Rivera-Williams_wk 1 Phi 103_assignment

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Feb 20, 2024

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DISTIGUISHING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INFERENCE AND ASSUMPTION By: Frances Rivera-Williams PHI 103: Informal Logic Professor John Ludes June 2, 2015
The difference between inferences and assumptions are defined by “Critical thinking.org” as: “An inference is a step of the mind, an intellectual act by which one concludes that something is true in light of something else’s being true, or seeming to be true.” (Paul & Elder, 2013) “An assumption is something we take for granted or presuppose. Usually it is something we previously learned and do not question.” (Paul & Elder, 2013) For example, we can see a woman walking down the street with a bunch of bags in a shopping cart and believe that the woman is a bag lady or homeless. The inference here would be that we see the woman walking with a shopping cart full of bags. The assumption would be that we believe that she is either a bag lady or homeless. It never occurred to us that she may not have transportation and needed the shopping cart to get her groceries back to her home. Looking back to several situations that I made assumptions on, I never thought that some of them were inferences and not assumptions. Example 1: In high school, I saw a young lady with 2 black eyes and a bandage across her nose. My first thought was that she had gotten into a fight and ended up getting beat up. I never once thought that she had just had plastic surgery on her nose and in the healing process she would have 2 black eyes. I never had met anyone that has had plastic surgery before so I did not know that is what they look like afterwards. Needless to say, I felt like a real idiot afterwards. Example 2: I lived in a neighborhood where neighbors looked out for each other. One day, I was sitting on the porch and I saw a man in the driveway of a neighbor, he had a hanger in the window of the woman’s car. I did not know that she had locked her keys in the car and he was a friend trying to open the door to help her retrieve the keys. When you live in a high crime area, you see a situation like this and believe that the man was a car thief trying to break into this woman’s car. My first thought was to call the police, but instead I went over and asked him what he was doing. He introduced himself to me as the woman was walking out her home and was embarrassed that she had locked the keys in the car. Then she tried to play matchmaker and introduced the young man to me as a friend of the family. Example 3: One day I was on my way to work. I saw a man running at a high rate of speed down the street towards the bus station, with a woman’s purse in his hand. I thought that he had just purse
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