I really enjoyed the opening of the chapter, where General claims and their contradictions are discussed. In arguments, there are many premise that come up that are used to defend a claim, and the beginning of this chapter really helps me sort out these various premise and find contradictions.
I found the section on 160 where they analyze words used in arguments to be beneficial. We all think we positively know what works like “All” and “Some” mean in arguments, but it was nice to have them defined for us. I like how it showed us to claims can be rearranged in while still keeping the exact meaning that is desired. It was nice to see to list of contradictions so we can know exactly how they are used. I thought I knew exactly how contradictions are used, but I was incorrect. The chart showing what kind of statements contradict other kinds of statements is very useful.
An example of this from my daily life occurred the other at the on campus radio station I dj for. Another DJ and I were arguing about how to operate a certain piece of equipment. They claimed that “Every listener wants to hear this”. When replying, I realized that I was actually using information from this class in my daily life. I replied, “that is not true, at least one listener does not want to hear that c.d.”. This was a direct contradiction to their claim, and I used logic in order to attack their claim.
Overall, I felt this chapter to be very helpful and useful in my daily life, but am I the only one that feels that this information should have been earlier in the book?
That was a good example with the music, since like you said, it would be an obvious fallacy to state that every person in any given area wanted to hear a certain cd. There is always got to be at least somebody who doesn’t. I think a lot times people fall back on to this kind of reasoning, when they are unable to come up with a logical reason why something should be the way it is, which is unfortunate because I think with the help of classes like this, most people would be able to effectively argue about something without falling back on fallacies and contradictions.
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