Major Course Assignments

Both of our major course assignments were useful because they both teach us some certain aspects of modern popular culture and helps us to critically think about them through an alternate academic perspective. For example, our current group project focuses on breaking down famous social organixations messaages, claims, and etc. and really analyzing them to see if they have any fallacies in the arguments that they promote. This project is useful because it really opened my eyes into thinking about famous organizations in a critical way rather than just accepting their judgement on anything based on their popularity. For our group's social organization, we chose to analyze PETa which was a social organization that primarily focued on defending animal rights. Their level of argument are pretty extreme at times as they use controverisal advertising (such as displaying nude celebrities in pring) to promote hteir group's ideals, which at times are pretty unnecessary.

Don't Generalize!

One lesson that I thought useful was the section about general claims and their contradictories. This section talks about how a claim can easily be overreached if people make general claims. General claims are basically when people reason with "All" like " All people think Errol is awesome." To fix this claim and make it better sometimes, one simple needs to put "some" instead in the place of "all". Tis helps the argument because it avoids generalizing a whole group and/or message. In a contradictory sense, one could say the same thing in a negative light. For example, "No people think Errol is awesome", but that greatens the chance of creating a fallacy, especially since that's obviously not true. In real life situations, I always catch people on making general statements. I severely dislike general claims because they generalize a whole group's different ideas and characteristics and streamline them to this one persepctive.

Your on a slippery slope

One concept from the readings, specifically chapter 6, that I found interesting was the slippery slope argument. Being one of the content fallacies, I've already read upon this and it was refreshing to re-read and learn the concept again. Basically the slippery slope argument is when a bad argument uses a chain of conditionals, which at least one of which is false dubious. This happens a lot in conversations as sometimes people state/claim things they don't even know for sure. For example:

Jane: What should I wear today? I can't decide.
Mark: Well it has been cold for the past two days so wear a jacket.
Jane: But you never know weather changes, did you check the news?
Mark: I can tell its going to be cold, I mean why wouldn't it?
Jane: I guess...

Obviously Mark doesn't have any reasoning behind his conditional and thus it seems dubious and fits in with the category of slippery slope claims.

I object!!!!

Two lessons I wanted to discuss about chapter 7 were the concepts of raising objections and refuting arguments. In chapter 7, it states how raising objections essentially happens in every day life to everyone having discussions or arguments. Basically when one starts an argument, usually a counterargument appears, and then a counter to that counter argument, and etc.

An example of a typical argument with objections is as follows:

Person A (argument): It's really cold outside, want to keep me company?
                 Person B (objection): I think I should go home, I have homework.
Person A (counterargument): But it's Thursday so there's no school tomorrow
                Person B (objection): I dont know...I have ALOT of work
Person A (countercounterargument): Forget that, I have a fireplace, movie, and a couch with your name on it!
                Person B (succumbs): ok :)

Refuting an argument is also another lesson that was taught in chapter 7, which was basically what Person B was attempting to do directly in the above discussion. Person B could also refuse by reducing Person A's argument to the absurd by stating that they don't want to keep Person A company, but why would Person B want to do that if Person A is so persuasive?

Compund & Contradictory Claims

Two things that I enjoyed learning about from chapter 6 are "Compound Claims and "or" claims" and the "Contradictory of a claim". Through compound claims, the author suggests that these types of claims can be composed of different claims but is only viewed as one. An example of that would be:

Either I pass in this writing class or fail

This is an example of a compound claim because it combines two claims  "Either I pass in this writing class" and "Either I fail in this writing class" into one claim. 

In other words, a contradictory of a claim is generally the opposite of a claim, like above, an example would be:

Claim: I passed my writing class because I got an A on my final.
Contradictory claim:  I failed my writing class because I got a F on my final. 

The second is a contradictory claim because it claims the opposite message from the first claim.

Hey wanna hang out.... ;]

;]

^

What is this?

It is a winky face. 

Analysis: It is an emoticon, that is winking 

What is it inferring: That there is a suggestive meaning to whatever sentence its added onto.

So one of the topics that was covered in Chapter 4 that I found interesting enough to blog about was inferring and/ or implying claims. In this chapter, the author covers how some people leave the conclusion unsaid in a sentence because the speaker means to imply something without actually saying the premise. One example of this situation constantly happening is through the above example, the winking emoticon. In our social media universe, winky icons can suggest a variety of things when added to sentences through texts, posts, comments, messages, and etc. Although it might be used by others as a means of expressing some other type of emotions, it is generally used to add an undertone of sexuality in text. Thus accordingly, "I wanna hang out :)" is seen as friendly as opposed to "I wanna hang out ;]" can suggest further sexual activity.