Responses 3

Aztec Tat:

I like this summary; it’s concise and brings out the major points. The formatting of the post is also quite interesting. I really like how you point out an important aspect of the chapter and in the following sentence you apply your own thoughts. It is a very direct way of planning and organizing your opinions, compared to my methods of introducing the whole chapter summary in several paragraphs and then all my thoughts of the chapter in the last paragraph. For engineers, I agree that evidence is mostly direct experiments and calculations, as demonstrated with all the labs and calculations we are expected to do for physics and chemistry. I see engineers falling under the category of scientists, and for that our thought processes fall entirely in a different area than, let’s say, churches and poets. Engineers demand proof from statistics, experiments, and logical reasoning through quotes from mathematicians, chemists, and the like. Science doesn’t like personal stories even though there are researchers in the world who quote from others. It’s more or less a game of telephone without all the misinterpretations; however it is a pretty intricate game where each person would have to find a back-up or several data calculations to prove that what that individual says is exactly the same as what the person before said, if you know what I mean? In other words, it is quite difficult to find support or evidence through anecdotes and personal thoughts when it comes to scientific claims which are immune to pathos and ethos. 

danibarn:

It is very true that evidence basically makes up certain arguments. For example, people will most likely not believe me if I make a claim that “we will all die from skin cancer because I said so.” The reason why I put certain arguments rather than any argument is that think back to when people believed in things the nobility would say such as “the Earth is flat” or the geocentric theory, the thought that the Earth was the center of the universe. There was not much evidence to prove the Earth was actually flat or that the Earth was really the center of the universe, however people believed it anyways because they could not prove it themselves until Galileo Galilei used his telescope and saw Venus’s phases. There will be people who will believe you if you bring up something hypothetical that they have never heard or thought of. However, they will need evidence if there is an argument against that thought. In other words, it will most likely take more effort to turn people around in the opposite direction from where they are heading to. I find your analogy to WWII an excellent point to bring up about evidence. Remember the Salem witch trials too? People would believe anyone who is accused of being a witch an actual witch with no evidence. In the modern era, it’s different; there are kids running around and saying “oh yeah, prove it” because they are not as gullible as the world used to be in the old times. As a last note, most, but not all, advertisements use graphs to convince the audience that their product is better.