Making Generalizations

We make generalizations every day about groups of people or things. It is important when making generalizations that we have a good sample. If I was doing a survey on the necessity of shaving and only interviewed girls I shouldn’t generalize and say that everyone thinks shaving is important. Because I did not survey any males in my study my outcome is inaccurate. Another important aspect of generalizing is to make sure my sample is representative. On top of interviewing both sexes I should also search for people of different cultures and ages. I should try and make sure that I have a large sized group of randomly selected people that I interview as well. Lastly I should have made sure my sample was studied well. I should make sure the people I am interviewing fit the criteria of my study. For example I wouldn’t interview my 6 year old cousin about shaving because she is too young t shave.

What i have learned

Over the course of this semester I have not only increased my knowledge of argumentative and reasoning skills but I have also learned a lot about myself. One of the most interesting concepts I learned were all the different types of appeals. People use all different types of appeals such as sympathy and fear to convince others to join their cause or support them and I never realized how gullible I was to most of them. I realized that I am easily convinced by advertisements specifically those that use the appeal to sympathy. Overall I think I have learned how to strengthen the claims I make from exercises about repairing and analyzing arguments. The examples in the book about these helped me realize common mistake I make all the time in my arguments and I learned ways to repair them and make them stronger. Another important concept I learned was how much being clear and concise in an argument makes a difference. In the group facilitation study a lot of the arguments the people made were vague and did not offer much support. I realize that the people who spoke and gave strong reasons with lots of support were often the ones who had an impact on the decision of the group.

My likes and dislikes

I have never taken an online class before so I was kind of excited to not have to go to class and just complete the work on my own. I really like working on the group projects. Although sometimes it was stressful it really helped me improve my communication skills and learn to work with people even if you cannot always meet in person. One thing I didn’t like about the class was having to post blogs 12 hours apart. I completely understand the point of having time restrictions and it definitely helped me from slacking off and waiting till 9 pm on Saturday night to finish them all. However sometimes I would get really busy and do all my blogs on one day earlier in the week but then forget to post them later so I would have to wake up at odd times in the night to make sure I could get them all in twelve hours apart.

Mission Critical website

The Mission Critical website is actually very helpful and I wish I had discovered it earlier. This website offers very good explanations and examples for so many things from how to form an argument to the analysis of one. This website is a very good tool that helped increase my knowledge on the different types of reasoning by providing good examples that were easy to understand. Sometimes when working with the Epstein book I have to go back and read the example three times before I can grasp the concept. If I fail to grasp the ideas they are trying to portray doing the exercises is not very helpful because it is unable to explain where I made my mistake. In this website almost all sections have exercises that will give you information on why an answer you selected is incorrect in comparison to the others. I feel like this tool really helped me learn the material better. This website offers very casual realistic examples and explanations and think it a useful pair to the Epstein manual.

Cause and Effect

The cause and effect reading from the website had a lot of helpful tips. The example about the car accident was simple and made it easy to understand their reasoning. I never realized how a cause and effect relationship could be a form of inductive reasoning until after reading the given information. However unlike in inductive reasoning where the assumption is that there is otherwise no significant difference between the premises in cause and effect reasoning the implication is that there is only one significant difference. There are two rules to remember when deciding if you’re dealing with causation. The first is that the cause must precede the event in time. The second rule is that even if there is a strong correlation, it is insufficient to prove causation. In the exercises that went along with the examples I learned even more about this type of reasoning because if I clicked on the wrong answer rather than just telling me it’s incorrect it provides a brief description of why my answer is incorrect.

Inductive vs. deductive

I often forget and get confused on the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, so I decided to do more research to help me remember. Deductive reasoning involves moving from the general to the specifics. While inductive reasoning takes specific statements and tries to generalize them.  An example of deductive reasoning would be:

·      Premise 1: All college students go to school.

·      Premise 2:I go to school.

·      Conclusion: I am a college student.

An example of inductive reasoning would be:

·      Premise: All cows I have seen have spots.

·      Conclusion: All cows must have spots.

Just because someone uses inductive or deductive reasoning does make their argument true. In my last example just because all cows I have seen have spots does not mean the all cows must have spots. In fact there are lots of cows without spots. An in my deductive reasoning example just because I go to school does not always mean I am in college.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-difference-between-inductive-and-deductive-reasoning.htm

Judging Analogies

In chapter 12 of the Epstein reading it discusses how to judge analogies. Sometimes people jump from one thing to another and try to compare them with a weak analogy. It is important that we learn how to judge these analogies so we can decipher when someone is making a valid point and when they are not. It is important that on top of just realizing the similarities and differences between the things we compare that we look at the general principle. At first glance some reasons people give to support their argument can seem like it doesn’t apply but once we spot the general principle we can find underlying similarities that bring the argument together and help us to make a more rational conclusion. Another way that we can judge analogies is by using an analogy of one argument to another which creates a powerful way to refute. If we simply accept analogies people give us without analyzing them we could miss important details that could sway our decision.