Deductive and Inductive Reasoning

When I was doing the post about the examples of the different types of reasoning, I had a little trouble coming up with the examples for inductive and deductive reasoning. It was confusing at first because I got mixed up with the two of them. Anyway after doing a little research on the internet I found that it was quite easy to understand once you understand it. The deductive premise pretty much starts out like a hypothesis or an assumption. The premise or the argument can’t really be argued because the premise is can not be proven; the unproven premise can only be accepted by the person value.  As for inductive reasoning the premises uses data and observation to determine the conclusion.  It doesn’t use unproven premise like deductive that leads to the conclusion.

The website I found was quite helpful with explaining these two types of reasoning. Here the link:http://ocw.usu.edu/English/english-1010/inductive-and-deductive-reasoning.html

Reasoning by Examples and Reasoning by Criteria

I find the reasoning by example and reasoning by criteria to be really useful and amusing. Reasoning by example is usually used when giving evidence into your argument.  This is pretty common in most of the conversation we often have when explaining to others. For example, when my friend and I were talking about TV shows, and I said, “Hey you should watch this show. My cousin told me, he watches this show yesterday and says it was hilarious”. In this example I show evidence to support my previous premise; this type of reasoning often works really well for convincing others.  For reasoning by criteria, it’s about assumption.  Instead of saying something straightforward such as, “Get this one!”  It should be something with more reasoning to it. For instance, a better version of the example above should be like this:  “I think he want something looks cool. How about this one” 

Which is much reasonable that the example before it.

Types of Reasoning

 Here are the different forms of reasoning that we are suppose to cover this week.

1. Reasoning by Analogy

Ex: Bob is a genius because he’s smart. Jack is smart too. Therefore Jack is a genius.

2. Sign Reasoning

Ex: Bob didn’t come to class today, so I guess he’s busy with something else.

3. Causal Reasoning

Ex: I slept in my math class today, because I was up all night doing my economic homework. 

4. Reasoning by Criteria

Ex: Your little sister will want something that’s cute and fluffy for her birthday. How about this pillow that looks like a turtle?

5. Reasoning by Example

Ex: You shouldn’t cheat in college. One of the students in my chemistry class got caught cheating during an exam and he was expelled.

6. Inductive

Ex: All students that we have seen wears backpacks, therefore all students wears backpacks.

7. Deductive

Ex: All apples are fruits. All fruits grow on trees. Therefore, all apples grow on trees.

Calls in Your Debts Appeals

I found the “calls in your debts appeals” concept amusing while reading chapter ten of Epstein. According to Epstein, the definition states, “You should believe or do something if you owe someone a favor”. This concept is often used without us noticing it; usually we don't pay attention to it. Here is an example that happened to me last week. My three cousins and I were playing a first person shooter video game; the game mode was team death match, where as two people team up against the other two. So I team up with my younger cousin and his older brother said, “How could you team up with him and not me? Remember that one time where I helped you with your math homework?” In this example, my cousin, the one who said that, was trying to make me feel guilty to get me into his team. In other words it's like making someone doing you a favor by using guilt towards them.

Page 195 Exercise 3

When doing the second group project several weeks ago, I noticed that most of PETA advertisement commercials uses the appeal to fear concept to persuade people. PETA shows footage of animals being torture or killed in order to support their organization. The footage that are shown are often bloody and disgusting because that way it will make people scare of eating meat and being cruel to animals.

For the exercises on page 195, I chose the third one:

“Find an advertisement that uses an appeal to fear. Is it a good argument?”

Here is the advertisement that I chose: Link

In this advertisement when the man states, “When you buy a dog from a breeder, you'll kill a dog in the shelter”, shows that people are killing dogs when they are buying them instead of adopting them. Is it a good argument? I believe this is argument is good because it seems plausible. For instance, buying a dog from a breeder may  increase the number of the dogs population, which will cause some dogs to end up in the shelter or worst. Then the process will eventually continue. Fearing those people that buy dogs instead of adopting them was strong message from PETA. It's also an excellent example of an appeal to fear as well.

Appeal to Emotion

Chapter ten of Epstein, is a short chapter about the appeal to emotion in an arguments. According to Epstein, an appeal to emotion is basically a premise that where you should believe or do something that you feel about it. In this chapter, there are several types of appeal to emotions that were cover. I found three of them is be quite interesting. The first is appeal to pity, it is when someone feels sorry for the other person, oneself, or people. Second is an appeal to spite, where it bring in evidences to go against the claims. Third is appealing to fear, which is mostly when someone or something is trying to manipulate others; mostly used by politicians and advertisers. 

Here is an example of appealing to fear:

Bob: You should stop smoking.

Jack: Why?

Bob: Smoking will eventually causes you to have lung cancer and you will die quicker.

I found these types of appeals to emotion to be interesting because it mostly happens to us daily.

Further Discussion: Fallacies

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.