The concepts that I believe that I should cover again are fallacies. The reason for that is the some of the examples that the book gave are not clearly explained or is hard to understand. For example I didn't really get begging the question fallacy when I first read about it. After I did some research on the web it turn out to very simple. From my experiences some of the examples of fallacies in the book are not really well describe. Some are really easy to get while some of the example are hard to understand. After learning about all of the fallacies that is cover by the recent chapter, I found that it's easier to remember the fallacies by the section they are in. For example, violating the Principle of Rational Discussion is where several fallacies such as begging the question, strawman, slanters, and others are under. Some fallacies in the book does not give clear examples, which sometime could be confusing for readers. Here is a website I found with several fallacies and examples of them: http://www.drkenhunt.com/papers/everyday.html.
I agree with you that fallacies need to be explained more in the book. I found that the books example were not clear enough and I had to go online to find out more about fallacies. After going online I found out about more fallacies which I used in my second assignment. The website also made the fallacies more clear and easy to understand. One of the new fallacies I learned about was "appeal to pity" which I noticed was in the organization I was researching. After researching about the fallacies, I have a better understand of the many types and meanings.
ReplyDeleteI had a hard time too trying to distinguish the different kind of fallacies specially appeal to emotion and bad appeal to common belief. I wish that they gave examples of arguments for each structural fallacy. I went to your website and found that it had more explanation and clarification than the book. It gave perfect examples, and I was able to understand what the book meant. Doing further research is necessary when we don't understand something in the book or that we need other example. Maybe that's what I should start doing in this class, instead of guessing on a word I should look up on the Internet :).
ReplyDeleteI also decided to describe fallacies for my further discussion. I thought that the Epstein text gave a very confusing definition and ended up finding two different definitions on the website http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/. This provided the definitions for a deductive fallacy which has all true premises and a false conclusion, and an inductive fallacy, in which the premises do not provide enough support for the conclusion. A new fallacy which I learned from the project is a mob appeal fallacy which for example tries to make an individual feel terribly bad about an act that they are performing.
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