Past Concept

The one concept that I picked from this semester was the concept of reasoning. I thought that the different types of reasoning was a really useful, as well as interesting because of the many different types of reasoning. Reasoning is probably the biggest concept behind critical thinking. I did not think there were that many different types and kind of reasoning. I just always thought that reasoning was reasoning, and not that it varied in type. You can apply all the different types of reasoning to different aspect of your daily life.
Like for example today, I used Reasoning By Criteria to figure out what to get for my secret Santa. I used Inductive Reasoning to plan ahead for traffic on the freeway, because there is always traffic around that specific time. And Deductive reasoning to figure out what day my Chemistry final would be, because if I had lecture on Monday and Wednesday than the final would take place on Friday.

The types of reasoning are really useful and interesting. Definitely something that you use on a daily basis.

FAVORITE

This was my first online class, so I didn't really knew what to expect. It was a good experience to have, I might enroll in other online classes in the future. I didn't expect the class to have group assignments. Since it is an online class, people probably don't have that much time to begin with if they're taking an online course.
My favorite thing about this course was that it was online. So my schedule was a little bit more open due to this. It allowed me to do the work whenever I wanted.
My least favorite thing was probably the deadlines for stuff. Since it is an online class, I seem to forget about it some times. There is no real reminder for the work and deadlines.
This class can be improved by probably not having group assignments, if it's an online course. But I think the blogs are a good way to learn the concepts.

Overall the class was a good experience itself and the lessons of critical thinking was useful.

Things Learned

Over the whole courses of this semester, we learned a lot of different concepts. For me, when you put them all together, we learned how to build strong arguments. Which is very important in life. Because to me, life is just one big argument for you to fight. To build a strong argument, you must use different types of claims, reasoning, and appeals. Every aspect of life, is going to require a different aspect of claims, reasoning, or appeals. Knowing how to apply those concepts into your arguments, will provide you with a strong argument.  We also learned how to avoid bad arguments. What to and not to do when making an argument. When you know all the rights and wrongs, you will know how to build a good argument. So the one main thing, that I learned from this course was arguments. How to build them, how to analyze them, and how to counter them. Which will certainly be very helpful in life.

Interesting Concept from Chap15

Chapter fifteen was about cause and effect.  Cause and effect an be understood in the form of "B happened because A happened." A is the cause and B is the effect. We make a lot of cause and effect in our day lives. Like "There was traffic so I was late."

A concept mentioned in chapter fifteen was reversing cause and effect. Reversing a cause and effect is the incorrect way to do it. Reversing a cause an effect is when someone mistakenly think that the cause is caused by the effect when there is no back up support or evidence. There are other reasons that should be taken into consideration when evaluating a claim.
An example would be "I got in trouble that is why my parents got divorced." A lot of kids think that when their parents get divorced, it is because something that they did. But it is not exactly true. People get divorced for a lot of reasons.

Mission Critical

I found that the mission critical website was very useful on understanding arguments efficiently. The mission critical website discussed many of the various concepts we learned throughout the course. I thought it was a very good website to go to if you need help on a specific concept. They have information about arguments to appeals to fallacies. I found the section about fallacies very helpful. Since it is important to know how to build efficient arguments, it is important to understand all the different kind of fallacies. The website also offer helpful exercises to practice these different concepts. You can take the questions exams to help further expand your knowledge of these concepts. If you are having any kind of trouble, these exercises would be it easy to understand. Overall this website would help make your arguments stronger. There are a lot of good information and exercises. I would definitely recommend this website to anyone having trouble with arguments.

Cause & Effect Website

I thought that the cause and effect website reading and exercises was useful in many different ways. I found out and learned some useful information on casual arguments. A casual argument strengths comes from three different factors which are how acceptable the implied comparison is, how likely the the case for causation is, and how credible the significant difference is. Understanding these three factors would help with the concept. It is super important to know these three factors and how they work in an argument. You have to understand how acceptable the comparison is, the basic similarity has to be strong enough and realistic. Then question is the case, to see if the argument is likely. And then question the difference between the comparison.
The exercises were also useful because got to see these concepts from the reading implied to different situations. It always help when you get to use and see what you just learned in a situation or example.

Slippery Slope

I decided to discuss he concept of Slippery Slope for the concept that I have not yet discussed. Slippery slope is the concept that once one things happens than it would lead to series of other events in a chain reaction. Usually the events have no importance to the argument or main claim. I think that we hear a lot of slipper slope claims when we get lectured by our parents. Like if we start doing this bad thing, it will lead to this.
Slippery slope is the problem with most arguments and claims. Slippery Slope can be broken down to the form of "If A happens then B will happen." Most of time, A and B has nothing do with each other, which makes an argument weak. To fix this, you have to make sure that A ad B are relevant to each other and are not just jumping to conclusions.