ABSTRACT
In everyday life, an argument usually means any kind of disagreement—who should clean up the room, did one member of a couple do what the other accused him or her of, and so on. Such arguments often end in screaming matches of "Did not!" "Did too!” The question is when a sequence of inductive or deductive reasoning adds up to a good argument. Some logicians use valid to refer only to the internal logic of a deductive argument—whether the conclusion follows inescapably from the premises, regardless of the adequacy of support for the premises—so that rules this word out for broader use. In common practice, however, deductive arguments—even if they are internally valid—are only as good as their premises, which must be arrived at and evaluated by the same criteria as inductive assertions. So the weakness in many deductive arguments lies in the disputability of their explicit or implicit premises.
