Week 16-Post 3: Chapter 10-Too Much Emotion

The most useful or interesting concept that I found while taking this course this semester was concepts in Chapter 10: Too Much Emotion of the Epstein text. This Chapter is interesting because many people do things and believe things based on their emotions. One's emotions are very strong on their decision making abilities. Epstein states, Appeals to emotion is "an argument is just a premise that says, roughly, you should believe or do something because you feel a certain way" (191). An appeal that stood out to me is the appeal to fear. Many politicians and advertisers use this appeal to emotion to get people to do things because they put that fear in peoples brain and mentality. Appeal to fear gets people to do things that they may not want do or may affect the decisions they take based on their fear. Politicians always use appeal to fear to get votes and get people to support them. Like for instance people are scared of terrorism and a politician goes on and speaks on what he will do to stop terrorism. People will support him because this politician and others will create this fear for people to act based on their fear and emotions. Found this Chapter to be very useful and have many important concepts on appeal to emotion that are use in everyday life.

Week 16-Post 2: Most favorite, least favorite thing about Class

Favorite thing about this class was that it was mainly online most of the time so it made it possible for me to take this class to fit to my already busy schedule. My favorite thing about this class is that most of the work was done through daily blogs and the questions really made you thing on how to apply reasoning and examples to show that one understands the concepts in comm 41. Another favorite thing is that the Richard Epstein text of Critical thinking really explain the concepts very well as well as the group communication book. The least favorite thing about this class is that one has to wait 12 hours every time to post a new blog up to blogpost website. Sometimes that is stressful because you have to wait 12 hours to post every blog up. Another least favorite thing was that I felt that there some issues with group projects even though I worked well with my group. Sometimes its hard getting all five people in the group to find a time to meet in person where everyone can make it to get organize and start planning for the project. Almost everyone has a busy schedule and in sense taking this online class because it's more convenient for there schedules. This class can improve by having no restrictions on the blog post and perhaps an alternative to group projects.

Week 16-Post 1: Learning in Comm 41

There are many new concepts I learned through taking this comm 41 course and applying the concepts to everyday life. All the concepts learn through this semester were useful by applying them through weekly blogs that we had to do because doing these blogs assure that I was understanding and thinking such as concepts like Appeal to Emotion. I never knew that there was many concepts to do with Appeals to Emotion such as appeal to pity, appealing to fear,appeal to spite, and many more concepts having to do with appeal to emotion. The group projects were very useful for this class because it made you go back and look at concepts and apply them to group projects such as looking at a editorial and applying some of these comm 41 concepts to write and critique the editorial. The second project was using a social organization such as PETA to write about what kind of argumentation the website uses to prove their points. All these things were helpful to learn all the concepts in comm 41 but the blogs were most useful to keep you thinking about how your going to apply the concepts and use your own examples to write on your blog.

Week 14-Post 3: The Normal Conditions

In Chapter 15, Epstein talks about "The Normal Conditions" and goes and relates to the example he gives of spot and dick. Epstein goes on and explain why the normal conditions are important to cause an argument or example to be valid or strong. According to Epstein, Normal Conditions are "for casual claim, the normal conditions are the obvious and plausible unstated claims that are needed to establish that the relationship between purported cause and purported effect is valid or strong" (303). Epstein uses the example about Dick and Spot to show how the concept of normal conditions is use and the example is:

"Dick was sleeping soundly up to the time that Spot barked.
Spot barked at 3 a.m.
Dick doesn't normally wake up at 3 a.m.
Spot was close to where Dick was sleeping.
There was no other loud noise at the time...." (303).

Epstein explains that its important to leave or exclude the obvious and normally we assume that things are the "normally" just like that. For instance in the example above, Dick normally doesn't wake up wake up at 3 a.m. and we need to assume that things are normally like this that Dick never tends to wake up at 3 a.m. but this time he did. This concept was just interesting to me and made sense when Eptein conclude the normal conditions in his example of Dick and Spot.

Week 14-Post 2: Mission Critical Website

At first it took me a few minutes to realize that mission critical was not another concept in critical thinking that I had to learn. I looked all over the place and only saw a lot of familiar concepts that I already learned about by reading the Epstein text and small group communication text. Then I realized that the mission critical website is a website that reviews mots of the concepts learned in critical thinking, but there were also new concepts that I had not heard or knew nothing about. I remember that there was a chapter in the Epstein text where we learned about different appeals to emotion. I don't remember seeing "Appeal to Prejudice" in the Epstein text or at least did not see this concept. From this mission critical website I learned that appeal to prejudice is also known as appeal to stereotype. According to the mission critical website, appeal to prejudice is "a predisposition to judge groups of people or things either positively or negatively, even after the facts of a case indicate otherwise". This website is really helpful because it has all the concepts that I have learn about in this comm 41 class in critical thinking and allows me to go back as well as other students to go back and review concepts that were not clear the first time around.

Week 13-Post 1: Cause and Effect website

According to the website, http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/itl/graphics/induc/causal.html, one of the most important concepts for inductive reasoning in your arguments is to argue with causation. This material seem new to me because I had no idea of making arguments with casual arguments which makes your inductive reasoning a lot stronger by using causation. This website helped me understand that casual arguments are closely related to the structure of inductive reasoning, but there is one difference from inductive reasoning and casual arguments. The website helped me understand that the implication is that there is no significant difference in inductive reasoning, but casual arguments imply that there is one significant difference and this is what makes causal arguments different from inductive arguments. The exercises helped me better understand casual arguments. For example, the first exercise asked what was the "commonality" of the five people getting sick at the picnic? The most reasonable answer and choice for me was that this five people eat the potato salad because these five people most have a cause for getting sick while other people at the picnic did not get sick. The difference for people who did not get sick at the picnic is that they did not eat the potato salad at the picnic.

Week 12-Post 3: Analogies in the Law

In chapter 12, Epstein talks about reasoning by analogy. According to Epstein, reasoning by analogy is "a comparison becomes reasoning by analogy when it is part of an argument: On the side of the comparison we draw a conclusion, so on the other side we should conclude the same" (253). Epstein goes in to talk about "analogies in the law". Epstein states that analogies in law have to be presented with detail and with careful analyzed arguments. For example, a judge has to reason using analogies in the law to make a fair ruling against the person that is being accused of the crime. A judge has to carefully analyzed the arguments and evidence of both the prosecuting side and defending side of attorneys and the judge makes a decision after a certain amount of time and decides how to rule on the case. Analogies are everywhere, but they are a big part of the law.