LogicMark Pursley

Identifying Arguments

Which of the following passages are arguments? Identify the conclusion of each argument.

  1. This would not have occurred but for the press who have dogged them everywhere. (Al Fayed)
  2. The day will surely come when each soul will be confronted with whatever good it has done. As for its evil deeds, it will wish they were a long way off. (Qur’an 3.30)
  3. Our ideas reach no farther than our experience: We have no experience of divine attributes and operations: I need not conclude my syllogism: You can draw the inference yourself. (David Hume)
  4. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice to the beasts: a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)
  5. He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger. (Confucius)
  6. I believe one should be agnostic when belief one way or the other is mere idle speculation, incapable of verification; when belief is held merely to gratify desires, however deep seated, and not because it is forced on us by evidence; and when belief may be taken by others to be more firmly grounded than it really is, and so come to encourage false hopes or wrong attitudes of mind. (Sir Julian Huxley)
  7. Determinism is not incompatible with moral responsibility. Determinism implies that our behavior is caused. Moral responsibility requires only the ability to restrain some desires to realize an anticipated benefit (such as preventing harm to ourselves or others). Knowing that an action is likely to have harmful consequences should cause us to avoid it. (Mark Pursley)
  8. If the experimenter would not be prepared to use a human infant, then his readiness to use nonhuman animals reveals an unjustifiable form of discrimination on the basis of species, since adult apes, monkeys, dogs, cats, rats, and other mammals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing, and, so far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to pain as a human infant. (Peter Singer)
  9. What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a chain of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether the premise is true. (Carl Sagan)
  10. Life is 99% what you make it. So, if your life sucks, you suck. (Suicidal Tendencies)
  1. A smaller percentage of Catholics committed suicide than did Protestants during the last quarter of the nineteenth century because the institutional arrangements under which the Catholics lived made for a greater degree of “social cohesion” than did the social organizations of the Protestants. (Ernest Nagel)
  2. If anyone is able to make good the assertion that his theology rests upon valid evidence and sound reasoning, then it appears to me that such theology must take its place as a part of science. (Thomas H. Huxley)
  3. It is as reasonable for those who experience their lives as being lived in the presence of God, to believe in the reality of God, as for all of us to form beliefs about our environment on the basis of our experience of it. (John Hick)
  4. When one sees that everything exists as an illusion, one can live in a higher sphere than ordinary man. (The Buddha)
  5. For if the mind dies wholly when life abandons it, that very life which deserts it is understood much better as mind, as now mind is not something deserted by life, but the very life itself which deserted. For whatever dead thing is said to be abandoned by life, is understood to be deserted by the soul. Moreover, this life which deserts the things which die is itself the mind, and it does not abandon itself; hence the mind does not die. (Saint Augustine)
  6. The intellectual principle, which we call the mind or the intellect, has an operation in which the body does not share. Now only that which subsists in itself can have an operation in itself. ... We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called intellect or mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent. (Saint Thomas Aquinas S.T. Ia, 75 2)
  7. Unless you can react against the brainwash from the start, your government will rule your mind and your mind will rule your heart. You’ll conform to every social law and be the system’s slave, from birth to school to work to death from the cradle to the grave. (Subhumans)