Post 3 12/8

  For the last post of the semester, I found something from Chapter 14 which seemed useful, which is the concept of generalizations. According to Epstein, generalizing involves concluding "a claim about a group, the population, from a claim about some part of it, the sample" (280). For example, here is a generalization that can correspond to the current issue of college athletes getting paid to play college sports: Of the college athletes that were interviewed,  55 percent said that they were paid to go to the college which they attend in order to play sports. So about 55 percent of all college athletes get paid to play sports for their school. In this argument, the sample is the group of student athletes who were interviewed, and the population is all college athletes. Because the same proportion of the whole as in the sample will have the property, this is a sample of a statistical generalization.

Post 2 12/8

When I first signed up for this class, I did not know what to expect because I had never taken an online class before. I was also curious to see how an online communications course would work, because I had previously taken Comm 40 with Professor Harris and enjoyed that class. However, one of my favorite things about this class was having the opportunity to interact with a group for the projects throughout the semester. It was helpful to have the same group for the semester has well because it was cool to build relationships with those people and have trust in each other to get our parts of the projects done, instead of having to get comfortable with a whole new group for each project. Something that I did not like about this class was that the projects seemed like they were rushed and that we had to find seven to ten people from outside of class for the public relations part of the project, which is a lot because other people are also very busy. This class can be improved by possibly having more instruction on the projects because it seemed like my group had many questions about each project.

Post 1 12/8

   Over the course of the semester, I believe that I learned a lot from this communications class. All of the concepts which we learned in this class seem to be very important for every day life, whether it comes to using claims or fallacies when speaking out in a group. Especially in college, you are meeting so many people and need to develop new social skills to connect with people, and this class is needed to develop those skills. For me, this class comes in handy as well because I work at PF Changs as a server and I am talking to many people each day that I have never met before. One of the many things I learned this semester was the difference between prescriptive and descriptive claims. For example, at work this weekend it was very busy and the food was taking a long time to get to the tables. For my table, one of their entrees took thirty minutes to get to them. They were nice about it and knew that we were busy, but i told them that we would take care of that dish because it should have been ready with the rest of their food.  At that moment, I realized that I had made a prescriptive claim, which is a claim that says what should be.

Post 3 11/19

   Another concept of Chapter 15 which I found useful is the Cause and Effect in Populations section. According to Epstein, cause in populations is usually explained as "meaning that given the cause, there's a higher probability that the effect will follow than if there were not the cause" (320). For example, for this type of cause you could come up with an argument for why people who do not work out or exercise have a much higher probability of being overweight than those that do exercise. Also, there are different types of evidence to use for a cause in population. The first type of evidence is that there must be a control group. The control group is used to isolate any uncontrollable phenomena by not being subjected to the unknown variable being tested. If the experiment is uncontrollable, it is known as cause-to-effect if it starts with the suspected cause and you see if the effect happens. On the other hand, in an effect-to-cause, you start with the effect on the population, then try to figure out how it got there.

Post 2 Mission Critical Website

   The Mission Critical Website is different from the Causal Arguments, in which I thought the Causal Argument website was odd because it started by providing an example before going into detail about what they are. However, both links are helpful in their own way. When first going to the Mission Critical Website, it is somewhat overwhelming because there are too many links on the main menu. After reading through the website and clicking on the different links, I found that this site has so much information related to critical thinking and I will definitely be using it to study for the final. In addition to the many links which provide so much information for the basics of arguments, analysis of arguments, fallacies, and non rational persuasion, there are practice exercises and exit exams provided for each section. Something new I learned from this website is an appeal to vanity, which is a fallacy used to create a predisposition toward agreement by paying compliments, also known as apple polishing. Overall, Mission Critical is a very informative, useful website.

Cause Effect Website 11/17

   I thought that the Cause and Effect Website tool was very useful because it had a lot of information, starting with the main page which focuses on causal arguments. I did not know that using inductive reasoning by arguing causation was such a simple concept to understand, because it is always used in the court room. In the court room, the lawyers of both the plaintiff and of the defendant are constantly making arguments to causation while trying to sway the jury's opinions and reach the verdict. Another example similar to that of the exercises from the link on the main menu is if you and all three of your roommates go out to eat at La Vic's and everyone orders the same thing, a burrito with carne asada. The next day, everyone has to stay at home and miss class because everyone has food poisoning. Therefore, the idea which may be considered the most significant "commonality" in their illness must be the fact that all of the roommates ate a burrito at La Vic's, not they they all went to the gym together.

Ch.12 Post 3

Another concept in Chapter 12 is called Judging Analogies. When judging analogies, it is necessary to survey the similarities and guess on the more important ones so that we can find a general principle that applies to both sides. After this step, the differences are surveyed too see if there is not some reason that the general principle might not apply to one side. According to Epstein, there is a list of questions to ask yourself when evaluating an analogy: Is this an argument and what is the conclusion? What is the comparison? What are the premises? What are the similarities and can we state the similarities as premises and find a general principle that covers the two sides? Does the general principle really apply to both sides and do the differences matter? Is the argument strong or valid and is it good? (pg. 257) Something else to watch out for when judging analogies is a fallacy of composition, which comes about when something is supposedly true of the whole analogy when really only part of the whole is true.