Introduction
d. My house is a post-war bungalow. 1. Every morning, if it is going to be a sunny day, the rooster in the yard crows. 2. Tomorrow is probably going to be a sunny day, just like
C. They might follow correctly and logically from the statements that came before them, if only we had a little bit more information. Without your deliberate, conscious awareness, your mind probably filled in that extra information with statements like these ones:
the last few days. 3. Therefore –
1. Maybe all the postwar bungalows in this neighbour-
a. That rooster is more reliable as the TV weather-
hood are rotting, decrepit shacks.
man.
2. Maybe the rooster has never got it wrong so far, unlike
b. One of these days, I’m going to kill that horrible
the TV weatherman, who makes mistakes all the time.
creature!
3. The reason I’ll be hiding in my bedroom is because I
c. My old clock on the wall is a family heirloom.
will want to read the book without anybody disturbing
d. Tomorrow morning, that rooster will probably
me.
crow again.
4. People who give great gifts deserve to be thanked.
1. If the surprise birthday present is a Harry Potter book, it will be a great gift. 2. The surprise birthday present is a Harry Potter book. 3. Therefore – a. I’m going to hide in my bedroom for a few hours. b. I really owe the person who gave it to me a big thank-you! c. I have to fix the leaky roof over the kitchen today. d. It’s a great gift.
In each of these examples, the best answer is ption D. So long as the first two statements are true, o then the third one, option D, must be true. You also know that in both examples, option C doesn’t belong. It has nothing to do with the two statements that came before it. To claim that option C should come next is not logical. Perhaps option C would make sense if it was part of a joke, or a very complicated discussion of housing development plans for pirates, or inheritance laws involving clocks and farm animals, or how author J.K. Rowling doesn’t like leaky houses. But in these examples, we do not have that extra information. Going only with the information that we have been given, option C cannot be the correct answer. The best answer, in each case, is option D. Of all the four options offered here, option D has the strongest support from the statements that came before it. But look again at the options A and B in all three examples. These options were not as silly as option
None of these statements appeared among the initial premises of the argument. Nothing in the initial premises told you anything about these possibilities. They come from outside the argument as presented so far. But that subtle relation between statements allowed you to add something consistent and plausible to the argument in order to move the argument from the premises you had, to conclusions A or B. You might even fill the space with more than one sentence to make the move, as we did in the third possibility above. Logic is the study of relations among ideas like these. If you could handle these three examples here with ease, then you can handle everything else in this textbook just as easily. The Process of Reasoning The chapters of this book roughly follow a path that I shall refer to as ‘The Process of Reasoning’. In the first chapter, I will describe the ‘backdrop’ or the ‘setting’ in which this process takes place. This backdrop consists of problems, intellectual environments, and world views. The next chapters follow the stages of the ‘Process of Reasoning’ itself, which are: Observe and Question. This first stage requires us to gather as much information as we can about one’s situation and one’s problems. This stage is studied
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