Think Again: How to Reason and Argue

Cynicism results from unrealistic expectations.

To determine whether an argument is valid, one method is to try your best to imagine or describe a situation in which the premises are true and the conclusion is false. If you can describe a situation with this combination of truth values, then the argument is not valid.

The statements that present a reason are called premises. The proposition that they are supposed to be a reason for is called a conclusion. Hence, we can say that an argument is a connected series of premises intended to present a reason for a conclusion.