Generalizing

According to the book, generalizing basically means concluding a claim about a group from a claim about some part of it. I found this interesting because they way the book describes it, generalizing is something we do everyday and is how we "make sense of our world". In short, generalization are arguments, so they follow the same rules of whether or not an argument is strong, which is if it has a plausible premise. I liked the example the book used which was "28% of all smokers get cancer." This is a generalization based off findings by poll takers or scientists, and shows that it is something we always see in everyday life. Any time you watch the news, numbers and percentages are always used. These are generalizations! We use them pretty much everyday to help us make decisions. For example you could say: "It's raining really hard today, I should slow down when driving or I could lose control like last time or like many others who have sped in the rain!"

What was your favorite thing about this class? What was your least favorite thing about this class? How can this class be improved?

My absolute favorite thing about this class was how I was able to work on the classwork at my own pace. This was really helpful because I work graveyard shift, so its nice to have some flexibility in one of my classes. I also liked that every week, all the information was pretty much laid out in a neat and organized manner. That definitely helped me stay on task! Good job professor Perez!

My least favorite thing would be the 12 hour post restriction! I know it is set in place to prevent procrasination, but it is definitely a pain, especially when you wait till the last minute. I found that some weeks I would have to carefully lay out my posts in order to meet the time limit on my final post.

Overall, this class has been great. All the assignments, tests, and group projects are fair, so I honestly can't think of anything to improve on!

What I learned over the semester.

Over the course of the semester, I have learned a ton of things, ranging from whether or not an argument is good or not to all the different type of fallacies. As a whole though, I think this class has definitely allowed me to become a much better critical thinker, in the sense that I can much better break down arguments or points out flaws in them. Not only can I now more efficiently point out weak points in arguments, I can also in turn make repairs by adding more or removing something to make it stronger. One thing I learned in particular that I found really useful was the different types of appeal to emotion. When reading about it, it was amazing to see how it was so commonly used in everyday life by pretty much everyone. In some way, shape, or form, you have probably appealed to someone's emotion before, so its great to be able to identify this when it arises!