The given article is based on the recent news story of the acquittal of police officer Jason Stockley for the shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith. The article begins by highlighting the controversial nature of the decision and Judge Timothy Wilson’s involvement in it, enforcing the premise that many people believe that the wrong decision has been made. It then describes the strong negative response towards Judge Wilson’s statement regarding the fact that the gun may have been Smith’s considering he was a heroin dealer, despite Stockley’s DNA being found on the gun. After this, the article describes the concept of implicit bias as a subconscious bias regarding race, ethnicity, age and appearance. From this it then concludes that Judge Wilson may have been biased. So the process of deductive reasoning is the way by which the article explored the general premise of their being a negative and controversial response to the decision and the fact that it is indeed possible for people to have bias, and from this concluded that the decision may have been biased. While this conclusion technically makes sense based on the given premises, the logic behind this can also suggest that as people can be biased, the public are biased towards Stockley because of his race, which is what led to the negative reaction towards the outcome of the trial. Therefore both the premises and the conclusion can be said to be neither true nor false. While the premises are true and the conclusion has the capacity to be true based on the premises, the conclusion can be disproven by other conclusions based on the same premises making it untrue at the same time. So the conclusion is both proven and disproven by the premises. Besides the method of reasoning, the lack of detailed evidence and therefore more specific premises prevents any conclusion made by the article from being proven or disproven.
