By the end of this unit you should:
Read the following instructions on how to evaluate an argument critically.
Being critical means providing your evaluation of the conclusion of any argument, and providing evidence to justify your decision. As this course focuses on logical thinking, you should provide evidence based on logic, and use logical terminology accurately. The following list provides an indicative guide for how to evaluate arguments.
Critically evaluate each of the following arguments.
Critically evaluate each of the following arguments.
Critically evaluate each of the following arguments
Understand and be prepared to explain the main issue in each of these paradoxes.
Critically evaluate each of the following arguments, which were written by students.
Listen to these evaluations [Recordings made by students will be added here].
Critically evaluate each of the following arguments
Listen to these evaluations [Recordings made by students will be added here].
Work alone or in pairs. Read the words in the glossary before evaluating the arguments.
Critically evaluate the following arguments.
Read and identify: the claim(s), i.e. the conclusion(s), the premise(s), any assumption(s), the type of reasoning used (e.g. deductive, inductive) and any flaws or fallacies.
Two rabbits and a hedgehog were sitting talking by the side of a busy road. The hedgehog was keen to see what was on the other side of the road but was frightened of attempting the journey for fear of being run over by a car. The rabbits gave him a piece of advice: ‘If there’s a vehicle coming,’ they said, ‘look it right between the headlights, curl up in a tight ball, let it pass over the top and away you go. It’s as simple as that.’ A few minutes later, the first rabbit tried to cross the road. Half-way across, he saw a car approaching. Lining himself up directly between the car’s headlights, he curled up in a ball and allowed the wheels to pass either side of him. Then he scampered to the grass verge on the other side. Shortly afterwards, the second rabbit crossed the road. He was almost at the other side when he saw the headlights of a huge lorry. Lining himself up directly between the headlights, he curled up in a ball and allowed the wheels to pass either side of him. Then he too scampered to the grass verge. Five minutes later, the hedgehog finally plucked up the courage to try and cross the road. He had only gone a few yards when he saw headlights approaching. He lined himself up directly between the headlights, curled up in a ball and splat! He was run over. One rabbit turned to the other and said, ‘That was bad luck. How many three-wheel cars do you get on this road?’ (Tibballs 2000: No. 193, 29) (p.57)
Simplified from Source: Ritchie, G. (2014). Logic and reasoning in jokes. European Journal of Humour Research, 2 (1), 50-60.
The text below is annotated with html-like tags. These tags are matched in the Argument Visualizer. Opening and closing tags are used to show the start and finish points of each element.
Copy and paste the texts below in the Argument Visualizer Then, use the toggle buttons to hide or reveal the visualizations.
<prem>The monkey is hungry. </prem> <prem>There is a banana. <hidden></hidden></prem><inductive></inductive><conc>The monkey will eat the banana. </conc>
<inductive></inductive>
<conc>Professor X is an efficient and effective teacher.</conc><prem>
<redherr>All his students enjoy his classes </redherr>according to the feedback given on the student feedback questionnaires.</prem>
<prem><misstat>Every student who attended the course in full received a grade A which is testimony of his expertise in teaching.</misstat></prem>
<prem>.<redherr>The professor not only holds a doctorate in physics but is also a polyglot and a polymath.</redherr></prem>
<prem><bandwagon>His course is always popular with students.</bandwagon></prem> <prem><misstat>Every course offered in the previous two years has seen enrolments meeting or exceeding the minimum number of students.</misstat></prem>
<prem><redher>To ensure he has enough energy, he always brings a cup of coffee to the classroom.</redherr></prem>
This is yet more evidence of his dedication to his students.
<prem><bandwagon>Finally, the Facebook page of Professor X has received thousands of “Likes”, a clear indication of votes of confidence in his teaching.</bandwagon></prem>
Read the passage to answer the following questionss.
Compare your answers with a friend.
Now you understand the meaning of the text, critically evaluate this argument.
Coffee acts as a stimulus, guaranteeing increased research output and has become the keystone of many research laboratories with scientists harnessing its doping effects to function at their peak while benefiting from its antioxidant properties [1].
Caffeine, 1,3,7 trimethylxanthine (Crystalline xanthine alkaloid), causes the release of dopamine in the brain. The desire for a caffeine buzz spurred scientists in the University of Cambridge to upload the world`s first video camera feed in 1991 on the Internet. The camera sent images of the status of the Trojan room coffee pot to their laboratory so that they could check whether there was fresh coffee in the pot [2].
The desire for a perfect cup of coffee inspired another project. Former Apple and NASA engineers collaborated to create a high-tech coffee maker that brews a perfect coffee and includes features, such as thermostatic control, a QR reader and wifi [3]. Thus, coffee acted as a stimulus for research rather than a stimulant.
“Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world” [4] with a worldwide consumption in excess of 10 million tons per annum [5]. The USA and Scandinavia both ranked among the top coffee drinking nations per capita [6] and top scientific output per capita [7]. Given this established correlation between coffee drinking and research, it can be concluded that drinking coffee can lead to increased research output.
Based on a survey of 4700 American workers, scientists were found to drink the most coffee [8]. Given that coffee is the most popular drink and that scientists drink the most coffee, there are two plausible conclusions. Either scientists drink the most coffee as they crave popularity or scientists are popular and so drink coffee. Either way, the correlation between coffee drinking and scientists cannot be denied.
As further proof, a Boolean search using Google [9] for “scientists and beer” results in 16 million hits while “scientists and coffee” produced over 58, million hits, which is almost 4 times more. Axiomatically, coffee is far more popular for scientists to drink than beer.
A chronopharmacological assessment of coffee intake concluded that as cortisol levels naturally spike around 9am, 1pm and 6pm, that the optimum time to drink coffee is between 9.30am and 11:30 [10], presumably assuming monophasic sleep and a standard circadian rhythm. The doping effect of caffeine can be harnessed throughout the working day to ensure that scientists are functioning at their peak.
The foundation of science may be based on Occam`s razor and the scientific method, but the foundation of the workday of scientists in based on coffee [11].
Look up in a dictionary any words below whose meaning is unclear.
This text is included as a poor example of an argument that is full of fallacies. Your task is to find the flaws in the argument and not to fall victim to its persuasive rhetoric.
Critically evaluate the text below.
There are some truths which are so obvious that for this very reason they are not seen or at least not recognized by ordinary people. They sometimes pass by such truisms as though blind and are most astonished when someone suddenly discovers what everyone really ought to know. Columbus's eggs lie around by the hundreds of thousands, but Columbuses are met with less frequently.
So men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature's rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth.
Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature's restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the shewolf, etc.
Only unusual circumstances can change this, primarily the compulsion of captivity or any other cause that makes it impossible to. But then nature begins to resist this with all possible means, and her most visible protest consists either in refusing further capacity for propagation to bastards or in limiting the fertility of later offspring; in most cases, however, she takes away the power of resistance to disease or hostile attacks.
This is only too natural.
Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life.The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.
The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc. , and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as generally there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice.
Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.
If the process were different, all further and higher development would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior always predominates numerically over the best, if both had the same possibility of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken. Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health.
No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow.
Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest man part of who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one distantly, of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood.
The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:
Critically evaluate the "we found a witch" scene.
Write a critical evaluation of the "Drinking coffee leads to scientific success" in Activity 12. Use the advice in Activity 1. Submit one-side A4 pdf of your analysis via ELMS. Ensure that you use logical terminology appropriately. Use short simple sentences or bullet points. Be clear and concise.
Evaluate the arguments critically in everything that you read and hear. You can practise critical and logical thinking every day. Share your logical analyses in the Unit forum and comment when/if you would like to.
Make sure you can evaluate the following items in arguments:
Make sure you can explain the following concepts:
Running count: 108 of 108 logical concepts covered.