Subjective and Objective

One subject i feel that was really interesting this semester was subjective and objective claims. I feel like it was something that we briefly went over but since i enjoyed learning about it so much, i have decided to talk about it in my final blog post of the semester. A subjective claim is a calim that is made that depends on somebody's opinion to decide whether it is true or false. An objective claim is a claim that is true or false based on factual evidence and needs no one persons opinion to decide whether it is true or false. That is the majr diference between the two. I think the excercises that we had to do while reading the section were very good and helpful because they made us decide whether or not the claims being made were subjective or objective. They were very helpful excercises and made everything about the subject much easier to understand and since it was easy to understand, it made it a much more likeable subject to study.

What I Learned Throughout the Course

What have i learned during this class this semester? Where do i start? I learned pretty much everything i need to know about group communication. I am sure there is still quite a good amount of group communication that was not taught in this class but i feel like we went over a very large amount of different things throughout the semester. Even though it is an online comm class, it feels like it was still very helpful in teaching me about group communication. I may not know everything there is to know about group comm but i know that i know a lot more about it now than before starting this class and i feel like if i continue to study the material it will help me even more. In this class, my two favorite topics were probably arguments and claims. Especially subjetive and objective claims. It was good to learn about what they are and how they may apply to group comm. A good example would be for our group facilitation paper. I learned a lot throughout this class and that is for sure.

Generalizing

Going into this, i thought i knew what generalizing was but it was a little different than i had thought. We are generalizing if we conclude that a claim about a group, the population, from a claim about some part of it, the sample. To generalize is to make an argument. Sometimes the general claim that is the conclusion is called the generalization, sometimes we use that word for the whole arguement. Plausible premises about the sample are called the inductive eveidence for the generalization. That is how the book chooses to explain this subject. Before i read this, i had a good idea of what a generalization was. I always thought that it was kind of like putting a whole group of people together just because they have one thing in common. Turns out i was pretty much right because after reading this ection, not too much of it was different than what i thought it was prior to reading it. It was a very interesting section and i enjoyed it.

Question #3

For the third and final discussion question this week, we had to pick a section that we had not yet discussed from the reading. This week, we could pretty much choose any section because the first two questions were about things that we could find online. I chose to talk about cause and effect and the normal conditions. I know at times during the semester in this class, we have definitely talked about cause and effect so there isn't much else to say with that topic. I wanted to mostly talk about normal conditions because that is something that hasnt really been brought up yet. For a casual claim, normal conditions are the obvious as well as the plausible unstated claims that are needed to make sure that the relationship between the purported cause and the purported effect is valid or strong. I thought this concept was relatively simple to understand. After going over it a few times of course. It was a very interesting subject and i definitely learned a lot.

Mission Critical

For this discussion question, we had to visit a website called Mission Critical. I didnt really know what this website was going to be about so i was interested to check it out and see what i was in for. It turns out that this website was very much about breaking down different parts of arguments. First , it talked about the basics of an argument. It then discussed the different parts of an argument. Then, it gave an examples of all these different arguments and then they also analyzed all of the arguments to help explain whether the argument was a good one or not. After that, there was a different section that talked about fallacies and non fallacies as well as persuasion. This website was very descriptive in all aspects. It described everything very well and made everything much easier to understand. I thought it was a good website and it really helped me to understand these concepts better

Cause and Effect Website

The website that we had to go to was the cause and effect website. At first, i thought it was going to be really long and boring so i was not looking forward to it. It turns out that it wasnt really that bad at all. It was actually very interesting and i thought it really helped me understand the concepts even more. And it wasnt just reading, we got to do some excercises that were even more helpful. I wasnt too clear on the subject of cause and effect but this website definitely did a good job of helping me understand the concept. The examples they used were also good at testing us on whether or not we understood the topic. It was very useful because i got a few of them wrong on my first guess but it let me go back and correct myself so i could get the right answer and understand the reasons why i got the question wrong in the first place. It was very helpful

Appeal to Spite

I was trying hard to figure out which topic from the reading that i would talk about for this post because there were quite a few that i enjoyed that i could have chosen from. The one i chose to talk about can be found in chapter ten of the epstein text. It is appeal to spite. I found this topic very interesting to read about. I was a little lost at first but i read over it and it ended up being easier to understand. The book describes it as the hope of revenge. Basically, it is trying to explain how doing something bad to somebody is what you are supposed to do if they have done something bad to you in the past. I had never really thought of this as an argument but the book does a very good job describing how it can be an argument. It was a very interesting thing to learn about now that i understand it.

Question #2

For this blog post, we were asked to work with one of the excercises presented to us on page one hundred ninety five in the Epstein book. There were a few examples to choose from but i am choosing to work with number six. This example says to give an example of an appeal to spite that invokes what someone believes and is it a good argument? The only real example i can think of for this question would be the people in politics. I will use the presidential election as my example for this blog post. Presidential candidates always state what they believe and what they stand for when they are campaigning for election. Then, the other candidate gets his turn and before he even states what he is all about, he will usually rip what the other candidate had said and try to make him look stupid. That is just the way things work in politics. You are trying to make your opponent lose more than you are trying to win. Usually those arguments are good arguments

Appeal to Emotion

There is a very interesting section in chapter ten in the Epstein book. It has to do with Appeals to emotion. It talks about how we should use our emotions and that they should play some kind of role in our reasoning. This may be true but then the next question would be, "Can we use too much emotion?". That is a very interesting thing to think about. We may act to quickly at times because of our emotions. I think that it is very important to keep a level head and not act solely on your emotions, but actually think before you make a decision on your reasoning. By definition, an appeal to emotion in an argument is just a premise that says, roughly, you should believe or do something because you feel a certain way. Then the book goes on to give an example. It says that Suzy saw an advertisement that was trying to collect money for children in need. Suzy says the ad was very sad and she wanted to give money. in my opinion, she was acting only on emotion when she should really take her time and think about it before she goes and spends her money. Her emotions were the only reason she felt that way. Overall, it was an interesting concept to learn about.

Vague generalities

Earlier in this class this semester, we discussed vague arguments in one of the discussion weeks. This week, I am going to discuss vagueness again but this time it involves using vague generalities. It was something that I found a little hard to grasp at first. It was just a little hard to understand but after reading over it several times, it was much easier to understand. The section on vague generalities is in chapter eight of the epstein book. For precise generalities, the book tells us that we need to make sure that if we use percentages in a claim, that it is not always going to be a strong aegument. Then there are vague generalities. The book states that we use all or part of a collection without specifying a precise number using the words all, almost, many, most, a few, and some. The use of some and all can be further examined to see if the argument is valid. Overall it was an interesting section and now that I understand it, it is even more interesting.

Course Assignments

I believe that the two assignments that we have done in this course have been extremely helpful and useful in this class. First of all, we get to work with groups which is always good. I will admit that I was a little bit nervous before I actually met my group for the first time because I was afraid that I would get a bad group but luckily, I did not. Also, for assignment number 2 we got to learn about different charity organizations and i thought that was very interesting. In the first assignment we got to look at different articles. We had to pick out the main point and some supporting points and that was fairly easy to with a group. These to assignments have been very helpful in many ways. We have had to learn to work with people that we don't know and we have had to analyze articles and other things like that differently than we, or at least I have done before. These two assignments have been very useful.

General Claims

Chapter eight in the Epstein book is about General Claims. One of the most important things that the first section covered was when and how to use words like all, some, no, and only. Those words are very strong and leave no room for anything else. All means every single one without any exceptions. Some means at least one, so it might be smarter to say some rather than all. An example of this is when someone says " all professors give easy exams". That is saying that every single professor in the world gives easy exams. That is clearly not the case so you would not be making a valid argument if you said all. Now i'll look at it the other way. If someone says "some professors give easy exams", you would be much more inclined to listen to them. It makes sense that some professors give easy exams and that is definitely believable. If you say that all professors give easy exams then you clearly are lying. You have not had all professors, so you do not know. That is a very valid point and this section was very good in explaining that it is important to reason using general claims.

Inferring and Implying

In chapter four of the epstein book, there was a certain section that i found a little interesting. It can be found on page seventy four and it is about inferring and implying. Before i read this section, i thought i knew what both those things were and i guess i did in a way but this section made me look at them in a different way and helped me get a much bettter understanding of what they mean. So this is how the book explains it. " When someone leaves a conclusion unsaid, he or she is implying the conclusion. When you decide that an unstated claim is the conclusion, you are inferring the claim". I think that is a very good explanation and it definitely helped me. This section was overall very helpful with all its examples of different ways to tell what someone was implying and what someone was inferring. It simply just made it cleaer for me

Internet Advertisements

Internet ads can be found everywhere on the internet. They are extremely annoying and you can't get away from them. It is easy to shrug off about ninety five percent of them but there are some that definitely catch your eye. There is this one on www.knbr.com that pops up everytime i visit the site. It is for the Blackmon Legal Group which is centered somewhere in San Francisco and it is apparently a very good lawfirm. I just clicked into it because it is always there so i wanted to see what it was. The claim in makes is that it's the best injury law firm in the bay area. Considering I don't know about any of the lawfirms in the bay area, they don't do a very good job of explaining what they do that makes them the best. They just say they are the best. They basically don't support their claims in any way so it makes it hard to believe that they are indeed the best. Like I said, I don't know anything about them so I can't argue one way or another and since they don't support their argument, it is hard to believe. I think internet ads are annoying but I guess it's possible that some of them out there are actually worth clicking in to.

Repairing Arguments

Every time you hear an argument, you should ask yourself if it is a good argument. A lot of people give bad arguments and they are usually pretty easy to spot. The section on repairing arguments was very interesting and it prvided a lot of good examples of arguments that needed to be repaired and how to repair them. An example of an argument that needs to be repaired is No cats sing. So Sylvester does not sing. The only way to make this argument valid or stronger is to make one certain argument. That argument would be Sylvester is a cat. Since I added that to the argument, it makes the argument good. That argument is similar to the first example in chapter 4 of the Epstein text. There is nothing more that you can do to it to make it better. That is one of the many ways that you can use to repair an argument.

So its' Bad, So What

One thing that I noticed at the end of the chapter caught my eye and I thought that imight be a good idea to discuss it in my last post for this week. At the end of the chapter, there is a paragraph with the title, " So it's bad, So what". When I first saw this title, I assumed that it would be discussing why it would be ok for an argument to be bad. As you might guess, this was not the case. Instead, this section talked about the goal is to eventually be able to learn how to exchange ideas, not to stifle arguments. It points out that if we were to point out every single bad argument that our family and friends make, they would consider us completely unbearable. I think that statement would be completely true for most people and I know that it would be true in my life. My friends would definitely not want to talk to me as much if I criticsized. I agree with that statement of this section in the book.

Content Fallacies

A fallacy is a bad argument of one of the types that have been agreed to be typically unrepairable. I will be discussing content fallacies. A lot of arguments are considered bad because there is a need for repair to a false premise. But some arguments look like ones that we should definitely be suspicious of. When one of those arguments comes up, you should look for thr generic premise, which is the one that usually need to be repaired. Just because you use one of those premises, it doesn't really mean that your argument is really that bad. Sometimes, the premise is plausible and can even be true. The argument is a fallacy when the premise is suspicious and it is not supported by any other premises. An example is to say that almost everything someone says is probably not true. This is a content fallacy because there is a lot of doubt in what that person is saying. It would be a lot better to say " anything your friend says is not true". That is much more believeable simply because it does not use the words "almost" and "probably".

Structure of Arguments

The section about how to structure an argument was very helpful. I will use example number 1. It is , My neighbor should be forced to get rid of all the cars in his yard. People do not like living next door to such a mess. He never drives any of them. They all look old and beat up and leak oil all over the place. It is bad for the neighborhood, and it will decrease property values. I consider this an argument. I believe that there are two claims in this argument. I think the first one is when the person says " My neighbor should be forced to get rid of all the cars in his yard". I believe the seconf claim is when the person says "It is bad for the neighborhood, and it will decrease property values". I do not believe that this argument needs any additional premises because it already states many reasons as to why the cars need to be moved. There are a couple of subarguments in this argument. I believe the first one is " He never drives any of them". The second one is " They look old and beat up and leak oil all over the place". I believe that overall, this is a good argument.

Good Reason to Believe

The very first section of chapter three of the Epstein book talks about having good reason to believe and how you need good reasons to believe an argument. This is true because if you were to say something that was completely "out there", then people would think you were crazy because they have absolutely no reason to believe you. Part of making a good argument is making people believe what you say and for that to happen, you have to be able to make plausible claims. An example of a bad argument is: Everyone owns at least one television. Therefore John has two televisions. This makes no sense because both the premise and the conclusion are false and since there are people that do not own any televisions, there is no reason at all to believe this argument. So that is an example of how it is very important to make an argument easy to believe. If you don't do that, you will look really silly to whoever you're making your argument to.

Strong vs Valid Arguments

An argument is considered strong if there is a way for it's premises to be true and its conclusion be false at the same time even though it is unlikely. An argument is considered valid if it is not possible for its premises to be true and the conclusion false at the same time. It is hard to compare the two kinds of arguments but sometimes, a strong argument that has premises that are true is better than a valid argument with the same exact conclusion. An example of this could be: Most of the basketball players I have seen are more than six feet tall. Therefore, every basketball player is more than six feet tall. That is an example of a strong argument. An example of a valid argument would be: Every basketball player is over six feet tall. Therefore, anyone that plays basketball is over six feet tall. This is a good example of a strong argument with premises that are true being better than a valid argument even though they have pretty much the same conclusion.

Good Argument?

There are three tests that prove whether an argument is a good one or not. The first test is that the premises must be plausible. This means that there has to be good reason to believe the argument. The second test is that the premises have to be more plausible than the conclusion. The third test is that the argument has to be valid or strong. An example of an argument could be, Mike is a basketball player. All basketball players are tall. Mike is tall. The first test to see if this is a good argument or not is to decide whether the premises are plausible. I believe they are plausible because if you look at the basketball players in the NBA, they are mostly tall. The second test is to decide whether the premises are more plausible than the conclusion. I believe that the premises are definitely more plausible than the conclusion because it is much easier to believe that Mike is a basketball player than it is to believe that he is tall because if you have never met him, you wouldn't know how tall he is. The third and final test would be to decide whether or not the argument is valid or strong. My argument is neither valid nor strong. It is a weak argument. This is because it is possible and not unlikely for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. There are many basketball players who are under six feet tall, so to say that all basketball players are tall would be false. In conclusion, my example is a bad argument.

Good Group

One of the more interesting things I found in the rest of the reading was the section where it talked about what it takes to make a good group. This can be found in the "essential guide to group communication" book. It talks about many different things that are needed to make a good group. The first they talk about is Group Interdependence. This is basically saying that every member in the group needs to have their own responsibility and fulfill that responsibility. The next section talks about cohesion in groups. This section talks about how important it is to be involved with your group and how you need to learn to work together as a group to get things done. Another section talks about establishing norms in a group. In a group, it is important to have consistency and know that you can depend on your fellow group members. You also need to decide things like what roles that certain members will have and things like that. All those things are necessary to make a successful group.

Vague

A vague sentence is one that can be understood in many different ways, so many that we have to ask the speaker what they mean to get a clear understanding. A recent vague sentence I have heard was not too long ago when I was talking to my friend. He said that he was thinking about buying a new pair of shoes. I asked him which shoes he was talking about. His response was "those one Jordans". As you can probably guess, I had no idea what shoes he was talking about. I had to ask him to clarify because there are a countless amount of Jordan shoes that it was extremely difficult to automatically know which ones he was talking about based on the description he gave me. He could have been talking about any one of the hundreds of pairs of Jordan brand shoes. I had an idea that he was talking about the newest pair that came out not too long ago but, once again I had no way of knowing for a fact what he meant. His answer was just too vague.

Objective and Subjective Claims

An objective claim does not need anyone's opinion to make it true or false. On the other hand, a subjective claim invokes personal standards, meaning that the claim is true or false depending on someone's opinion. Since the super bowl is this sunday, I will use the 2009 Indianapolis Colts as my example. A subjective claim about the colts would be to say that " The Colts are the best team in the NFL". This is subjective because it depends on other people's opinions. Many people might think the New Orleans Saints are the best team because they are also in the super bowl. Others may believe that neither of those two teams are the best, it all depends on their opinion. An objective claim about the Colts would be to say that " The Colts had the best record in the NFL during the 2009 regular season" This is objective because it doesn't depen on what someone thinks. It is a fact that the Colts' 14-2 record was the best in the league during the 2009 regular season.

About Me

I am a second year student at San Jose State University. I am majoring in Business. This is the first comm class that I am taking so I don't really know what to expect. I am hoping that this class will help me become more comfortable in group decision making because that would help me succeed in my major. As far as online classes go, this is also my first. So far, I can say that it has been a good experience. The main thing I hope to gain from this class is the skill to communicate better in group discussion and in other group settings. Some interests of mine include sports, video games, and hanging out with friends. I like watching and playing any sport but I would have to say that my favorite is definitely basketball. I hope this class is as enjoyable as it seems and hope that you all have a great semester.