Useful concept : Fallacies

         I felt that the concept of fallacies was really useful. Every single person in this world would have used a fallacy once in his or her lifetime. The statement that I used is a fallacy in itself. When i said "every singe" I was referring to every single human being in this world, but when you look at it, babies are human beings who still have not even started speaking. So there is no possible way they can come up fallacious statements / arguments. So, to re-word that sentence, most of the people have used fallacious arguments sometime in their lives. This is a really important concept to understand because one can easily get convinced with other's conclusion, especially when they are not providing enough or credible evidence.
           In addition, the words the use to form the argument really shapes its meaning. Being a business major, it is very important for me to understand the fallacies that is being used against me. After understand in depth about fallacies, I can deal with fallacies and question them back if they do try to persuade me with a fallacious argument / statement.

Most Favorite and Least Favorite

This class was a really good experience for me. The most favorite part about this class was, how we were given flexibility with our homework and other projects. On the other hand the least favorite part about this class was the fact that we had to communicate through e-mails, texts, and phone calls instead of communicating face to face.
I believe that the class can be improved in the form of having more in person conversations with the teacher. This will help us clarify more doubts in person, get immediate feedback. I also would have wanted more, clear details on the various assignments given. The directions were a little vague and unclear at times. It confused our group a lot of times.
Other than these small hiccups, the class had many other positives. The class improved my communication skills and taught me valuable lessons that will help me in the future.

What I have learned :

I have learned a lot over the semester. I got myself familiarized with a lot of concepts / skills such as, fallacies, leaderships, facilitating others, reasoning, and group work. Over the course of this semester, I learned how frequently people use fallacies in their argument to convince other people. Another interesting concept that I can relate to the real word is how we reason with others, using various types and methods of reasoning to make our argument strong and valid.
Apart from textbook concepts, I learned how to work with a group, communicate with them (mostly through e-mail and texts), direct a small group and how to take the initiative. It was a very tough challenge for me to help and talk with others via e-mail, but the way this class had been designed has helped me improve my communicating skills. I also learned key information relating to managing a small group. the facilitation project was a really good project as it helped me act and improvise according to the situation.
There were a lot of other concepts that I learned, but I felt that these were the important ones that will help me in the future.

Chapter 15 : Cause and Effect

I will be talking about Particular causes, generalizations and general causes.  there is no particular definition behind the concept. It is just laid on top of the basic definition of a cause and effect incident. Here, this example should clarify this concept :

A particular cause :
                  The sniper shot him at his heart; the man died on the spot.
This example shows how a cause, which happens once, creates an effect which also happens once. Now, in order to establish a relationship between these two incidents, we must look at this from various other possibilities. For instance, if the man shot him with a pistol gun, or a shot gun; or the distance between the two men. If these cases are tried, all these shots would kill the other.

Now, we can generalize this statement by stating that : A bullet shot at anyone's heart, will definitely lead to their death, unless they are wearing a bullet proof vest.

 This is basically what a particular cause and effect, and a generalization of causes is.

Mission Critical

This website has a lot of familiar concepts that we have studied during this semester. I took the freedom to go over the ones that we have not yet covered, or I personally have not read. For example, I went deductive reasoning in Conjunctions and Disjunctions. In other words, arguments with "or" or "and". I learned that during the "or" claims, you accept one case or the other, or you reject it all together. On the contrary, an "and" claim is where, you would accept all the cases, or reject one. Another concept that I went over was the "two wrong" fallacy. The "two wrong" appeal basically states that when a wrong action is performed based on another wrong action, it is called the "two wrongs make a right" fallacy. An example for this fallacy would be,
Sam borrow's his best friend's watch, but never returns it.
Sam keep the watch with him , and does it give it back to his best friend.
Sam tells himself that his best friend would have done the same to him.
I learned a lot more concepts from this website. It provided loads of exercise problems, and clear definitions with examples. It was easy to reiterate the purpose and the definitions of various concepts.

Mission : Critical ( Causation)

This website was the same exact website that I used to answer the previous week's blog post. This website really helped me understand the clear definition and meaning behind causation. The example was really simple for me to analyze and incorporate. The website had a couple of general rules that really help me, like

1. 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.
2. 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. ( Introduction to causal agreements ).    

Another helpful insight this website provided me was the practice option ( exercises ). The exercises just reinforced the basic concepts and gave me a wide spectrum of the various concepts within causation. 

Judging analogies

Judging analogies are basically analogies / arguments that are made without proper premises. In other words, your supporting claims do not completely back up your conclusion, hence, the other person ends up claiming that your claim is weak. In the words of Epstein, "one side of the analogy is like, the other side is too vague to use as  a premises."

For example :
An elephant eats anywhere between 200 to 400 pounds per day; on the other hand, humans on average consume anywhere between 3000 to 4000 calories per day.

So, does this mean that, all of the elephants combined eat more per day than all of the humans combined ?
Of course not !  This is an example of an argument trying to argue that what is true of an individual is true for the group . Furthermore, the type of food / diet a human follows is not clear. It would certainly differ. Other details for the elephant are if the elephant is a wild one, or a tamed one. Therefore, we can conclude that, with this as the example, the differences between the units of an individual and the group is too large to analyze.