Week 9 Post 3: Chapter 15- Tracing the Cause Backwards

After I read Chapter 15, I found many topics in there interesting and fun to talk about. If I were to choose one thing to focus on, it would be about tracing the cause backwards. I thought the example in the Epstein text very funny brought up many situations that happened in the real world. In the text, it has an incident were Spot caused Dick to wake up. But did he really? An example that happens in the real world would be car accidents. One thing leads to another to cause something to happen. It usually has a lot that leads up to the accident, such as it was raining at night and Sam didn’t see the car in front of him stop abruptly. But the car in front may say that it was because there was a woman crossing the street when she wasn’t suppose to. The woman may say it was because she was late for dinner. This can lead to a very long and difficult story. But with tracing the cause backwards, we can see step by step to see what caused the problem.  

Week 9 Post 2: Mission Critical Website

I found the Mission Critical website easy to follow and understand. I liked the fact the there is everything you need to understand terms. Bullet points used in the website made it easy to locate and search for, especially difficult concepts. I thought that this website should be shown to everyone taking a Comm class because it is really useful. As I clicked in Appeal to Pity, a whole page of information came up about this topic. It gives great examples and definitions of the word that made me understand it better. I also like how it has review problems for fallacies. For me, fallacies were one of the difficult concepts to understand. Therefore having the fallacy exercises really helped. It also includes answers and examples of you are stuck on a problem or you don’t understand the question. Looking at this site, I tried to review other topics that I didn’t understand and I found this site to be very handy, I will definitely add to it my bookmarks. 

Week 9 Post 1: Cause and Effect Website

In my opinion, I thought that the Cause and Effect website very helpful and interesting. In the beginning as I was reading I thought it was kind of confusing due to the format of the website. It looks exactly like a textbook. But as I kept reading, I found it easy to understand because it had a lot of examples and the terms were easy to comprehend. I like how it lists out what is important on the site. Such as listing out what is needed in a causal argument, in other words, what to look for.

On the website it says that to be a causal argument it needs to fulfill 3 things:

1. how acceptable or demonstrable the implied comparison is

2. how likely the case for causation seems to be

3. how credible the “only significant difference” or “only significant commonality” claim is.

I felt that the examples that came after the 3 things listed were straight forward and helped me understand the whole concept. 

Week 8 Post 3: Casual Reasoning

There were a lot of things in this week’s reading that I found interesting. This includes all the different types of reasoning such as sign reasoning, reasoning by example, and the one that interested me the most casual reasoning. I think I was most attracted to causal reasoning because it’s the most basic. You don’t have to give a lot of in depth detail because it is based upon making it simple to understand. An example of causal reasoning would be, “ I need to find a dress for this weekend’s dinner dance. Therefore we should go shopping.” As you can see it is based on everyday life and it comes in and out of our daily conversations. After learning about this type of reasoning, it made me realize the little things when I talk to my mom or friends and how causal reasoning comes to be. Causal reasoning is one of the easy and simple reasoning’s to understand, but there are much more out there that can be made simple and fun to like. 

Week 8 Post 2: Inductive Reasoning

As I was looking through all of the different types of reasoning, the one that was hardest for me to understand was inductive reasoning. The first time looking at that type of reasoning made me literally scratch my head. When I was trying to search online for this type of reasoning, it started making more and more sense to me. I found out what inductive reasoning means, it is to take one specific thing and turn it into a general idea. An example of this would be, “My turtle’s shell is green. Therefore all turtles have green shells.” This example shows how one specific thing such as my turtle can be turned into a general claim. This argument is most definitely false because I have not seen other people’s turtle before and therefore I cannot make and assumption of the general. But to make inductive reasoning work, I can say that,” only my turtle has a green shell.” Saying it this way allows for my argument to be right and tell others that it is because it is my turtle only makes it specific. Here is a site that I thought would be useful when looking at inductive reasoning. http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/dedind.php

Week 8 Post 1: Reasoning Examples

Reasoning by Analogy

            Premise: My mom likes to make pancakes in the morning.

            Premise: My sister likes to make pancakes in the morning too.

            Conclusion: Therefore, everyone likes to make pancakes in the morning.

Sign Reasoning

            Premise: The water in the fish bowl is turning murky and looks dirty.
            Conclusion: It's time to clean the fish bowl. 

Causal Reasoning

            Premise: I missed the bus for school today.

            Premise: Therefore I was late and didn’t have time to eat breakfast.

Reasoning by Criteria

            Premise: Marisa loves purple orchids.

            Conclusion: I think it would be a great idea to get her orchids for her birthday.         

Reasoning by Example

            Premise: Learning how to swim is not as hard as it seems.

            Conclusion: You can look at Kim and learn from the way she does the back float.                

Inductive Reasoning

            Premise: Troy has to drive his daughter Ella to school at 7 o’clock.

            Conclusion: He will also drive his daughter to school tomorrow.

Deductive Reasoning

            Premise: They sell lots of fruits and vegetables at Safeway.

            Premise: Orange is a fruit.

            Conclusion: Oranges are sold at Safeway. 

Week 7 Post 3: Appeal to Pity

Another topic from this chapter that interested me was the appeal to pity. In the Epstein text, it shows that appeal to pity means to feel sorry for someone. The text itself gave an example of “If you feel sorry for poor kids, you should give money to any organizations that says it will help them.” As for my own example I want to relate it back to PETA, where PETA allow us to feel sorry for the animals and tells us not to harm animals. They do a good job of this by using videos of animals and very cruel descriptions of how animals are tortured and raised and ends up on our dinner table. This is where appeal to pity comes in, in my own opinion, I start feeling bad for them and at times it makes me so disgusted that I would actually want to consider being a vegetarian. On top of that, I would want to donate to organizations like that to help animals and protect them from cruelty.

Week 7 Post 2: Exercise #6

I choose to do exercise # 6, looking for an example of appeal to spite. As I mentioned before appeal to spite means to hopefully look for revenge on someone and causing him or her to fail. When looking at that and it tells me to link it to political views such as campaigns. This is a great idea for me because it was November 2 was the day to vote. Hopefully everyone went. But getting back to topic, I remember watching a commercial about Meg Whitman, she was running for governor of California. I remember watching a commercial where she was saying exactly all the same things that former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said. My reaction to this was ,“Wow!” she sounds exactly like him. In my opinion, I felt that it was a funny and convincing commercial that Meg Whitman will be exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and do the same thing and not help the state of California. 

Week 7 Post 1: Appeals to Emotions

There are so many types of appeals to emotions from Epstein’s text. It is stated that appeal to emotions means “An argument is just a premise that says, roughly, you should believe or do something because you feel a certain way. Often we call the entire argument in which such a premise appears an appeal to emotion.” The appeal that sticks out to me the most “appeal to spite.” This appeal got my attention because it comes shows me that people will really try to get revenge on people because they didn’t help you do something in return.  This in our society seems to be happening with people always in the background trying to pull someone down. It gives a sense of Karma. This to me says that we have to “please” everyone, or else its going to come back to us because we didn’t help them in the first place. I think it is also a bad thing because that also means we have to agree and do what we don’t want to. To make it fair I believe that to even it out, we should only agree and do what we think is right and not just ignore them because the person didn’t help you before.