Another Ch 8 Concept

Something that I found to be very useful during this assigned reading was the way the book teaches us how to use a diagram to check for valid and invalid forms. The book shows you how to make the diagram to represent the premise by breaking each sentence down into parts within each other to prove whether or not the claim is valid. For example, “All cats meow. Everything that meows is a mammal. So all cats are mammals. The “cat” area is inside the “things that meow” area and the “things that meow” area is inside the “mammal” area. From this diagram we can tell that cats ends up being inside of the mammal area representing that all cats are mammals. The diagram also shows that the premise and conclusion are true meaning the argument is valid. This concept was useful for me to learn because it helped me understand visually a lot better how to check an arguments validity.