Reasoning by Analogy

I felt that I needed to further research reasoning by analogy because it was difficult for me to understand. One website that I came across was helpful and explained this concept clearly. This website defined an analogy as: "a statement of logical relationship between two similar things that are compared with each other." This definition helped be better understand what an analogy really is. The site also explained that an argument by analogy can be: "A is like B" or "X is similar to Y." I found another website that was also helpful. This site explained that there are four steps to take when you reason by analogy. The first step is that you must identify the analogy by recognizing the similarities between objects and situations. The second step is to state the purpose of the analogy. The third step is to access the source of the analogy. The fourth and final step is to evaluate the ambiguities, dissimilarities, and false attributions that may weaken or break the analogy. This additional research helped me better understand reasoning by analogy.

Reasoning Examples

Example of Reasoning by Analogy:
"Spot is a dog and Spot barks.
Max is a dog.
Max will bark."
Example of Sign Reasoning:
"When its winter season, it must be cold outside."
Example of Causal Reasoning:
"My grade is poor because my teacher does not like me."
Example of Reasoning by Criteria:
"This car has all of the features that you were looking for. Are you interested in buying it." "You need to buy this car, it's sick."
Example of Reasoning by Example:
"You should come to the gym with me. One of my friends doesn't
go to the gym and he is unhealthy."
Example of Inductive Reasoning:
Premise: "My teacher has showed up to class every day this semester."
Conclusion: "My teacher will show up to class tomorrow."
Example of Deductive Reasoning:
"All cats are lazy. Jinx is a cat. Jinx is lazy."

Overall, I felt this exercise was very helpful and helped me better understand these examples of different types of reasoning.

Appeal to Vanity

According to the textbook, a feel good argument is one that appeals to our wanting to feel good about ourselves. Appeal to vanity is a fallacy in which one uses compliments to make another person feel good to convince or persuade them. This type of fallacy is also referred to as apple polishing. An example of appeal to vanity would be: "Dad, I know that I disobeyed you and made a huge mistake by going out past my curfew, but you sure prepared a delicious meal for dinner tonight." This would be considered an appeal to vanity because the speaker is trying to make their dad feel good by complimenting his meal. Apple polishing is usually much more effective if the compliment that the person makes is closely related to the issue. In the previous example, the compliment that the speaker gave their dad was not related to the issue that they were dealing with and was therefore not very convincing.

Objective 6

According to chapter 10 of the textbook, "Appeal to spite, the hope of revenge, is invariably rejected as bad by some people on moral grounds." In appeal to spite, spite is substituted for evidence when an argument is made against a claim. Appeals to spite can very often be found in political speeches and also in every day conversation. One example of appeal to spite that I found was: "If you decide to vote in favor of this tax cut, the wealthy will just have more money, while middle class citizens like us will continue to struggle to get by." The argument here is that, "you should not vote in favor of the tax cut because it will just let the wealthy keep more money." This statement would not be considered a good argument as is. The premise needed to make this argument strong is "you should not vote in favor of something that does not benefit you."

Appeal to Emotion

According to the textbook, emotions definitely influence our reasoning. Our emotions influence almost all decisions that we make on a daily basis. In chapter 10 of the textbook, it states that: "An appeal to emotion in an argument is just a premise that says you should believe or do something because you feel a certain way." Even though this is dealing with the premise, most of the time the entire argument is called an appeal to emotion. One of the aspects of appeal to emotion that caught my attention was appealing to fear. Appeal to fear happens when a claim is used to create fear. I found this aspect of appeals to emotion to be very interesting because of all of the political campaigning that has been going on. Appeal to fear can be easily found in many campaign advertisements for politicians. This aspect of appeal to emotion is also extremely common in marketing. Appeal to fear is considered bad if one legitimate concern is substituted for all others. On the other hand, appeal to fear is good if it is the only factor in making a decision.

Fallacies

One concept in the class that we have discussed that I believe needed to be further researched is Fallacies. After reading the section of the textbook that discussed this topic, I felt that I did not fully understand some concepts involving fallacies. One website that I found helpful was http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/fallacies.html. I felt that this website helped me better understand fallacies. One concept that this website helped me understand was arguments. Under the argument section of this website it talks about using good premises. It says that good premises are ones that you have good reason to believe are true and relevant to the issue at hand. Another point that this website made about arguments was that they should provide good support for the conclusion. One section of this website that really helped me better understand this concept was the section that described each fallacy in detail and provided good examples for each fallacy.

Assignment 2: Social Organizations

I found the second major group project to be very useful. This assignment was very interesting for me because I was interested in learning more about different social organizations. For this project, my group choose the social organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving, also known as MADD. This assignment was very useful because we were able to connect what we leaned in class to the real world. One component of this assignment that I enjoyed was that we had to find different artifact on the MADD website that were related to different concepts in the textbook. This project was also very informative because we had to truly learn what the social organization was fighting for and what their stance was on certain social issues. Another component of this project that I enjoyed was that we got to work in groups and work together to complete this assignment. Overall, I found this assignment to be very helpful and informative.