possible world.'
Conclusion: The distinction is sometimes introduced, rather, by means of examples: in a recent book '7 + 5 = 12,' 'If all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then
Socrates is mortal' and 'If a thing is red, it is coloured' are offered as examples of necessary truths, and 'The average rainfall in Los Angeles is about 12 inches' as an example of contingent truth.
7. There is no argument here. The two sentences here are conditional sentences, "if-then" sentences.
8. Premise: Homo sapiens achieved his characteristics as a biological species more than 100,000 years ago and his fundamental biological characteristics could not be drastically altered
without destroying his very being.
Premise: He developed his human attributes in the very act of responding to the environment in which he evolved.
Premise: The earth has been his cradle and will remain his home.
Conclusion: There is no hope whatever that man's biological nature can be changed enough to enable him to survive with the earth’s atmosphere; in fact, the very statement of this
possibility is meaningless.
9. Premise: Who does not recall that the big and awkward Samuel Johnson, who also was to remain ungainly all his life, was occasionally carried to school on the shoulders of the pupils in
honourable tribute to his intellectual attainments.
Conclusion: Not for a single instant can I believe that David's schoolfellows did not recognize his superior mentality, and, to some degree acknowledge it.
10. Premise #1: Individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals differ more from each other than do the individuals of any species or variety of
the same nature.
Premise #2: There is a vast diversity of the plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most different climates and treatment.
Conclusion: This great variability is due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those which parent species
had been exposed under nature.
11. Premise: What we took is not the property of others, but our ancestral heritage which for a time had been unjustly held by our enemies.
Conclusion: We have not seized any foreign land.
12. Argument #1:
Premise: Of every malice that gains hatred in Heaven the end is injustice.
Premise: Every such end, either by force or by fraud, afflicts another.
Premise: Fraud is an evil particular to man [humankind].
Premise: Fraud displeases God.
Conclusion: The fraudulent are the lower [in the circles of hell], and more pain assails them.
12. Argument #2:
Premise: Fraud is an evil that is particular to man [humankind].
Conclusion: Fraud displeases God more than other injustices.
13. There is no argument in this poem.
14. Premise: The utilitarian believes it is the majority of the people who should receive the happiness attending any action by a moral agent.
Conclusion: The primary defect of utilitarianism is that it ignores the rights of individuals and always creates a minority group whose needs and desires go unfulfilled.
15. Premise #1: Heat is a secondary quality, unlike solidity.
Premise #2: Secondary qualities are not in the objects themselves.
Conclusion Fire is not hot.
C. Pages 23-28
1. Premise: We know there is a level of naive, commonsense, grandmother psychology
Premise: We know there is a level of neurophysiology, the level of neurons and neuron modules and synapses and neuro-transmitters and boutons.
Conclusion 1: There is no need to suppose that between these two levels there is also a level of mental processes which are computational processes.
Conclusion 2: There is no need to suppose that it's at that level that the brain performs those functions that we regard as essential to the survival of the organism, namely the function
of information processing.
2. There are two arguments in this passage:
A. Premise #1: Men are disturbed not by things, but the views they take of things.
Premise #2: If death were terrible, then Socrates would have thought it terrible.
Conclusion: Death is not terrible.
B. Premise: Our terror of death consiste in our notion of death, that it is terrible.
Conclusion: When we are hindered or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves, that is, to our own views.
3. Premise #1: When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or not, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves
to my view
Premise #2: Likewise as to the hearing and other senses, the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will.
Conclusion: Some other spirit produces the ideas I have via the senses.
4. Premise: Odysseus' was always daring.
Conclusion: Odysseus was willing to go with Diomedes.
5. See page 230 in First Logic, 3/e by Michael F. Goodman.
6. There is no argument in this passage.
7. Premise: It was pointless to order the troops to put the fires in the town out.
Premise 2: Here and there, smoke was rising from the fires which they had lit in ovens and out of doors.
Premise 3: Having collected their loot, soldiers were sprawled around their camp-fires like gypsies.
Conclusion: The Narva regiment had changed in two hours. [Note: I think this is a hard one. The problem lies in not having the text in front of us which shows how the regiment was before
they had changed. Nonetheless, they'd started fires, they were sprawled like gypsies. This certainly doesn't sound like a military regiment's actions. I take the assertion that they had changed to follow from the three sentences above.]
8. There are two arguments here.
A.
Premise 1: In the absence of regulation of aggregate demand there would be unpredictable and almost certainly large fluctuations in demand and therewith in sales and production.
Premise 2: In the absence of regulation of aggregate demand planning would be gravely impaired, capital and technology would have to be used much more cautiously and far less effectively than now.
Premise 3: In the absence of regulation of aggregate demand the position of the technostructure would be far less secure.
Conclusion: The regulation of aggregate demand is an organic requirement of the industrial system.
B.
Premise 1: The position of the technostructure is endangered by the failure of earnings.
Premise 2: (Implied) The absence of regulation entails the failure of earnings.
Conclusion: In the absence of regulation, the position of the technostructure is endangered.
[Note: This argument almost looks like it begs the question, but the first premise should be taken as a conditional. That corrects it.]
9. Premise: It is traditional to think of the difference between an analog and a digital encoding of information as the difference between a continuous and a discrete representation of some
variable property at the source.
Premise: Different speeds represented on a speedometer are represented by different positions of the pointer.
Conclusion: The speedometer on an automobile constitutes an analog encoding of information about the vehicle’s speed.
10. See page 230 in First Logic, 3/e, by Michael F. Goodman
11. Premise 1: 'Conscious that' is at least unusual if not outright one of those things we 'do not say'.
Premise 2: 'Conscious of' and 'aware of' are as close to being synonymous -- to my ear -- as any terms we are apt to find in ordinary language.
Conclusion: A step in the direction of clarity and order can be taken by abandoning 'conscious that' and rendering 'conscious of' always as 'aware of', thus forming all the Intentional idioms
with 'aware'.
12.
Premise: If any library book of divinity or school metaphysics fails to contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number, or any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact
and existence, then it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Conclusion: Burn these books.
13. There is no argument in this passage.
14. Premise: Whatever features an individual male person has which tend to his social and economic disadvantage (his age, class, height, etc.), one feature which never tends to his disadvantage in
the society at large is his maleness.
Premise: Whatever features an individual female person has which tend to her social and economic advantage (her age, race, etc.), one feature which always tends to her disadvantage is her
femaleness.
Conclusion: Therefore, when a male's sex-category is the thing about him that gets first and most repeated notice, the thing about him that is being framed and emphasized and given primacy is a
feature which in general is an asset to him... When a female's sex-category is the thing about her that gets first and most repeated notice, the thing about her that is being framed and emphasized
and given primacy is a feature which in general is a liability to her.
15. See page 231 in First Logic, 3/e, by Michael F. Goodman.
16. There are 6 arguments here.
A.
Premise 1: At that time, which we call the big bang, the density of the universe and the curvature of space-time would have been infinite.
Premise 2: Mathematics cannot really handle infinite numbers.
Conclusion: The general theory of relativity predicts that there is a point in the universe where the theory itself breaks down.
B.
Premise 1: The point of theory breakdown is an example of what mathematicians call a singularity.
Premise 2: All our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat.
Premise 3: At the big bang, the curvature of space-time is infinite.
Conclusion: Theories break down at the big bang singularity.
C.
Premise 1: Predictability would break down at the big bang.
Conclusion: Even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward.
D.
Premise 1: The point of theory breakdown is an example of what mathematicians call a singularity.
Premise 2: At the big bang, theory breaks down.
Conclusion: The big bang is a singularity.
E.
Premise 1: As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences.
Conclusion: Events before the big bang should not even form part of a scientific model of the universe.
F.
Premise 1: As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences.
Premise 2: Events before the big bang should not even form part of a scientific model of the universe.
Conclusion: We should cut events before the big bang out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang.
17. Premise: If positivism be taken in its widest sense, the sense in which it embraces all shades of analytical, linguistic, or radically empirical philosophy, it is dominant in England and
in Scandinavia, and commands considerable allegiance in Holland and Belgium, in Australia and the United States.
Premise: Elsewhere, positivism makes hardly any showing at all.
Conclusion: At the present time, the philosophical world is curiously divided.
18. Premise: The word “snob” began as an all-purpose insult, used to express contempt.
Premise: By now it has certainly earned its evil reputation.
Premise: For us snobbery means the habit of making inequality hurt.
Premise: The snob fawns on his superiors and rejects his inferiors.
Premise: While the snob annoys and insults those who have to live with him, he injures himself as well, because he has lost the very possibility of self-respect.
Premise: To be afraid of the taint of associations from below is to court ignorance of the world.
Premise: To yearn for those above one is to be always ashamed not only of one’s actual situation, but of one’s family, one’s available friends, and oneself.
Conclusion 1: Snobbery is simply a very destructive vice.
Conclusion 2: The word "snob" has had many meanings since it surfaced in the late Middle Ages, none of them good.
19. Premise: Relations of power are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of
these differentiations.
Premise: Relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play.
Conclusion: Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent
in the latter.
20. See page 231 in First Logic, 3/e, by Michael F. Goodman
21. Premise: Many scholars are attracted to constructivist conceptions of truth and rationality independently of any overt concern with the doctrine of equal validity—the view... that there
are many radically different "equally valid" ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them.
Premise: Whatever the source of their appeal, we are not in a position to lay out clearly why equal validity will seem plausible to anyone who finds even one of these constructivist theses true.
Conclusion: Thus, if fact-constructivism were true, we couldn't just say that there is some fact of the matter out there about where the first Americans originated.
22. Premise: The main reason no one being perfectly adapted to her/his specific environment is perhaps that every genotype represents a compromise of genetic variability and stability.
Conclusion: No individual is ever perfectly adapted.
23. Premise: Each of the steps in the explanation is justified by a principle deemed necessary by the theory, either a bridge principle of an internal principle.
Premise: The network of internal principles and bridge principles is supposed to secure the deductive character of scientific explanation.
Premise: To explain why lasers amplify light signals, one starts with a description in the antecedent vocabulary of how a laser is constructed.
Premise: A bridge principle matches this with a description couched in the language of the quantum theory.
Premise: The internal principles of quantum mechanics predict what should happen in situations meeting this theoretical description, and a second bridge principle carries the results back
into the proposition describing the observed amplification.
Conclusion: The explanation is deductive.
24. Premise: He who merely believes in the word of God knows more than the greatest philosophers have ever known concerning the only matters of vital importance.
Conclusion: We should feel justified in saying that the simplest among Christians has a philosophy of his own, which is the only true philosophy, and whose name is: Revelation.
25. See page 231 in First Logic, 3/e, by Michael F. Goodman.
1. Division
2. Equivocation
3. Argumentum ad Populum
4. Hasty Generalization
5. Argumentum ad Baculum
6. Deontic Fallacy
7. False Cause
8. No fallacy
9. Argumentum ad Hominem
10. Division
11. Argumentum ad Populum
12. False Cause
13. No fallacy
14. Petitio Principii
15. Argumentum ad Hominem
16. No fallacy
17. Argumentum ad Vericundiam
18. Argumentum ad Hominem
19. No fallacy
20. No fallacy
21. Composition
22. No fallacy
23. Limited Alternative
24. Argumentum ad Misericordiam
25. Argumentum ad Hominem
26. Argumentum ad Populem
27. Accident
28. False Cause
29. Hasty Generalization
30. No fallacy
31. Petitio Principii
32. No fallacy
33. Argumentum ad Populum
34. Argumentum ad Hominem
35. Deontic fallacy
36. Petitio Principii
37. Equivocation
38. No fallacy
39. Argumentum ad vericundiam
40. Straw Person
Last updated: 7 July 2015