Claims

One concept I have gained knowledge about and found useful and interesting is subjective and objective claims. According to the textbook “Critical Thinking” by Richard L. Epstein, a subjective claim is subjective if “whether it is true or false depends on what someone (or something or some group) thinks, believes, or feels. A subjective claim invokes personal standards.” “A claim is objective if it is not subjective. An objective claim invokes impersonal standards.”

An example of a subjective claim is, “Tiger Woods should be the worst player in golf because he has no morals.” This claim is subjective because it represents how someone feels. Subjective claims are can also be viewed as opinions in which people have.

An example of an objective claim is, “Tiger Woods has won 14 major professional golf tournaments.” This is an objective claim because it is stating something that is a fact and does not invoke personal standards.

My Favorite Thing

I enjoyed several things in this class. My favorite thing about this class however was the group assignments. I enjoyed working in groups because I like being a part of a team. We were able to divide the work and we each were responsible for our own work. We came together and worked well. Having an assignment divided up is sometimes better because we don’t have to spend as much time on it as we would if we were each doing it individually. My least favorite thing about the class was the posts each week. I felt like sometimes it was just busy work. An improvement I would suggest is not making each post be 12 hours apart. Students these days sometimes have a large workload in addition to a job and don’t always have the time to accomplish assignments when they want to. Student’s resources can also be limited and forcing them to make each post 12 hours apart can be very difficult. I would maybe shorten the length to 8 hours apart or shorter. This way they most certainly have time to complete assignments.

What I learned

I have learned many concepts over the course of this semester. One concept I have learned about is vague sentences. “A sentence is vague if there are so many ways to understand it that we can’t settle on one of those without the speaker making it clearer.” An example of a vague sentence is, “Where are they going?” A lot of things aren’t clarified with this question. Some questions raised are; “Who is they?” “Are ‘they’ people?” Animals? This question needs to be made clearer in order for it to be understood. Another thing I learned in this class was the tests for an argument to be considered good. The first test is, “the premises are plausible.” This means that we have good reason to believe that the premise is true. The second test is, “the premises are more plausible than the conclusion.” The third test is, “the argument is valid or strong.”

Cause and Effect

I found the Cause and Effect website to be helpful and very useful. Causation is very important to the concept of inductive reasoning. I liked the example that the website gives regarding the case of a car accident. Upon first reading the example, I felt that it was the illegally parked truck that ultimately caused the car accident. With an inductive argument, it “carries as part of its second premise the implication that there is otherwise no significant difference, these causal arguments carry the implication that there is only one significant difference.” I learned that there are two rules when dealing with causation.

The first rule is that, “The cause must precede the event in time. On one hand, arguments that have the effect before the cause are examples of the relatively rare fallacy of reverse causation. One the other, arguments whose only proof of causation is that the effect followed the cause are examples of fallacious post hoc reasoning.”

The second rule is that, “Even a strong correlation is insufficient to prove causation. Other possible explanations for such a strong correlation include coincidence, reversed causation, and missing something that is the cause of both the original "cause" and and its purported "effect."

Vague Generalities

One concept from our readings that I found useful and interesting was vague generalities. This concept was discussed in Chapter 8 of our “Critical Thinking” textbook. Vague generalities are made when a precise number is not specified. Certain key words used in vague generalities are; all, many, most, a lot, some, a few, and very few. Our textbook points out that it is possible for us to analyze whether arguments using the ambiguous words, “all” and “some” are valid. There are two vague generalities that we can use in strong arguments, “almost all” and “very few”. An example would be; “Almost all tigers have a lifespan of 10-15 years in the wild.” “Very few tigers live longer than 25 years.” There is a direct way of reasoning with “almost all” and you can also argue backwards with “almost all.”

An example of direct reasoning would be; “Almost all tigers have a lifespan of 10-15 years in the wild. Manny is a tiger. So Manny will have a lifespan of 10-15 years in the wild.

An example of arguing backwards would be; “Almost all tigers have a lifespan of 10-15 years in the wild. Manny has lived 14 years in the wild. Manny is a tiger.”

Reasoning By Analogy

The type of reasoning that I found most difficult to understand was reasoning by analogy. According to our “Critical Thinking” textbook, “a comparison becomes reasoning by analogy when it is part of an argument: On one side of the comparison we draw a conclusion, so on the other side we should conclude the same.” When I first read this, I wasn’t too sure what it meant. A site that I found that helped me out was;

http://www.philosophypages.com/lg/e13.htm

On the page, analogical reasoning is discussed and an example is provided. The example given mentions the idea of buying a car and having 3 friends who bought the same car from the same person and were delighted. The conclusion you could draw is that if you were to buy the same car as your 3 friends from the same person, then you would be delighted as well.

Here is my example: “Three of my friends have the same type of Hummer vehicle and all complain that they get poor gas mileage. If I buy the same type of Hummer as them, I will have poor gas mileage as well.”

The website also gives you some criteria for evaluating analogies.

Types of Reasoning

1) An example of Reasoning by Analogy is; “Reading a book will give you knowledge. A book is a form of literature. A newspaper is a form of literature. Therefore a newspaper will give you knowledge.”

2) An example of Sign Reasoning is; “Leaves turning brown is a sign that the season of autumn is starting.”

3) An example of Causal Reasoning is; “Consuming excessive amounts of sugar filled products on a regular basis raises your blood glucose levels and can lead to the development of diabetes over time.”

4) An example of Reasoning by Criteria is; “How will we win? Defense will be the key. Winning is scoring on the offense.”

5) An example of Reasoning by Example is; “I had a laptop just that would always overheat like yours. I bought a cooling fan to go underneath it and keep it cool.”

6) An example of Inductive Reasoning is; “I always get stopped by the train on my way to work during the week. Tomorrow I will be stopped by the train on my way to work.”

7) An example of Deductive Reasoning is; “All the houses in this neighborhood have a swimming pool. Malcolm lives in this neighborhood. Malcolm’s house has a swimming pool.”