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.