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.”