Logic assignment

VALIDITY

Submitted to:
Miss Fozia Akram

Submitted by:
IRFAN KHAN
 Contents.

Sr. Content Page no.

1 Defination 1

2. TYPES OF VALIDITY 1

3. ARGUMENT 2

4. VALIDITY OF INFERENCE OF A DEDUCTIVE ARGUMENT 6

5. SOUND ARGUMENT 7

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 VALIDITY

DEFINITION

The term validity as it occurs in logic refers generally to a property of deductive

arguments, although many logic texts apply the term to statements as well (a statement is
a sentence that “has a truth value,” i.e., that is either true or false).

or

the best available approximation to the truth of a given proposition, inference, or

conclusion

TYPES OF VALIDITY:

We subdivide validity into four types. Each type addresses a specific methodological
question. In order to understand the types of validity, you have to know something about
how we investigate a research question. Because all four validity types are really only
operative when studying causal questions, we will use a causal study to set the context.

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ARGUMENT

An argument may be defined as follows:

• An argument is a set of statements, one of which is the conclusion and

the rest of which are premises. The premises are reasons intended to show
that the conclusion is, or is probably, true.

When an argument is set forth to show that its conclusion is true (as opposed to probably
true), then the argument is intended to be deductive. An argument set forth to show that
its conclusion is probably true may be regarded as inductive. To say that an argument is
valid is to say that the conclusion really does follow from the premises. That is, an
argument is valid precisely when it cannot possibly lead from true premises to a false
conclusion. The following definition is fairly typical:

• An argument is deductively valid if it cannot possibly have all true

premises and a false conclusion.

An argument that is not valid is said to be ‘’invalid’’.

The following is a famous example of a deductively valid argument:

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

What makes this a valid argument is not the mere fact that it has true premises and a true
conclusion, but the fact of the logical impossibility of things being otherwise. No matter
how the universe might be constructed, it could never be the case that this argument
should turn out to have simultaneously true premises but a false conclusion. The above
argument may be contrasted with the following invalid one:

All men are mortal

Socrates is mortal
Therefore, Socrates is a man

In this case, there is no impossibility of true premises but false conclusion: it is easily
imagined that there is a woman named ‘Socrates’, so that in fact the above premises
would be true but the conclusion false—hence it is possible that the argument has true
premises and a false conclusion. This possibility is what constitutes invalidity. (Although
whether or not an argument is valid does not depend on what anyone could actually
imagine to be the case, this approach helps us evaluate some arguments.)

A standard view is that whether an argument is valid is a matter of the argument’s logical
form. Many techniques are employed by logicians to represent an argument’s logical
form. A simple example, applied to the above two illustrations, is the following: Let the

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letters ‘P’, ‘Q’, and ‘s’ stand, respectively, for the set of men, the set of mortals, and
Socrates. Using these symbols, the first argument may be abbreviated as:

All P are Q
s is a P
Therefore, s is a Q

Similarly, the second argument becomes:

All P are Q
s is a Q
Therefore, s is a P.

These abbreviations make plain the logical form of each respective argument. At this
level, notice that we can talk about any arguments that may take on one or the other of the
above two configurations, by replacing the letters P, Q and s by appropriate expressions.
Of particular interest is the fact that we may exploit an argument's form to help discover
whether or not the argument from which it has been obtained is or is not valid. To do this,
we define an “interpretation” of the argument as an assignment of sets of objects to the
upper-case letters in the argument form, and the assignment of a single individual
member of a set to the lower-case letters of the argument form. Thus, letting P stand for
the set of men, Q stand for the set of mortals, and s stand for Socrates is an interpretation
of each of the above arguments. Using this terminology, we may give a formal analogue
of the definition of deductive validity:

• An argument is formally valid if its form is one for which no

interpretation exists under which the premises are all true but the
conclusion false.

As already seen, the interpretation given above does cause the second argument form to
have true premises and false conclusion, hence demonstrating its invalidity.

To really make use of these definitions, much more must be added to discuss “truth under
an interpretation,” and techniques produced to determine whether or not any
interpretations, or none, would make the premises true and conclusion false. Merely
showing that an interpretaiton exists under which the premises are true and the
conclusion true as well does not prove that there is no interpretation that would make the
premises true and conclusion false. These and related are matters taken up in the formal
study of logic.

Since deductive reasoning requires such a strong relationship between premises and
conclusion, we will spend the majority of this survey studying various patterns of
deductive inference. It is therefore worthwhile to consider the standard of correctness for
deductive arguments in some detail.

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A deductive argument is said to be valid when the inference from premises to conclusion
is perfect. Here are two equivalent ways of stating that standard:

• If the premises of a valid argument are true, then its conclusion must also be true.
• It is impossible for the conclusion of a valid argument to be false while its
premises are true.

(Considering the premises as a set of propositions, we will say that the premises are true
only on those occasions when each and every one of those propositions is true.) Any
deductive argument that is not valid is invalid: it is possible for its conclusion to be false
while its premises are true, so even if the premises are true, the conclusion may turn out
to be either true or false.

Validity of the inference of a deductive argument

Notice that the validity of the inference of a deductive argument is independent of the
truth of its premises; both conditions must be met in order to be sure of the truth of the
conclusion. Of the eight distinct possible combinations of truth and validity, only one is
ruled out completely:

Premises Inference Conclusion

True
Valid
XXXX
True
True
Invalid
False
True
Valid
False
False
True
Invalid
False

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The only thing that cannot happen is for a deductive argument to have true premises and
a valid inference but a false conclusion.

SOUND ARGUMENT:

Some logicians designate the combination of true premises and a valid inference as a
sound argument; it is a piece of reasoning whose conclusion must be true. The trouble
with every other case is that it gets us nowhere, since either at least one of the premises is
false, or the inference is invalid, or both. The conclusions of such arguments may be
either true or false, so they are entirely useless in any effort to gain new information.