ABSTRACT
An argument, as it is understood in this book, has a list of premises plus a conclusion, where the premises and the conclusion are a declarative sentence. We presuppose that some arguments in natural language are correct, while others are incorrect. That is, we assume a pre-theoretical fact, a fact that we strive to “account for” by our logical theories and without which logic would lose its point. If an argument is correct, we will also say that its conclusion follows from its premises. Thus, the term “follows from,” unlike such terms as “is inferable from” or “is a consequence of,” which will be used in more or less technical senses, will refer to a pre-theoretical relation. We classify arguments according to their forms, and we search for forms that are valid in the sense that all their instances are correct. A special case of forms is logical forms; arguments with valid logical forms are called logically correct. The chapter argues that it is reasonable to see some arguments as correct but not logically correct.
