Some/All

It is particularly important in sorting out inductive and deductive arguments to be sensitive to the difference between some and all. This may seem an obvious point, but it is one that it is easy to lose in the twists and turns of an argument—or indeed in making off-hand observations about things that seem self-evident.

Example:

"I don't know about that job candidate. We've hired people from that school before and, to be honest, they really haven't worked out. Let's look again at the other candidates."

The implicit assumption here is of course that since some graduates of a particular school have not worked out, it follows that all graduates of the same school will not work out at this particular sort of job.

The distinction between some and all should also be kept in mind when it comes to arguments with several interconnected strands. Does what one is saying apply to all the facts of the argument, or only to some of them?

Example:

"What on earth is wrong with spinster, chairman, mankind, or, for that matter, adjectives such as blind and deaf, to name just a few? These are perfectly legitimate and serviceable terms, yet an arbitrary, malevolent connotation has been assigned them. In their place we are asked to draw from a silly artificial glossary of convoluted euphemisms to describe people and events, a glossary replete with all manner of adverbs with the word challenged suffixed leech-like to them."

The writer here is arguing against bias-free language. The core of the argument is that the new terms we are asked to use are silly, artificial, and convoluted. That may well be true of a term such as mentally challenged. But notice how difficult it is to make such claims stick with all or even most of the examples here. The non-sexist alternatives for chairman and mankind—chair, humanity, and the like—are hardly silly, artificial, or convoluted. And are we in fact asked to replace the word deaf with aurally-challenged? Not at all. Those working in the field do indeed use aurally-challenged as a blanket term to refer to all those who have any hearing impairment, ranging from mild loss of hearing to complete deafness, but they do not shy away from using terms such as deaf and partially deaf. In short, the objection raised by this writer to "politically correct" language in general turns out to apply only to a very few instances.

If/Then

The if ... then syntactical structure is a basic form of both deductive and inductive arguments.


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