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Blog Post 1 - Appraising Argumentation

Chapter 2 of Argumentation and Critical Decision Making by Rieke, Sillars and Peterson deals with evaluating the reasonableness of arguments.  The text touches on why unreasonable arguments are often made in the first place. Unreasonable arguments are defined as arguments that cannot stand up to critical appraisal. The text tells us that the most common reasons for their advancements are inaccurate convictions, heuristic thinking, sensory stimuli and social influence. I really connected with the social influence section. In today’s world, we are so interconnected with social media that it is difficult to not come across posts that might be trying to sway our opinion on a topic. I cannot recount the amount of times that I have seen a shared post on Facebook that throws out statistics or  “facts” that may not be so accurate. However, most people, including me, often times scroll past these posts without verifying the information and perceive them as true just because their friend shared it. This creates false convictions, like those mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, and then leads us to later on create unreasonable arguments based on those fallacies.

The chapter also explains that when arguments and support line up with the criteria that key decision makers are looking for they become more reasonable and therefore more likely to gain adherence. Connecting this to a real life, there is a shortage of housing inventory in the Twin Cities which is driving real estate prices up In response, many developers are proposing new building plans in order to get adherence from the city. According to this principle, the developers should base their plans around the criteria that the city is looking for such as compliance with zoning codes and building codes in order to have the best chance at getting adherence.

Lastly, strong starting points for structuring reasonable arguments are explained prior to the conclusion. These are interpretation strategies, facts, presumptions, probabilities and commonplaces. Using probabilities as starting points seems especially powerful because they give a numerical value to the argument. Connecting back to the previous chapter, we learned that people are attracted to certainty when making decisions and that arguments are inherently uncertain because their outcomes often happen in the future. When we use probabilities in arguments it brings their outcomes much closer to certainty because the audience no longer has to guess the odds of something happening. So, the audience has something solid to grasp and in result the argument becomes more persuasive.  

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 18, 2018 at 9:47 PM

    First, I really like how you simplified some of the key points of chapter two in regards to what constitutes an unreasonable and a reasonable argument; also, I agree with your definition that unreasonable arguments cannot survive critical appraisal. Furthermore, like you, I too connected with the social influence portion of the reading, and I strongly relate to and identify with this portion of your blog post. Every day I check social media and usually I check it multiple times a day. So, often times I see statistics or facts and believe them because someone that I follow or I am friends with posted it, making me perceive their posted information to be true because often times I never fact check what I am reading on social media. However, I also think that not everything on social media contains fake statistics, facts, or news and often times we need to consider who is posting the content and in which context they are posting it.

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  2. AnonymousSeptember 19, 2018 at 9:32 PM

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