Humans are smart. They know a lot of things, more than any other single organism on Earth. Along with this, they also think they know a lot of things that may or may not be correct. Yet, they still hold this knowledge to themselves, even if they have no way to prove it. These unjustified and unproven bits of knowledge are called beliefs. For a belief to become knowledge, it must be justified. Reasoning, or logic and experience, plays a key role in the justification of belief to turn it into knowledge. Logic deals with taking two or more concepts and trying to see how they relate to each other. There are two types of logic, deductive and inductive. Experience, or empiricism, is used by using impressions and ideas gained from experiences to justify…show more content… The simplest form of deductive reasoning is known as the Aristotelian Syllogism. A rough description of the syllogism is that it contains two premises, one major and one minor, and a conclusion. It is one of the easiest and most famous ways of determining the truth and validity in an argument. A syllogistic argument can be one of four things: Valid and true, valid and untrue, invalid and true, or invalid and untrue. An example of a syllogism would be the following: A) All trees are plants. B) All plants are living things. C) All trees are living things. In this example, as is the case with most syllogisms, the major premise is represented by A, the minor premise is represented by B, and the conclusion is represented by C. It is also structured as an inclusion so its validity can be proven because if plants reside in the group of living things and trees reside in the group of plants, then trees would have to be classed with living things because of their grouping with the plants. This argument is valid and true because the premises and the conclusion are all true and argument makes
