Tuesday, October 2, 2007

arguments

After a few weeks of learning about philosophy, I am getting the basic idea of it. I am getting to know what the terms means and getting a better understanding of philosophy, especally the examples that you gave us. Those definitions and examples really helped me a lot. Before, I knew a tiny bit of philosophy and now I am learning a whole lot more. I did not know the actual meaning of philosophy as well as other philosophical terms. I think philosophy is a subject that helps us to understand why we asked so many questions and seek out the answers to. The questions has an explaination to what we are looking for. If there is no explaination, we can always find out the answers. (Eventually, of course.)
I also learned that philosophy and science is different from each other. Philosophy is the study of wisdom and knowledge and science is the fact of knowledge. (At least that is what I wrote down. I am not sure.) Can you give me a brief definition of the terms. Thank you. In addition, I learned that logic is the study of arguments. Logic has two parts: the premise or "reason" and conclusion. We talked about both sound ("good") argument and fallacious ("bad") argument. Thus, this led to our homework assignment. Our assignment was to find a newspaper article(s) that has a bad argument(s).
I found something in the newspaper that might be a bad argument. The newspaper article title is "Bush has own agenda on climate change". It talks about dozens of world leaders that are gathered for a meeting at United Nations, so they can talked about the issue of fighting global warming. I think the argument here is Bush is skipping all of the events, expect for dinner. Bush said "I want to focus this next week with my own gathering leaders, and discussed the same stated goal, the reduction in the emissions blamed for climate change, but in a fundamentally different idea of how to achieve it." The leaders are upset that Bush had his own agenda because they set up the meeting with him to talk about global warming. Why would Bush would do such a thing? The leaders did take their time to prepare this meeting and now the day got wasted. That is stupid. Bush should not have done that. I mean Bush should have gone to the meeting and discussed the issue. But no, instead he made his own plans. I do not know if this is a bad argument or not but I do know this makes an interesting argument.

1 comment:

M E Achtermann said...

The example you give is not so much a "good" argument or a "bad" argument as no argument at all.

An argument must provide a conclusion, which is a statement about the world based upon at leas one other statement about the world. here there is merely a presentation of information. Bush does not explain WHY he does what he does, he merely reports what he does.

So, there is no argument here, only a report.

As to the distinction between philosophy and science, we will talk about that at some length in class.