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You are confusing the distinction between validity and soundness. > That is not a valid argument, because all animals do not live on mars It would be more acc
by Pyxl101 11y ago
You are confusing the distinction between validity and soundness.
> That is not a valid argument, because all animals do not live on mars
It would be more accurate to say that it is not a sound argument because all animals do not live on mars. Validity relates to whether the conclusions follow from the premises, not whether the premises are true. (There are more constraints than that, but that's the basic version.)
- philipov 11y agoI am aware of the distinction between soundness and validity, but logic has strict types. I am referring to the type of the conclusion being wrong. "Therefore, all humans live on Mars" is not a valid conclusion from those premises if their truth value is not established. One must conclude the entire proposition "Therefore, if all animals live on Mars, then all humans live on Mars" for the argument to be valid. Our strict types are Fact, Hypothetical, and Implication. It is only valid to use possibly unsound premises if you admit their type as Hypothetical and not Fact. If our argument includes premises of type Hypothetical then it is only valid to make conclusions of type Implication, which have the form "If <Hypotheticals are True> then <Fact>." Disguising Hypothetical-type premises as Fact-type, and using that to draw conclusions of type Fact instead of type Implication is how people create strawman arguments in bad faith, and can be prevented at the validity-checking phase by enforcing strict typing.