How to Look for the Causes

In Ch. 15 section C talks about how to look for the cause in your argument. it gave an example of a waterfall in a backyard and how they kept losing water to they came up with a list of possible things that could be the problem and by narrowing them down one by one they finally came up with a solution to why their pond was losing water. A car is another similar example, if something is wrong with you car there are always several main things that you go look at first to make sure they are functioning properly. In many instances we cannot really conduct an experiment but we can do an imaginary experiment instead. This is something that we all have done when checking for truthfulness or validity of the problem. The chapter does make a note saying that this method will only help you find the causes if you are guessing the problem among the ones you are testing. I though this was helpful because this method can be put to use in our everyday lives when we need to problem solve. Anything from our cars to an argument we can assess the situation and test each individual problem as we see it.

Mission Critical Website

The Mission Critical Website had a lot of extremely helpful material and in the beginning I was a little overwhelmed but once I took it step by step and looked through the sections I found it was not so bad after all. A few of the sections were Parts of an Argument with sub sections talking about statements, vagueness and ambiguity and inference identifiers. I this part of the site I learned the definitions of a few words such as ambiguity which is a word or phrase is said to be ambiguous if it has at least two specific meanings that make sense in context. I also learned the definition for vague which is a word or phrase is said to be vague if its meaning is not clear in context. Most of this material was things that we learned already or was covered in our books but it was a nice little refresher to get to see it all in one place again instead of having to go through the whole book again.

Cause and Effect Website

After completing all the readings and exercises on the Cause and Effect website I now have a much better grasp on the whole concept. In the several exercises that we had to complete I got to read about Causal Arguments which is an important use when we argue inductive reasoning. The example that they gave had to do with a bicyclist's and several motor vehicles. The whole point to the example is there is an accident and they explain how the many accusations will or will not hold up in court. They also give examples of why or why not they are good arguments. This site also teaches us about Introductions to Induction and Deduction, Analogical Arguments, and last but not least Surveys, Polls, and Experiments. All of these sections gave me more insight on the topic and helped me to further my communicating abilities. I really did enjoy the little mini quizzes at the end. They helped me make sure I retained the information that I just read about.