Question 3 Last Question Yay!

First I'd like to say theres a lot of great things I've learned this semester. I don't know if i can pick just one to expand on it but i'll give it a good shot. I think arguing was a very important part of our class. And i think the best part about arguing was trying not to make a fallacy. Fallacies were something I've always heard of but I never really took the time and effort to learn it. I now realize that yelling and arguing without carefully thinking can lead people to think i'm an idiot. I really think knowing the fallacies will help not just my self but everybody from making mistakes. I hate losing arguments but i hate even more to bit my tongue. and even more than that I would be absolutely mortified if i ended up offending somebody. So I think knowing all fallacies from slippery slope to bullying can also help us as people recognize them and point them out. It's all about advancing as a people and I want to be able to have intellectual conversation with somebody without having to worry about being mean and still accomplish things.

Question 2

My favorite thing about the class is the online nature of it. I don't feel like i'm forced to be locked into a classroom for hours and hours. I like the fact that we read on our own time. We do blogs on our own time and we comment on our own time. It's a super flexible class and i really enjoyed that that most. I'll miss having an online class because now I'll have 2 1/2 hours more to be forced into a desk at school. The least favorite thing about this class was probably desire2learn. I didn't find it very useful. Maybe because we spent so much time on the blog desire 2 learn just felt like a waste of time. I think instead of using that the teacher can just put up important things on the blog and try to eliminate desire 2 learn all together apart from the quizzes. I think the only way this class could improve is to have an online lecture. A video recording of lectures would be very good and impressive. It's a colorful addition and a break from the reading. It also shows us more of the teacher. I really know nothing about the teacher. I don't know how she teaches meaning stylistically. I guess the style would be online, but maybe if i felt like a person was there i could feel like I was learning much better. I'm taking this idea from a biology class i took over the summer where we had online lectures and we had a short quiz and the end based on the lecture. I felt it was very helpful.

Question 1

What is it that i've learned in this class. The class is about critical decision making but i don't think that does it justice. I think this class teaches you how to think properly. Logically I don't think I've learned this much since I was in computer science which I didn't ended up hating. I learned how to think things through. I know longer have to go into arguments and ending up looking like a fool. I can end up looking like an average person. I know now when to pick my battles and when to believe whatever it is that i'm supposed to believe. I guess I could be classified as a gullible person. I tend to believe when people tell me things and I don't really think things of it because I trust people. Now i'm kinda weary to believe things unless I put it through my decision making criteria. I think this class is really important and I can see why it's needed for core GE. I think we should learn things like this at a younger age because i'm 20 years old right now and i feel like if i knew this when I was 16 high school would have been less of crap shoot. High school was like people always trying to deceive and lie for no real reason. Critical thinking would have made me think logically and answer back with a smart witty response like a politician. This class and my 100w class have really changed the way I speak and think so thank you for that. Logic FTW.

Cause and Effect in Populations

Cause and Effect in Populations is a very useful topic. Cause in populations is defined as “a claim that If the cause is present, there is a higher probability the effect will follow than if the cause were not present(Epstein 392)”. The example in the book is that smoking lots of cigarettes over a long period of time will cause a higher probability that it’ll cause lung cancer. We know that if you do something, there will be an outcome or effect by it. There is a problem with cause and effect that we actually don’t have an idea nor is it likely that we can state normal conditions for smoking. The one thing that we can do in cause and effect is to point out the evidence that we do have that convinces us that’s the effect of causing something, such as smoking or drunk driving. Evidence must be present in order to have a cause an effect scenario.

Cause and Effect

The Cause and Effect website has very good points on introducing us to Causal Arguments. Causation is connecting the relationship between conducting it and having a result. It’s usually dealt with injury cases. The example of the bicyclist moving into the traffic lane in order to pass a truck illegally parked in the bike lane has a good claim if he were to be in court. The bicyclist will probably say the truck shouldn’t have parked. That is why I swerved into the lane of traffic. One good point from the website is that none of the claims that he made fit the pattern of inductive argument because they aren’t observed or experienced. The last part of the website is the most important, which deals with three factors that give strength in a causal argument. They are to accept or demonstrable the implied comparison, the case for causation, and how credible it really is.

Mission Critical

The Mission Critical website has different parts of an argument and everything that consists of it. The section on Fallacies and Non-Rational Persuasion is what I thought was most useful in the website. There are two different types of Appeals. The first appeal is Misdirected appeals which consist of Appeal to Authority, Common Practice, and Appeal to Common Belief. An appeal to fear is that fear and love are two strong emotions. It affects and threatens the safety or happiness of ourselves or someone we love. This was very useful because people are always trying to get into people’s emotions to get something out of them. It is a very strong appeal to use. The second part of appeals is Emotional appeals. One Appeal in this section is Appeal to Spite. Spite is concerned with hatred and indignation to tap into a person’s feelings about people or things. It is a very powerful appeal.

Question 3 Reasoning By Analogy

Probably my most used form of reasoning even though I use it in dumb ways, is reasoning by analogy. I always try to draw parallels to things that have no correlation with the other thing whatsoever. I like how people compare LeBron James to Michael Jordan. The two players are from different places, they are from different times, and they aren't the same person. Michael Jordan is not dead and reincarnated in LeBron people need to get over that. So when people make the argument that Jordan would have never switched teams in the middle of his career like LeBron that doesn't make much sense. LeBron is a grown man who does whatever he likes not following Jordans every footstep. I'm sorry for the sports reference, but it was a good one in my opinion. I use analogy a lot in my reasoning, but as we see from this example bad analogies make for very bad reasoning. just because somethings are in common sometimes doesn't mean you can follow the same path every time. Each time is a different situation. It's like a fingerprint everybody has their own.