5. An automatic bell above the front door rings whenever a customer enters the front door of the Town Convenience Store. Therefore, one can accurately determine the number of customers who enter Town Convenience on any given day simply by counting the number of rings from the front door bell.
(1) The argument depends on which of the following assumptions?
(2) The conclusion follows logically if which of the following is assumed?
X The bell never fails to ring when a customer enters the front door of the store.
Why the book says that this is just a premise booster? I thought it should be a necessary assumption. Because if we negate it, we’ll get ‘the bell fails to ring when a customer enters the front door of the store’, which will destroy the argument. Thank you.
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Re: Drill 5 pg.95 ‘An automatic bell …’ Need help
You’re absolutely right that if we took this idea away — that is, if we no longer knew the bell rings whenever customers enter — we would certainly not be able to tally customers by the tolling of the bell.
So, bravo for your application and understanding of the negation test. If you kill an idea, and that death also kills the logic of an argument, then that idea was indeed necessary to the logic.
The hangup here is one of definition: we don’t have to assume that the bell will never fail to ring because we were blatantly told that this is true by the premise. By definition, assumptions must be unstated.
Premises can be and often are imperative to the logic of the argument, but they are never necessary assumptions for the simple reason that they are known, not assumed.
E.g. In the following argument: “All the teenagers in this room are wearing blue shirts, therefore everyone in the room is wearing a blue shirt.” If we took the fact re: teenagers and blue away, the logic of “everyone here is wearing blue” would certainly die, so the premise is necessary to the logic, just as in the bell argument.
But it is not necessary to assume the teenagers are wearing blue, because, again, we’ve been told this by a premise.
Instead, what we would need to assume is, e.g., that if any other age group is in the room, they are also wearing blue t-shirts. And we have to <assume> that because neither other age groups nor any hypothetical clothing they may be wearing are mentioned.
So, bravo for your application and understanding of the negation test. If you kill an idea, and that death also kills the logic of an argument, then that idea was indeed necessary to the logic.
The hangup here is one of definition: we don’t have to assume that the bell will never fail to ring because we were blatantly told that this is true by the premise. By definition, assumptions must be unstated.
Premises can be and often are imperative to the logic of the argument, but they are never necessary assumptions for the simple reason that they are known, not assumed.
E.g. In the following argument: “All the teenagers in this room are wearing blue shirts, therefore everyone in the room is wearing a blue shirt.” If we took the fact re: teenagers and blue away, the logic of “everyone here is wearing blue” would certainly die, so the premise is necessary to the logic, just as in the bell argument.
But it is not necessary to assume the teenagers are wearing blue, because, again, we’ve been told this by a premise.
Instead, what we would need to assume is, e.g., that if any other age group is in the room, they are also wearing blue t-shirts. And we have to <assume> that because neither other age groups nor any hypothetical clothing they may be wearing are mentioned.
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