Inductive Analogy Help

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Reply Thu 7 May, 2009 07:35 am
Has anyone else heard of this form of inductive analogies:

a1?am =
an =
S1?Sk=
P =

Assuming someone else in the world has had a Logic teacher who used this same setup, how would you diagram the following paragraph:

"Every student I've met from OHSU believes in God. Therefore, most of the students from OHSU believe in God."

Now, what if suppositions such as below were added to the conclusion:

1) Suppose all students interviewed were on the OHSU football team?
2) Suppose all those interviewed were first-year students.

I took the above example from my philosophy text. I'm not asking for straight up answers (we've actually already turned in that homework), but I have a test coming up soon & I'm looking for someone to better explain Inductive Analogies.

Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
VideCorSpoon
 
Reply Thu 7 May, 2009 08:26 pm
@ValidandNotinUse,
I'm not directly familiar with inductive analogies or in fact the form of the setup you are using. But this may be an issue with us learning the same thing in different ways. From as much as I know about formal inductive logic that is somewhat close to what you are doing, you may be doing what I learned as analogical reasoning. But again, I don't know if this is the thing you are studying yourself. The best way to describe it is this;

An analogical form is such that;
a) X has some attributes A,B,C,D,E
b) Y has some attributes A,B,C,D
c) Y is not known to have the attribute E
d) Therefore, Y probably also has attribute E

You then have to extrapolate the answer based on relevance and the terms of the analogates.

Is this close to what you have learned? I'm trying to figure out where to begin.

The way I learned it, formal inductive reasoning came way after quantificational and modal logic. It was very difficult for me to get the swing of it and that is a really harsh part of logic to take right after propositional.
 
 

 
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