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you anticipate someone might challenge it. This too is something any researcher does from time to time. If you are writing an essay, or a thesis, in any field at all – including the humanities and the professional disciplines as well as the natural and social sciences – you will try and make it ‘bullet proof’; you will try and think of possible challenges to your claims, and then formulate justifications of them which will buffer them against any possible challenge.

Is one direction of justification superior to another? No – they both have to meet exactly the same standards. The point of making the distinction is to recognise that sometimes we reason from the known to the (as yet) unknown, as in the hospital example, and sometimes we reason from the known not to the unknown, but to something else we know (or think we do) which lends support to our original knowledge claim. Typically, this is to something which will enable a critic or doubter to test the claim, and be satisfied that the original claim was correct.

In the first case our original data set, together with the generalizations we drew down from our general knowledge (general knowledge about common causes of clusters of food poisoning) was what led us to our conclusion. In the second case, we may have no idea of what, in our personal history, led us to the claim that is now being challenged. Rather, our confidence in our now contested claim is what leads us to think of simple ways in which we can satisfy another that we are right.

What is the moral of this tale? Do not confuse the question of what justifies me in my belief, with the question of what led me to my belief. They may coincide (as the first example suggests), but they need not (as per the second example.)

2. Induction and Deduction.

Induction and deduction are two modes of argument. There are two elements to an argument; one is the conclusion, the other is the set of premises. How many premises must an argument have? The minimum is one. The upper limit is …. there is none. An argument can have any finite number of premises.

Some examples. Here is an argument with one premise:

(Argument 1):

Mary is a spinster. (premise)
So (inference marker – to indicate that what comes next is based upon what has come before)
Mary is unmarried (conclusion).

Common inference markers in English are: “So”, “Therefore”, “Accordingly”, while mathematicians and logicians commonly use the Latin word “Ergo”.

Here is an argument with five premises:

(Argument 2):

George is a student in the front row and is under 30.
Helen is a student in the front row and is under 30.
Ian is a student in the front row and is under 30.
Jane is a student in the front row and is under 30.
Kevin is a student in the front row and is under 30.
So:
All of the students in the front row are under 30.

The first argument happens to be deductive; the second inductive. What is the difference? It has nothing to do with the number of premises. Here is an inductive argument with just one premise.

(Argument 3):

All of the metals we have examined and tested expanded when heated.
So:
All metals expand when heated.

And here is a deductive argument with two premises (the sort that Aristotle favoured, which led generations of students to wrongly think a deductive argument always had two premises. (Incidentally, if yo本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。