Respond to Peers

Peer replies: Reply to at least 2 of your classmates. Be constructive and professional in your responses. Each reply must be at least 100 words to earn credit. Peer # 1: Lizbeth Cambero Landey The popular appeal fallacy convinced me to buy a Revlon hair dryer brush. I kept seeing people posting on TikTok about a hair dryer brush that worked “amazingly” and dried your hair in half the time. A lot of the videos had the end results and their hair looked as if they had just gotten a professional blowout, so I went to Target and bought one. Seeing a lot of people posting this product impacted my decision because it made me want to purchase it and try it out.  Currently because of the election and the pandemic, I stay away from news media outlets that don’t agree with my own because I find myself bothered by some of the “internet trolls”. I try to analyze what I hear and do my own research to fact check whether what the news is saying is the truth or not. If I hear something that I’m not familiar with, I ask a close friend of mine who is very involved in the latest news and who I believe is an excellent critical thinker to explain a situation to me so I can have some knowledge to then perform my own research on the topic.  The government’s bias did not influence my quest for information during the election or the COVID pandemic. Despise the president downplaying the importance of masks, I continued to wear a mask whenever I was around other people and tried to maintain a 6ft distance. I overcame this obstacle by reading CDC guidelines and listening to my health care provider suggestions on how to stay healthy during the pandemic. Peer # 2: Brandi Morrison: Inductive arguments are based on probability rather than certainty. In an inductive argument, you can use a previous fact to draw your conclusion about a current decision or situation. In the reading one of the examples was, “based on the findings that only 19.9 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds voted in the 2014 federal election, the lowest turnout in any federal election that young people in college today aren’t as likely to vote in mid-term elections and thus gear her campaign to appeal primarily to an older constituency.” Its assuming that due to the previous numbers, it is possibly guaranteed the same or similar numbers in the future. This reminded me of hasty generalizations which was one of the fallacies back in chapter 3. In a deductive argument, the conclusion follows the premise if the premise and reasoning is true. One of the examples in the reading was, “No dogs are cats. Mindy is a dog. Therefore, Mindy is not a cat.” The conclusion in this example follows the premise because it is true. Mindy is a dog and since dogs are not cats, Mindy cannot be a cat. In deductive and inductive arguments, both conclusions follow their premises but in different ways. In a deductive argument, the conclusion will follow the premise if the premise is true. In an inductive argument, the conclusion follows the premise, but it is a matter of whether the argument is a strong or weak one. It does not have to be true or false. One of the guidelines in evaluating arguments is credibility. It is important to present facts and evidence in an argument. It is not to just support your position but to anticipate what part of your argument will attack and find evidence and research to back it up as well. It makes it easier for someone to see things from your perspective or perhaps agree with you. Without evidence, it comes off as you are making assumptions and do not actually have the knowledge of what you are talking about. Rhetoric is used in an argument to persuade others to believe in your truth. You present all your facts, evidence and position in an argument and the goal is to get people to agree with your conclusion rather than analyzing the argument itself. Rhetoric becomes a problem when someone comes up with claims that only support their position resulting in providing unbiased research and “logical” information. With that method, it can lead to a bigger conflict where both sides decide to argue and fight, rather than argue with reasons to come to reasonable solution.