The Cause and Effect readings were very helpful. It gave a lot of useful information and gave you a many different ways to understand the idea of cause and effect. They gave you examples in which they walked you through step by step so you could see what the cause was and the effect was. The website also showed you how to evaluate how strong a cause and effect claim is:
The strength of a causal argument, then, relies on three factors:
- how acceptable or demonstrable the implied comparison is (for example, do we think that there is a basic similarlity in most respects between the circumstances of this accident and those of the many other times bicycles and cars have traveled on this street safely;
- how likely the case for causation seems to be (for example, do we think that a bicycle swerving into an car's lane can cause an accident?);
- how credible the "only significant difference" or "only significant commonality" claim is (for example, do we believe that the illegally parked truck is the only significant difference between this case and the many other times bicycles and cars went down that street without an accident?).
I was indifferent about the exercises portion of the website. Even though it was helpful to practice cause and effect problems to see if I understand the material, the website had a very confusing set up of the answers. I think there are many different ways they could have set up the answers to make the website more efficient and useful.
this post is a great interpretation of what the website was saying. I did my post on this right before coming to your blog and i can see how in depth you went into the reading and interpreting of the information. The “factors that casual reasoning relies on”, was a great tool that now made me understand casual reasoning more clearly and more in depth. Although this specific topic is very complex and somewhat confusing, I do think these exercises and practices are helping me gather a more in depth understanding of the casual reasoning topic that seems to be giving many people in this course a hard time.
ReplyDeleteI think you did a really good job explaining the article. At first when I read the website I had a hard time understanding the examples they provided after I read your post I got a good understanding of the contexts. You really understood and made your own interpretations and explained your interpretations into depth by going further into the reading. I really liked how you described the strengths of causal arguments and their factors; I was having a hard interpreting that context and now I know exactly what the article was saying. You did overall a really good job.
ReplyDeleteYou did a great job on your post! You explained it very well and briefly. This helped me understand the website more. You interpreted everything clearly and obviously understood it very well. I as well as the above post had a hard time understanding the strengths of casual arguments as well as the factors of it. The website to me was a bit confusing, a lot of links and just hard to understand, but you made it a lot easier to understand. So I really need to say thanks to that, now I can write my post. Good job overall!
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