This second criterion is typically understood in terms of relevance and sufficiency, making a good argument an argument with premises that are relevant to the conclusion and sufficient to establish it as (at least) acceptable.
In place of a sound argument a deductively valid argument with true premises Johnson and Blair posit an alternative ideal of a cogent argument, one whose premises are acceptable, relevant to and sufficient for its conclusion.
For an analysis of S2 papers, including research premises, relevant evidence, biological background assumptions, research hypotheses and aim of the study, see Table 3 (all S1 papers we identified were argumentative, while all the S2 papers are research papers; the two tables therefore have slightly different organization).
Adding further premises that might seem relevant to the conclusion (e.g., Socrates is very young and there will be major medical advances before Socrates reaches old age) will make no difference to the conclusion.
The thought is that the conclusion must be relevant to the premises in a valid inference.
If X,A ⊢ B holds, then X must somehow be relevant to A. Premise combination is restricted in the following way.
Having both sufficiency and relevance as criteria (instead of the single validity criterion) has the benefit of allowing the making of nuanced judgments about the level of premise support: for example, we might say that an argument's premises, although insufficient, are nevertheless positively relevant to the conclusion.
Therefore, premise a above is potentially more relevant to β-cell dysfunction in the context of low-level environmental arsenic exposure, whereas premise b might be associated with β-cell damage and failure induced by high doses of arsenic.
Moreover, the biologically coherent information observed so far using PIE sets the premise to predict genes that might be relevant to HMPV-infection biology but not yet expressed at the particular time point of infection being studied.
The general premise of this chapter is that mattering is highly relevant to daily life and it is a concept that people can easily relate to and understand.
