TFY Chapter 11

Summary

Inductive reasoning is a method to uncover new information of supply missing information. Induction applies logic from facts about members of a class and draws conclusions. Inductive fallacies include hasty generalizations or jumping to a conclusion, and either-or logic, which oversimplifies. Questionable statistics cannot be verified or are false. Evidence must be consistent with the reasoning or is fallacious. Loaded questions are biased and unfair, seeking a predetermined answer. False analogies are another fallacy that ignores significant differences. False cause presents connections between occurrences without supporting evidence. The slippery slope argument makes a claim that a single event will set off an inevitable chain of events.

Exercises

1. All riders in a Boston suburb pay for their rides with special credit cards. All busses are equipped with electronic scanners that record account number, route, time and date. The American public is being conditioned to complete Big Brother surveillance of the future.

Slippery slope

2. The French and the German objections to importing British beef are purely a matter of their stubborn national pride. There is no reason to believe that this beef would infect any of their citizens with mad cow disease.

False cause

3. Any regulations that dampen corporate profits in the oil and coal industries will backfire because environmental preservation depends heavily on the health of the American economy. The richer the United States is, the more it can help poorer countries with their pollution problems.

False cause

4. Some people hesitate to have children because the expense and trouble. The trouble of having children is entirely secondary to the blessing.

NF

5. Legalizing marijuana would reduce the price by 50 percent.

Questionable statistic

6. The reason that I did not stop at that light was because it was two o’clock in the morning.

False cause

7. If the baseball players start using drugs, then so will the managers, and the next thing you know is that all the games will be fixed and baseball will no longer be a real American sport.

Slippery slope

8. You should never lie to your partner, although a little white lie never hurts.

Contradiction

9. A CA investigation found no evidence linking its employee, agents, or operatives with the crack cocaine epidemic in the U.S. and no connection between the agency and three men at the center of that drug trade .The findings…dispute allegations made by the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 of a CIA link to cocaine trafficking in California. The CIA released the first of two volumes of conclusions reached by agency Inspector General Frederick Hitz, who led a 17-member team that reviewed 250,000 pages of documents and conducted 365 interviews.

NF

10. All people are equal but some deserve more privilege.

Inconsistency