CCC8011

Critical Thinking: Analysis and Argumentation

6. Inductive Reasoning

Lingnan University, Hong Kong

peterhawke@ln.edu.hk

Term 2, 2020-2021
 Admin

Readings and further exercises for this topic:

https://philosophy.hku.hk/think/arg/
Lau A08, A11
 Introduction

Recall: good arguments have at least two features:

• true premises
• the premises support the conclusion
 Introduction

Recall:
the premises in an argument support its conclusion when either:
• Option 1: the premises entail the conclusion
(i.e. conclusion is true in every possible situation where the
premises are true)

• Option 2: or, the truth of the premises at least make it

sufficiently likely that the conclusion is true.
(i.e. conclusion is true in significantly many possible situations
where the premises are true)
 Introduction

Recall: an argument is valid when its premises entail its

conclusion.
Compare: an argument is inductively strong when it isn’t valid
and yet the premises strongly support the conclusion.
Inductive logic studies inductively strong arguments.

Today: we discuss inductive logic.

1 Inductive strength and probability.

2 Key differences between valid and inductively strong
arguments.
3 Types of inductive argument.
 Inductive Strength and Probability

Argument 1:
93% of Chinese have lactose intolerance.
Lee is Chinese

Lee has lactose intolerance

Invalid! Lee could be in the 7%.

But! If the premises are known to be true, Argument 1 is a

good argument: if you had to bet, the argument shows you should
bet that Lee is lactose intolerant.
 Inductive Strength and Probability

Argument 2:
It has never snowed in Jakarta in the last 50 years.

It is not going to snow in Jakarta this year.

Invalid! Jakarta could get unexpectedly bad weather.

But! If the premise is known to be true, Argument 2 is a

good argument: it would make a reasonable person very confident
that it won’t snow in Jakarta this year.
 Inductive Strength and Probability

Def: An argument is inductively strong iff

• it is invalid, and
• its conclusion is very likely given that its premises are true.

While arguments 1 and 2 aren’t valid, they are inductively strong.

Def. An argument is inductive iff it is intended to be inductively

strong.
 Inductive Strength and Probability

An argument that isn’t inductively strong:

Someone is standing

No one is on Pluto

On the basis of common knowledge, we can conclude that the

premise and the conclusion are extremely likely to be true.
But the premise doesn’t support the conclusion: the truth of the
premise doesn’t by itself make the conclusion very likely.
 Inductive Strength and Probability

Notation: ‘Pr (C |A)’ means ‘the probability of C given A’

(or in other words ‘how likely a perfectly rational person should
think C is given they only know A’)

Pr (C |A) is between 0 and 1.

 Inductive Strength and Probability

For the purposes of our course: An argument (premises P1 , . . . ,

Pn , conclusion C ) is:
• Valid iff Pr (C |P1 and P2 . . . and Pn ) = 1

• Inductively strong iff Pr (C |P1 and P2 . . . and Pn ) is greater

than or equal to 0.75 but less than 1
• Inductively weak iff Pr (C |P1 and P2 . . . and Pn ) is greater
than 0.5 and less than 0.75
• Inductively irrelevant iff Pr (C |P1 and P2 . . . and Pn ) = 0.5

• Inductively bad iff Pr (C |P1 and P2 . . . and Pn ) is less than 0.5

 Inductive Strength and Probability

Example:

x% of Chinese have lactose intolerance

Lee is Chinese

Lee has lactose intolerance

The argument has greater inductive strength if x=99 than if x is

95 (although in both cases, the argument is inductively strong)
The argument has greater inductive badness if x=1 than if x is 10
(although in both cases, the argument is inductively bad)
 Entailment vs. Inductive Strength

A inductively strong argument can be turned into an inductively

weak or an inductively bad argument by adding premises to it.
Argument:

Mary fell off the roof of a 50 story building

Mary is dead
 Entailment vs. Inductive Strength

Modified argument:

Mary fell of the roof of a 50 story building

Mary landed on a big soft tent on the ground floor of the
building

Mary is dead

The conclusion becomes less likely when the extra premise is added.
 Entailment vs. Inductive Strength

It is not possible to turn a valid argument into an argument that is

not valid by adding premises to it.
Example:

Hong Kong is a city

If Hong Kong is a city then it has more than 20000 people

Hong Kong has more than 20000 people

 Entailment vs. Inductive Strength

It is not possible to turn a valid argument into an argument that is

not valid by adding premises to it.
Modified Example:

Hong Kong is a city

If Hong Kong is a city then it has more than 20000 people
Hong Kong has a smaller population than London

Hong Kong has more than 20000 people

Adding a premise doesn’t change the fact that the other premises
necessitate the conclusion.
 Entailment vs. Inductive Strength

So validity and inductive strength differ in at least two ways:

• An argument is either valid or not.
• Inductive strength is a matter of degree.

• Valid arguments can’t become invalid by adding premises

• Inductively strong arguments can become inductively weak by
adding premises.
 Two Types of Inductive Argument

There are different types of inductive argument. Two typical ones:

• Abductive arguments.
• Statistical generalizations.
 Two Types of Inductive Argument

Abductive arguments have this form:

A.
The best explanation for A is B.

B.
 Two Types of Inductive Argument

Example:

The street is wet and the surrounding cars are wet.

The best explanation for the street being wet and the
surrounding cars being wet is that it rained last night.

It rained last night.

 Two Types of Inductive Argument

Statistical generalizations have this form:

A large and unbiased sample of things from population A has

been observed to have property P.

The whole of population A has property P.

 Two Types of Inductive Argument

Example:

We have observed a large and unbiased sample of spiders and

all of the observed spiders produce silk.

Every spider produces silk.