My Like and Dislike about this class

For my last discussion post I’ll talk about my like and dislike about this class. For me this class is less stressful than my other classes. When doing the discussions and comments for this class it’s much more relaxing than doing my other homework.  I really like the idea of posting 3 discussions and comments for this class. It’s a great way of learning by posting our ideas for each concept that cover each week.  The comments are helpful to the discussions as well. When I am stuck on a concept that I am learn, by reading other classmate blogs help me understand better. The comments from other classmate sometime helps me corrects my errors in some of my blogs that I didn’t have a clear understanding on.  I also like to see when some reply to my post as well.

My only dislikes about this class are the group projects, the hundred words minimum for the comments, and the twelve hours wait to post.  The group project assignments are not hard but it can be confusing. I also don’t think that was necessary to bring eight people to the last group assignment.  For the comments, I find that to reply with hundred words sometime is too much for some post. Other than these, I pretty much like this online course. Overall this class was great, this was my also my first experience of taking an online course.

What I have learned

There are a lot of materials that was covered over this course that I have learned. Some of the materials I already knew about it but it still was helpful.  Most of the concepts that I found interesting are the ones I can easily relate to. For instance, I found the fallacies that were covered in Epstein to be most interesting because it usually is uses in most of the conversations I have encounter daily. After learning about the different types of fallacies I started to notice most of them from the media as well; Like in TV commercials and advertisement.  The types of fallacies are the appeal to emotions. Where some types of appeal to emotion,like appeal to fear or pity are used to convince people.  I also learned several materials from the small group communication book as well.  Such as the different types of leaders in a group, like authoritarian, consultative, participative, and laissez-faire leadership.  Although I have experienced some of these types of leadership before, I didn’t really know the term for it. Most of the concepts that I truly understand are the ones that I had experienced before.

Chapter 14

After reading chapter 14 of Epstein, I found several of the concepts about generalizing to be quite interesting.  One of the concepts about this chapter that I thought  that was most interesting was representative sample.  According to Epstein, it’s define as, “A sample is representative if no one subgroup of the whole population is represented more than its proportion in the population. A sample is biased if it not representative.” It was confusing at first but I think that there a better way to explain this. Here is an example:  Let say that there are a bunch of rabbits and you are researcher who is studying about rabbits. In a representative sample you have to make sure that those rabbits you are studying represent the whole population of rabbits in the world.  I also found haphazard sampling and random sampling to be amusing.  Haphazard sampling may contain a representative sample although you might not have any good reason to believe that it’s representative.  So, there could be lots of ways for the sample to be bias. As for random sampling, let say that you are picking one member from a group, each of those members of that group have an equal chance of being picked randomly.  Therefore it’s unlikely for the sample to be bias.

Chapter 15

For the last post of this week I am going to discuss about chapter 15 of Epstein. This chapter was a little bit long though amusing.  The chapter is simply about the cause and effect concept but it also describes about other materials that are related to it.  I first thought that this chapter was straightforward since cause and effect was an easy concept.  After reading this chapter, I found that there was more to it. One concept that I found useful is the tracing the cause backward. For instance, the example in this chapter about Spot’s barking caused Dick to wake up could go on forever backward.  Tracing the cause backward is often use as an excuse from my point of view.  Another concept that I found amusing were the criteria for cause and effect.  In Epstein, the fundamentals that is necessary for the criteria for cause and effect states:

• The cause happened (the claim describing it is true).
• The effect happened (the claim describing it is true).
• The cause precedes the effect.
• It is (nearly impossible for the cause to happen (be true) and the effect not to happen (be false), given the normal conditions.
• The cause makes a difference-if the cause had not happened (been true), the effect would not have happened (been true)
• There is no common cause.

Mission Critical Website

The Mission Critical website was a very amusing website. It’s a website that I believe contains almost everything that we learned so far in critical thinking; there are also addition concepts that I didn’t know either. I knew most of the materials that were in the basic arguments, several concepts in the analysis of arguments, and fallacies.  Some of the materials that I didn’t know about were universal syllogisms, non-universal syllogisms, circular reasoning, and unfair fallacies. I am not sure if we have cover these materials in the text yet because they seem new to me. 

Overall I find this website to be very helpful for those who still have trouble with some of the types of arguments. The exercises that are provided in this website are really helpful. Most of the concepts that are on this website have the exercises option to help those understands the material better.   It’s almost like a database for most of the critical thinking materials.

Cause and Effect Website

I found that the Cause Effect Website to be really helpful and interesting.  The website pretty much explains about the concept of causal argument, which is similar to the inductive argument. I also learned several materials that were related toward this type of argument that I didn’t know. For instance, there are two rules when it comes to causation, the first is that “The cause must precede the event in time”, and the second is that, “Even a strong correlation is insufficient to prove causation”. According to the website it describes three fundamentals that strengthen the causal argument: 

1.How acceptable or demonstrable the implied comparison is

2.How likely the case for causation seems to be

3.How credible the "only significant difference" or "only significant commonality" claim is

It was confusing at first but after reading it a few times I sort of got the idea of it. The example and exercises that were provided in this website were certainly helpful, because it made these concepts much easier to understand.