ABSTRACT
It is plain common sense that the role of an argument is to give us reasons for accepting its conclusion as true. The aim is to give an argument that the intended audience ought to be persuaded by. But we have not quite defined what it is, exactly, for an argument to do this. You might think that we have done this with the notions of deductive and inductive
soundness, but that is not quite right. One reason is that, even if we have reconstructed an argument perfectly, we cannot always tell whether or not the argument is sound. And that is because a sound argument must have true premises. A deductively sound argument is one that has true premises and which is deductively valid; an inductively sound argument is one with true premises that is inductively forceful. Since we do not always know which propositions are true and which false, we cannot always tell whether an argument is sound or not.
