Week 10 Post 3: Chapter 14

Something that I found from Chapter 14 interesting is about Generalizations. From the Epstein text means that we are to make a claim about an issue, such as for a group or population to generalize an argument. There are three different things to point out for generalizations: 1. The sample is representative 2. The sample is big enough 3. The sample is studied well. What I just listed are all the things for premises to be considered as a good generalization.  In other words, for generalizations to be accurate, we need to consider the population as a whole with enough data to prove the problem. There should also be a small error margin for the population. This also includes variation, because it gives the data different things to compare it with. If we were to just compare one issue by itself, there wouldn’t be a correct answer due to the fact that you are basing your answers with one type of generalization.

Week 10 Post 2: What I Learned

There were so many things that I have learned from this class. To begin with I wasn’t taking this class seriously, but as the semester went on, I found that a lot of the things that we learned in class is beneficial to our every day lives. The skills that I have obtained from the class consist of learning how to communicate effectively with people in general.  This skill was most used when we had to do our group presentations. We needed to learn how to communicate with each other effectively such as, set up times to meet up to discuss with group projects, how to divide up the work and how we should write the paper itself. I also learned how to visually see how people communicate from our last group project, the group facilitation project. I was able to spot who the leader is and how the group interacted throughout the meeting. I feel that learning this technique has bettered my communication skills.

Week 10 Post 1: Best, Least and Improved

My favorite part about the class is that I was able to do all the stuff online. This made it convenient for me to do it at the comfort of my own house. I also liked how the professor made it so easily to contact her and help me whenever I was in need. She is a quick responder and is willing to help to the full extent. My least favorite part about this class is that when we are to post up blogs, we have to wait a full 12 hours until we can post our new blog. I feel that it’s unnecessary and we should be able to post stuff regularly and whenever we feel like without the time constraint. I feel that this class is good the way it is. It is straight forward and easy to understand. To improve this class, I feel that if we just skipped the 12 hour limit would be more helpful and easier for students.

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. 

Week 6 Post 3: Futher Discussions

I  think there were a lot of topics in this book that were hard  for me to understand. But most of them were easier to understand than the other ones, such as concealed claims. That was one of the concepts that i thought would need further discussions on. In the book, concealed claims had a lot to do with the words we chose to use in our arguments. There are different types of concealed claims that can affect with the way you write your claims. Loaded questions are one of those, that is sometimes hard for me to understand. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/loadques.html I found this site to help those types of issues with understanding loaded questions. As I browse through this site, I found that it also offers help to understanding fallacies, another concept that was hard for me to understand as well. I think that the best way to understand difficult concepts is to just reread the chapters and discuss with your fellow classmates. Whoever can give me more details for concealed claims please leave a comment below :)

Week 6 Post 2: Chapter 8

A concept that was talked about in Chapter 8 is about general claims and their contradictories. This uses the “all or some” of the claim. In the Epstein text, it shows that, All means “Every single one, no exceptions.” Sometimes all is meant as “Every single one, and there is at least one.” Which reading is best may depend on the argument. And some means “At least one.” Sometimes some meant as “At least one, but not all.” Which reading is best may depend on the argument. An example of “all” claims would be: all grass is green, grass is green, every grass is green and everything that’s grass is green. An example of “some” would be some flowers have scents to them and at least one flower smells. Another concept that I learned from this chapter would be “only and no” when used in a claim.  I found that in the text it shows us that No means “not even one,” “every single one is not.” And Only  “Only S and P” means “All P are S.” An example of “no” would be: no grass is green. An example of “only” would be: only flowers and trees smell. 

Week 6 Post 1: Assignment 2

I think that Assignment #2 was the most useful from the two assignments we had to do. For our group, we chose to use PETA as our social organization group. I think that PETA is a great organization to look at because of how passionate they are about help and saving animals. Looking into their website, I was able to find a lot of topics that were discussed in the text, which made it clear on which side they stand on. An example of that would be concealed claims, how PETA would use dysphemism, meaning that they would use words and exaggerate the issue. I understand that there is no way of making killing animals sound good, but PETA really shows how animals are brutally treated. I like choosing social organizations then the editorial letters because we are able to analyze the website ourselves without having to either agree or disagree with the argument. I think that it’s more difficult to look for fallacies in PETA because they make it clear whose for and against wearing fur and eating meat. I like how they use celebrities to attract people to the organization.  

Week 5 Post 3: False dilemmas

A topic that I found interesting in Chapter 6 is False Dilemmas. In the Epstein text, it says that false dilemma means, “a bad use of excluding possibilities where the “or” claim is false or implausible. Sometimes just the dubious “or” claim itself is called a “false dilemma.” This can also be described to be a valid argument, but it isn’t a very good one which causes a false dilemma. This reminds me of the times when my mom had to wake me up in the mornings when I was in middle school. She would use false dilemmas to try to wake me up. She would start from little things like, “Wake up now or I won’t make you pancakes for breakfast.” I would just ignore it until she said, “You better wake up or I won’t drive you to school!” After I heard that I would get up real fast because I lived 40 minutes driving to school and if I were to take the bus, it would take a hour and a half. False dilemmas work, but there just the things that people say in order for you to change your bad habits.

Week 5 Post 2: Chapter 7

In Chapter 7, the main topic is about Counterarguments. The two things that interested me are refuting directly and reducing to the absurd. For refuting directly, the text shows three points that we should follow in order to do so.  1.) Show that at least one of the premises is dubious. 2.) Show that the argument isn’t valid or strong. 3.) Show that the conclusion is false. As an example, I can say that it is useless for people to have tattoos. It’s permanent and painful. Its expensive to remove if you decide it isn’t right for you. To refute this argument I can say that tattoos are something beautiful and everyone should consider. It’s like a piece of artwork that expresses who you are. We can also say that when deciding on your tattoo make sure that its what you want when your 50 years old so you won’t have to remove it.

The second thing I want to talk about is reducing to the absurd, which in the book means, “To show that at least one of several claims is false or dubious, or collectively they are unacceptable, by drawing a false or unwanted conclusion from them.” This causes a people to come against the argument and start from a small point like my tattoo claim and use it for other things too such as art, museums, statues and not having artists. 

Week 5 Post 1: Chapter 6

In chapter 6, there were a lot of small details to follow and learn about. The first thing that I learned about is the compound claims. In the Epstein text, it says that it means, “A compound claim is one composed of other claims, but which has to be viewed as just one claim.” An example of that would be, “I will buy you lunch or I’ll just cook you something to eat.” This shows that I’m not sure what I am going to be doing, but it still one claim. 

The second this I learned in Chapter 6, is about contradictory of a claim. In the text the definition of it says, “One that has the opposite truth-value in all possible circumstances.” The claim would be, John is not a football player. The contradictory would be, John is a football player. This shows a claim that can be true but in contrary, the claim is turning in the opposite direction. 

Week 4 Post 3: Advertisements

The Old Spice Body Wash is a great example of how advertisement can alter a person’s judgment and cause people to buy their product. This is a body wash that is directed towards women to help their boyfriend/husband look like him. The Old Spice commercial has been seen on television with a great dialogue to attract its customers. “Hello ladies, look at your man then back at me, now back at your man, now back at me. Sadly he isn’t me. But if he stopped using lady scented body washes, and switch to Old Spice he could smell like its me.” This is how he starts his commercial, as it goes on, he can change his location from being in a shower, then on a boat with an oyster that can change into diamonds, and ends up on a horse! I don’t believe you can look like him if you use the product, but maybe smell like him. In reality, I’m not even sure if he even uses that product on himself. 

Week 4 Post 2: Personal Experience

I am interested in the topic of Personal Experience. In the textbook it states, “Our most reliable source of information about the world is our own experience.” I believe that this is the most valid reason of how we can show others the truth. We need to trust in ourselves because that the only legit thing that we have to prove. The only person that you can trust is from your own eyes. I remember this one time where I saw a fox in one of the parks in San Francisco. I told my friend and he did not believe me at all. He completely ignored me and said a lot of things to disprove me. I saw what I saw and it was real. A week later when I was going through Golden Gate Park, I was telling him about my story again. And as I was turning the block guess what we saw? It was the FOX! I was so happy and my friend didn’t say anything to me after that. I was able to prove him wrong and it felt so good because he thought he was right the entire time. J