Friday, April 30, 2010
Cause and Effect Excercise Link
The cause and effect website reading provided a useful learning method in a concept discussed in chapter 15 of our book. I like the example given in this link because it was different from the other one in the book. It provided a secondary learning tool from the book discussing cause and effect. What I found really interesting was the pos hoc reasoning. An example that the website explains is when John feels he is about to hiccup he takes a deep breath. A bad argument would be that the hiccup causes the John to hold his breath. Although the hiccup does precede John holding his breath, it is not necessarily the cause. The cause in this situation would be John thinking he is about to hiccup. I found this interesting because it is something I never thought of but when broken down really makes sense. I learned from this reading that even though something precedes or even follows an event it is not necessarily connected by cause and effect.
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I agree, I thought this example was pretty helpful, especially since I have a harder time with the Latin terms. But it seemed like this one was easier to remember because of the example they gave. I think what helped it that “pos hoc” sounds a little like hiccup so maybe it will be easier for me to remember this term because I can associate it with the hiccup example. I think it helps sometimes to think of things that are difficult to remember this way, so I thought it was a good example too of how a cause and effect argument can be bad.
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