The website provided by the professor was pretty helpful in explaining the concept of "causal arguments". Causal arguments are pretty common as usually every act in life has some form of a "cause" and a later "effect", such as being out in the cold (cause) exposed you to illness (effect). The example provided on the website was a pretty interesting one in my opinion. If you had little-to-no information about the case prior to reading it (such as the illegally parked car), there would be many different scenarios that a person could argue.
I "knew" about the cause and effect concept, but I never really actually read up on it. There were several things that were pretty useful that I never really bothered to notice before. Causal arguments basically follow the form of inductive reasoning, except for an important difference. As the website stated, inductive arguments imply that there is no significant difference while causal arguments imply that there is one significant difference. Another would be the rules that causal arguments must follow, such as the cause must precede the effect or you'll run into a fallacy such as post hoc reasoning or reverse causation. The exercises were also pretty helpful in applying the info that I just read to real-life situations.
I’m definitely glad that I read your post because it clarified a few things for me. I knew that casual reasoning seemed similar to inductive reasoning but I was unaware as to why. Now, I know that it is because inductive reasoning has no significant difference and casual reasoning has one significant difference. As you mentioned, it is also true that people can come up with a ton of different arguments for a situation based on the knowledge they have of the subject. My family approaches arguments from different stances all the time because some of them know more about one part of the subject than others. Your explanations on this topic were very helpful.
ReplyDeleteYour post did a great job of explaining why inductive reasoning is similar in structure to casual reasoning, but you explain the difference that distinguishes them apart from each other. I had also heard of casual reasoning but never knew how the cause and effects work out in examples and arguments and this website did a great job of explaining casual reasoning. At first I had to read the concept on the website several times to understand it. But the exercises were really helpful as well. They go into detail and explain all the choices that are wrong and why and the choice that is correct and why. The exercises helped me understand casual reasoning a lot better. But good post explaining casual reasoning.
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