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Is this abduction an "Affirming the Consequent" fallacy?Greetings. I'm a begginer in philosophy. A few minutes ago, I readed in this link an example of abduction which is the next one. All men are mortal Socrates is a mortal Socrates is a men I see a problem in this abduction, because it has the form of the previous fallacy. If P then Q Q Then P. What about Socrates is a woman (for example) or a pet's name (a cat's name)? I hope this example doesn't mean abduction is invalid. NOTE: I'm not a native English speaker. I readed the example here: www.solvingforpattern.org. . .
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asked on Saturday, Jan 29, 2022 08:19:41 PM by Cristian | |||||
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Back to the original question about Abduction and Affirming the Consequent, Abduction is the process of assuming something is true because it is the simplest explanation of something that’s observed. So if X’s fingerprints are found on the murder weapon, the detective can “abduce” that X may have been the killer. In that sense, abduction is a type of “affirming the consequent”: If X used the gun to commit the crime, X’s fingerprints would be on the murder weapon. X’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon. Therefore X used the gun to commit the crime. — Initially, it should be noted that unlike deductive reasoning, the claim is not that the conclusion must follow from the premises, but only that it is a "valid" hypothesis.* In everyday life we use such reasoning all the time (we see something and we assume that whatever was the most straightforward cause did in fact cause it). But it’s a hypothesis, not a certainty. BTW: It seems unintuitive to apply abduction to an abstract argument such as All men are mortal / Socrates etc. — *As Cristian points out, it is deductively invalid to say: If P then Q. Q Therefore P. In deductive logic that is the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent.
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answered on Sunday, Jan 30, 2022 11:06:55 AM by Ed F | |
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There are three different issues here. First, the form is invalid. It violates the fallacy of Categorical Logic called the Fallacy of Undistributed Middle. The term "Distributed" means that a statement must be true about every member of the class. In at least one premise the middle term must be distributed for the argument to be valid. The Middle term is the term that appears in both premises, in this case "mortal". It is not distributed in either premise and thus commits this fallacy. As to the two meanings of the word "man", that's the fallacy of Equivocation--where a term with two different meanings is used in the same argument in two different ways. Finally, the issue here is whether the argument is deductively valid. The term "abduction" refers to something else--where one forms a conclusion based on the best evidence available at the time. That's not what's going on. here.
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answered on Saturday, Jan 29, 2022 09:15:34 PM by Ed F | ||||
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Yes it indeed is. If you accept that all people who are humans are mortal, then saying, "If all matter that is human is mortal, then everything that is mortal means it is human" though the conclusion may sound correct, the way used to get to that conclusion is immensely incongruent and needs to be looked at because obviously, there are things that are not human and are still mortal, for instance birds. |
answered on Saturday, Jan 29, 2022 08:48:11 PM by Destone | |
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