Practice Exercises

With each of the following, first tell me whether it is an argument. If it is an argument,

circle the conclusion, and tell me what type of argument it is. Explain your answer IN
DETAIL.

[1] In the sample of people we polled, 85% of people like Darth Vader better than Donald
Trump. So, in the population at large, 85% of people like Darth Vader better than Donald
Trump.

This next passage contains two arguments:

[2] Of course God exists. That's the only way to explain miracles. [3] A miracle is, by
definition, an event that violates a law of nature. So miracles can't have a natural
explanation; they have to have a supernatural source.

[4] The United States is an incredibly over-reactionary society where the mindless forces
of victim demagoguery have unfortunately joined with the child-worship industry. It is
obviously tragic that some American psychopaths go on shooting sprees at elementary
schools.

[5] What is loosely called the "scientific method" can be nothing more than a work habit
that skilled investigators possess, not a finite set of established principles which
researchers explicitly apply and acknowledge. After all, most scientists could not
intelligibly describe in the least the method they use to test and support their hypotheses.

Suggested Answers
 [1] is an inductive argument; the conclusion is the second sentence. That’s because the
premise basically registers a statistical feature of some example-set of the population, and
the conclusion then attributes this feature to a further set (namely, the whole population).

[2] is abductive, and the conclusion is the first sentence. It is abductive because the
conclusion (obviously) is offered as an explanation of the premise. But moreover, it is not
deductive nor is it inductive. It is not deductive because it is possible that there are other
explanations for miracles (e.g., wizards, demons, freak accidents). It is not inductive
because it is not extrapolating from known cases of a phenomenon to unknown cases.
[3] is deductive (assuming that ‘natural’ means “something that cannot violate
laws of nature,” and ‘supernatural’ means “something that can violate laws of nature”).
The last sentence is the conclusion. The argument is deductive because the following is
not possible: that miracles are violations of the laws of nature, and that the source of the
miracle is something that cannot violate laws of nature.
Ted says: Since [3] is being offered together with [2], there is a way in which they
compose into one long argument. Basically, the person is trying to argue that God
explains miracles, because nothing natural could explain them. Yet the conclusion that
God explains them does not deductively follow from the conclusion in [2]. (Conceivably,
there could be other supernatural beings which explain miracles.) Still, perhaps [3] is
meant to tighten the abduction in [2].

[4] might be intended to support a conclusion, but it isn’t clear which statement would be
the premise and which would be the conclusion. For this reason, it may be best to say this
is “not an argument” but rather just a pair of unsupported statements. (That is so, even
though these statements may be plausible on their own.) Yet depending on the context,
one could imagine the second sentence acting as a premise for the first. In that case, the
argument would seem to be abductive. It would not be deductive, since the conclusion is
a rather dramatic generalization from a single type of case in the premise. (U.S. society as
a whole could conceivably be civilized, even if there are a few psychopaths.) It is not
inductive since the conclusion is not predicting—at least not explicitly—that there will be
more shootings at U.S. elementary schools in the future. But the conclusion, in some
sense, would act as an explanation of the premise…and so, that solidifies the case that the
argument would be abductive.

With [5], the conclusion would be the first sentence, and it would be abductive. The
argument is not deductive, since it is possible for scientists to be unaware of their own
method, even if the method consists in precise rules. And it is not inductive since it is not
extrapolating from known cases of a single phenomenon to some unknown cases of the
same phenomenon. Moreover, the conclusion would explain the lack of awareness on the
part of scientists as to a precise method.