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A

Ad Hominem

a.k.a.: Attacking the Person A persuasion strategy in which the peddler attempts to defend her own position by pointing out the undesirable associations, personal characteristics, or motives of those who do not accept it. The impact of the suggestion that "only bad people disagree with me" is often supplemented with an "all good people agree with me", introducing an appeal to diffuse authority. The big (and overlooked) question is, what has their badness or your goodness got to do with the truth of your position? The big (and overlooked) answer typically is "Nothing."

Ambiguity

A term in a context is ambiguous if it has more than one relatively distinct meaning in that context

antecedent

The "iffy" part of an "if-then" statement.
Comment: "Antecedent" and "consequent", as technical terms, refer only to parts of a conditional statement. Thus there is neither consequent nor antecedent in statements of the form "A or B", and in particular, A is not the antecedent in such a statement.
Not every statement following the word "if" is the antecedent of a conditional. For example, statements of the form "A only if B" translate into the conditional "If A then B", where you can see that actually B represents the consequent statement, not the antecedent.

Argument

An argument is a collection of statements in which one or more (known as the premises) are given for the purpose of justifying, or defending as true, another statement (the conclusion).

C

Causal Reasoning

Definition: Inference from premises concerning correlations, concurrence, covariance and other empirically observed connections, to conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships
Comment: Note that not every piece of reasoning about causation meets the terms of this definition. Consult our treatment of the Standard Pattern for Causal Arguments for more details about good causal reasoning.

conclusion

Definition: In the technical sense, which refers to arguments and their structure, the conclusion is a statement which is supposedly given support by a set of other statements (the premises).
Comment: In real life, arguments frequently have several levels of sub- arguments-- that is, the overall conclusion will be supported by its set of premises, but any one of those premises may itself be supported by another set of statements, and so forth. Relative to the statement it supports, a statement is a premise; relative to those which it is supported by, it is a conclusion.

Counterexample

Definition: A counter-example to an argument (as opposed to one to an argument pattern) constitutes (broadly) a demonstration that the premises of that argument could be true under certain conditions where the conclusion would nevertheless be false.
Comment: This demonstration will usually consist of adding a premise to the argument, that details a particular way in which the original premises could count as true, and under which it is at least not certain that the conclusion is true.