All other things being equal a significantly higher percent

All other things being , equal, a significantly higher percentage of smokers than none smokers get heart disease. Therefore, smoking contributes to heart disease 1. deductive, valid 2. inductive, reasonable 3. inductive, unreasonable please explain your answer

Solution

Given argument is \"All other things being equal, a significantly higher percentage of smokers than none smokers get heart disease. Therefore, smoking contributes to heart disease.\"

This is an inductive argument as it merely increases the probability that the conclusion \"smoking contributes to heart disease\" is not a definitive conclusion of the premise, namely \"all other things being equal, a significantly higher percentage of smokers than none smokers get heart disease.\" but the validity of the premise does increase the chances that smoking contributes to heart disease.

The argument is a reasonable one since there is not just a difference in heart disease occurence between smokers and non-smokers but a significant one. If the difference wasn\'t significant, the differences could be chalked up to chance. But because the difference is high (significant), we can say that it is highly unlikely that a factor other than smoking could play an important role in the increase of heart disease occurence amongst smokers as compared to non-smokers.

Hence, we can claim that the argument is 2) inductive, reasonable.