Question

mod 7 Define what it means for a set of premises to be inconsistent and outline and define all the guidelines of premise acceptability and unacceptability.

Answer 1

Answer.

Inconsistency in premises pertains to the soundness of an argument. It means that All arguments with inconsistent premises are logically valid and all conclusions can be validly inferred from a contradiction. But no such argument is sound — a sound argument is a valid argument with true premises, in which case the conclusion is necessarily true. For instance, in the following argument,

‘People don’t want to pay taxes to government. But people want services from government. So we should have a welfare state where we don’t have to pay taxes to the government.’

even though the premises may seem invalid in the sense of being logically irresistible, they are logically consistent with each other.

Thus, When it comes to value-based arguments (e.g., political, moral, and religious) we will often not be able to achieve 100% certainty of truth of the premises. it doesn't necessarily mean that we should reject the argument. For premise acceptability, the premises must meet general two standards: (1) do the premises take into account the audiences "cluster" of beliefs and values and (2) are the claims acceptable to a reasonable universal audience.

However, we cannot just yet be able to say that the claim is unacceptable. An unacceptable claim is one for which there is known evidence that directly contradicts the claim. if there isn't obvious evidence against the claim, it is not unacceptable, but merely questionable.