General Claims and their Contradictories

General claims help determine if it is part of a collection or if it's separate. There are key words like All, Some, No, and Only.

All can be confusing because sometimes it means every single one with no exceptions and sometimes it means every single one with at least one exception. Some means at least one and is sometimes meant as "at least one, but not all."
No means not even one and is sometimes used by the word "only." Only means all are something, all have to be this.

Example of All: All cats meow.
Example of Some: Some people have black hair.
Example of No: No one is 300 years old.
Example of Only: Only people with bus passes can ride the bus.

The contradictory of each claim is one that makes it false.
Contradictory Examples:
All: Some cats don't meow.
Some: No person has black hair.
No: Someone is 300 years old.
Only: At least one person without a bus pass can ride the bus.
These contradictories make each claim on top false.

Again, this is exactly like discrete math when you negate a statement you get the contradictory of the statement.
All - some are not, not every
Some - No, all are not, not even one
Some are not - all are
No - some are
Only S are P - Some P are not S, Not every P is S

Critical Thinking in News and Politics

For the first major course assignment we had, I found it useful because it helped me to find the premises, claims, and argument within someone else's writing. It helped me to locate where everything was and helped me to understand how someone organizes their argument. It was useful because I learned how to pick holes in a person's argument and learned how an argument can be good or bad. It helped me to determine whether the argument is valid, strong, or weak. It also taught me the usefulness of evidence within an argument, if there is no evidence then you aren't credible enough to be believable in your argument. Just like for the assignment that my group and I did on the health care reform. We found the premises, claims, and argument the author made by reading the whole editorial. Sometimes an argument or a claim isn't stated so we had to assume what the author was trying to get at, and this is also where I found this assignment useful. Sometimes an argument or claim isn't stated and this helped me figure out how to find it when it's unstated or how to find it when it is stated.

checking for validity with diagrams

Using diagrams to check validity is very helpful. According to the epstein text, to check the validity with diagrams:
-A collection is represented by an enclosed area
-If one area is entirely within another, then everything in the one collection is also in the other
-If one area overlaps another, then there is something that is common to both collections
-If two areas do not overlap, then there is nothing common to both collections
-An "a" or a dot in an area marks that a particular object is in that collection
-Draw the areas to represent the premises as true while trying to represent the conclusion as false. If you can, then the argument is invalid. If there's no way to represent the premises as true and the conclusion false, the argument is valid.

It's almost like a venn diagram. It contains one thing which then you have to decide whether what it contains is also contained in something else, which determines whether the argument is valid or not.

I thought drawing a diagram was very helpful because sometimes it's hard to tell where something belongs, like in Discrete math where we had to use letters or statements that included "all" or "for every" or "not" and drawing a diagram for that would make things simpler. Like if I said that all students at SJSU are taking math classes. Suzie is taking a math class. If I drew a diagram for that then I would know that isn't a valid argument because yes, Suzie is taking a math class, but that doesn't mean that she is a student at SJSU.

Bad Appeals to Authority

A lot of times I believe what people say and what they're arguing just because a lot of other people believe them too. A most common thing would be to believe our friends just because they sound like they know what they're talking about or when they peer pressure you into thinking something, like if someone peer pressured someone else by saying "You should smoke, everyone else is." Another example would be gossip, like when some says "Yea he's dating her, I saw them together," and then another friend would add on to that saying "Yea, I saw them together too one time." Then I would believe that friend just because my other friends believe it too. Or sometimes when I hear a smart person say something and they're totally joking around, but I believe them when they say it just because I know they're smart. Well, in evaluating premises bad appeals to authority should be avoided.

Advertising on the Internet

This advertisement is one of the funniest I have seen. It is trying to convince the audience(directed towards women, and men indirectly) to get old spice. According to Chapter 5 in the Epstein text, the criteria for accepting or rejecting claims are our own personal experience and from other sources. The claims they use in the advertisement, we know from experience, that it's not true, that "anything is possible when your man smells like old spice and not a lady." I think the audience all knows that, but the true claim the commercial was trying to give was that men shouldn't smell like women, and with old spice they won't. We can only believe this claim through our personal experience and through other sources. To accept a claim through other sources we have to trust someone who is an authority of the kind of claim. In the commercial I guess you could say the authority figure was the man in the commercial who is wearing old spice. If he looks like that, rides a boat, "give two tickets to the thing you love", gives diamonds, and is on a horse, and wears old spice then isn't that pretty convincing to the audience that they too should get old spice? But the problem with this is that to accept the claim, the authority has to have no motive to mislead, and this commercial is very misleading.

With this advertisement, it is appealing to both our personal experience and other sources. In my opinion, with my personal experience, old spice has a very man-like scent, but I would not listen to the authority figure here because he is misleading. Not every man who wears Old Spice will attribute the same qualities as the man in the commercial, and just because he says that your man will smell like a man because of Old Spice, doesn't necessarily mean he will. He isn't an expert. So I reject the claim in this advertisement because of other sources.

Honestly though, I think this advertisement was depending more on humor to convince the audience to buy their product and not the claim that was given. I think if people were trying to believe what it was saying, they wouldn't buy, but if they were going for humor, it would get them.