Friday, February 12, 2010
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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I liked your explanation of how when making a claim in an argument we need to make it easy to believe with our premises. When making a claim in an argument we can not just through useless facts out there that have no evidence behind them. Your example of everyone having a TV in their house is a good example. The premise of everyone having a TV in their house has nothing to do with how many TVs John has. It shows how a weak premise could lead to a weak conclusion. By having a weak conclusion you will look like you haven't thought things through, and as you stated "look silly."
ReplyDeleteI hella agree with you. The concept of believing a person's statement is a big deal. It's like one of those people preaching in San Jose State. He has a bad way of making people believe things is (in my opinion) the fact that he just LITERALLY screams on your face. I would be walking and he would just scream at me to make me believe his beliefs. I am Catholic but his techniques are horrible. I like how you describe that it is important to make a good argument by believing the statement, I totally agree with that.
ReplyDelete