Week 3 - 2.1.1 Validity

Hello everyone and welcome to the third week of public reasoning. This is the starting of our unit two. As always remember to keep a pen and paper ready to take notes. Let's get started. Till now we have learned that what an argument is. An argument is a series of sentences where some sentences give

reason for believing a claim. The claim that the author wants us to believe is called the conclusion. And the reasons that the author gives to support the conclusion are presented in form of premises. That is sentences that together give reason for the conclusion. But you might be wondering in the classes that you have watched and the

exercises that you have done, how do I know if an argument is good or not? How do I know if the reasons given in the premises are good and it supports the conclusion? In the coming weeks, we will be working on this. We will be seeing if an argument is a good argument through the

concept of validity and soundness and we will be seeing how to reply to an argument through counterarguments. We will look at different kinds of argument in this unit. The first three weeks of this unit are about deductive reasoning. Eventually we will look at inductive arguments in the last three units of this week. This is the first class of

week three. The aims of this class are to understand the validity of deductive arguments to learn valid forms of arguments and to judge validity for arguments in peace of public reasoning. Let's start with an example. Suppose you have the following argument. Premise one, we will go to Delhi or we will go to Mumbai. Premise two, we will not go

to Mumbai. Conclusion, we will go to Delhi. How do you know if this is a good argument? Or in general, how do we judge any argument? So if we look at this argument properly, we can see that the argument has two things that we can judge it on form and content. So in the argument that we took