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.