Reasoning Examples

Reasoning by Analogy- Jo gets good grades and he studies a lot.  Jane studies a lot.  Jane will get good grades. 

Sign Reasoning:  If there is stopped traffic on the freeway, then there is probably a traffic accident.

Causal Reasoning: If you don’t do any of your homework in any of your classes, you will not get good grades.

Reasoning by Criteria: You want to look good for all the ladies, so you should wear this shirt tonight.

Reasoning by Example:  You shouldn’t take the bus to school.  I have to take the bus and it is a huge waste of time. 

Inductive Reasoning: We have gotten out of class at least fifteen minutes early every day this semester, so we will get out at least fifteen minutes early tomorrow.

Deductive Reasoning: If you miss your registration date you won’t get classes.  You missed your registration date.  You don’t get any classes.

Guilt

An appeal to emotion that particularly stands out to me is trying to guilt someone into something.  Unfortunately, however pathetic it is when people pull this kind of thing, it happens all the time.  People love to hold things over someone’s head and play off of their want to make everyone happy.  If someone makes you feel like a bad person for not doing something by bringing up a previous time where they feel they did something to “earn” this favor from you, it probably means that they ran out of other arguments and had to resort to something of this sort in order to squeeze the favor out of you.  People should refrain for making this type of argument because it is annoying to the person receiving it, and because I feel is discredits your reputation as a good arguer.  It’s much better to come up with an actual reason you want someone to do something for you instead of trying to guilt them into it. 

appeals to emotions

Appeals to emotion work on some people more than others.  Unfortunately, there are some people who just cannot say no if someone makes an appeal to their pity, or if they pull a guilt card on them.  Same as there are some people who are way too easily swayed by an appeal to fear, or the idea that two wrongs make a right.  Do not let yourself be someone who is too easily affected by your emotions, it is important to be able to think something over rationally and separate it from your emotions in order to make a good decision.  I think appeal to pity and guilt are the most common appeals to emotion that I see, because more often than not they end up working.  People get too caught up in how they feel to rationally make a decision that may be best for them in the long run.  You see this a lot in situations regarding romantic relationships between two people, and I am sure every has experienced a significant other at some point in time using an appeal to their pity or guilt in order to get them to do something. 

Objective 1

Here is an example of a bad argument calling for affirmative action which uses appeal to pity:

If you care about our country at all and all of the homeless people who have nowhere to sleep at night, then you will vote democrat in the next election.

This is a very bad argument because there is no apparent connection between the premise and the conclusion.  It calls upon the pity of the reader by mentioning taking care of our country and the less fortunate people who live here, but it doesn’t state a reasonable way to fix the problems it mentions.  It would be a much better argument if it explained how voting democrat would in turn help the country and the homeless people who live here. 

I looked into precise generalities because I wanted to get more of an understanding of how they are used in real life.  My google search came up with a bunch of statistic sights, which is interesting to me because I am in an intro to statistic class right now.  I looked at one of the sights and they used the idea of a precise generalization in their abstract.  This makes sense to me because precise generalizations are all about percents and probability, so I can see how they would fit into the world of statistics.  I learned in my statistics class that if something is a high enough percent you can say it is significant, which is the same thing as how the book describes if a percentage that is given is high enough then it makes for a strong argument.  Now I think of precise generalizations as statistics and it makes it easier to remember. 

Here’s the link J

http://www.springerlink.com/content/q5726wj14387p235/

Class Assignments

The assignments that we have done for this class I feel are very relevant to a lot of work we are going to be doing in out college careers.  Being able to think critically about something you find online is something we have to do almost every time we do an assignment outside of the classroom.  It’s important to be able to know what is a good argument versus something that uses tricks to be appealing.  Also, it helps me be able to formulate my arguments better in a way I can be more confident of and help get my point across in the most intelligent way.  The assignments take what we read about in the book and write about on out blogs and turns it into real-life, useful situations.  I like to think of it as the final step after we learn things in class- figuring out how to use them in our lives. 

Chapter 8- Disscusing Not-So-Good Ways to Argue

Arguing backwards with all is commonly heard, especially when making quick judgments based on previous experiences.  I had a roommate who was very smart and would help me with my homework, and people would come over and assume he went to college with me.  The train of thought that brought about this conclusion was all smart people go to college (All S are P), and your roommate is smart (a is P), therefore he must go to college (So a is S).  This is a weak argument and sure enough, not correct. 

Another weak way to argue is reasoning in a chain with some.  An example of this would be college graduates and their work situations.  A person could say some college graduates are out of work (Some S are P).  Also, some people who are out of work are on welfare (Some P are Q).  So some college graduates are on welfare (So some S are Q).  This may be true for a very small portion of college graduates but it is a pretty inaccurate way to describe the average college graduate.  You can see how this may not be the best way of convincing someone of something