study alone
The Instructions:
Determine whether the following arguments are inductive generalizations or analogical arguments. Identify the sample, target, property in question, or, for analogical arguments, identify the analogues (the sample and target, also called the terms of the comparison), the basis of the comparison, and the feature in question. Also identify any inductive fallacies from chapter 10 of your textbook (if there are fallacies, explain your reasoning).
The Passages:
1. Stratton goes to his first day at classes at PCC and concludes he is going to like his anthropology course. “You can just tell,” he says to his girlfriend later, “it’s gonna be a great course. The teacher brought up all these interesting subjects, and it was just the first day!”
2. The cocktail Betsy that orders before dinner is watery, so she decides not to eat at the restaurant after all. “I don’t think they can make a decent dinner if they can’t even make a decent martini,” she mutters.
3. Stortz has heard from his friends that the folks in North Carolina are pretty friendly, so he looks forward to going through there on his bike trip.
4. Agnes has read that fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed people are more likely to develop problems from over-exposure to the sun, but she discounts these reports. “After all,” she reasons, “my Uncle Bob works outside all day on a boat, and I’ve never heard of him having problems with sun exposure, even though he is blonde, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned.”
5. Mr. Al C. Holic reads a report in the newspaper that a daily glass of wine or two might be good for the heart, so he decides to get hammered. “Why in hell not,” he says. “If one glass of wine is good for you, then surely five or six is really good for you!”
6. Overheard: “You don’t think this country is in a slump? Get real. George here was laid off before Memorial Day, and Howie’s wife and a whole bunch of other people lost their jobs when the Safeway over on Jeffrey closed down. These are tough times.”
7. Fewer than 20% of college professors think of themselves as shy, according to a new study by two psychologists. “We were surprised by this result because other studies have reported almost 50% of adult Americans think of themselves as shy, said Jane Smalley, professor at Chico State University. “College professors are sometimes considered an introverted group and so we expected perhaps a majority to think of themselves as shy,” she said. Smalley and her associate John Mason interviewed 150 college professors who were identified by their deans and other administrators at 25 American universities as “typical” faculty. The universities were selected by a random procedure from a list of American colleges and universities.
8. Juanita has taken six courses at Valley Community College, and she has a grade average of B so far. All the courses she has taken have been in sociology and psychology. She’s thinking of enrolling in another course next term, and she expects to make at least a B in whatever she takes. Suppose that when she took the previous courses, Juanita had done all her studying alone because she didn’t know any of the other students at Valley but that now she knows several good students and plans to study with them when she takes her next course. Would her argument be stronger or weaker than if she were planning to study alone? Discuss.
9. A random survey of 1000 callers to a drug-help hotline produced the following results: 535 of the callers were heavy users of cocaine freebase, amphetamines, or heroine; 220 were “recreational” users of cocaine or marijuana, 92 were not drug users at all, and the remainder refused to answer. This survey proves that most people who use drugs are not of the “recreational” type.
10. Goldman may have won the Supervisor of the Year award, but that just means they didn’t look very hard for a winner. I know a couple of people who work in Goldman’s division and they say that he’s a real pain to work for. I’d sooner trust my friends than some awards committee.
