10G 【fish】argument161

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

小C~我看组里没开贴，我先开了哈~筒子们，不要放弃啊~就剩一个多月了~咱要顶住啊~

In the argument, the arguer concludes that the respondents’ reading habits is not mainly literary classics. To justify his claim, he cites a research finding that in every public libraries in Leeville, the number of mystery novel is outstanding than others. Though deduce sounds reasonable, a close scrutiny of this argument reveals that it suffers from several critical fallacies, as discussed below.

One of the most threshold problems that may shake the conclusion is the unknown of the statistical data in the first study. Choosing samples in the experiments plays a key role when we do research. Basically, to make the conclusion more convincing, the sample size should be large enough to avoid small probability event. It’s said that researchers must test a new drug on thousands of patients before launching the drug, to see whether it will have a side-effect on patients, or whether it does help to relieve symptoms. In other fields, such as economic forecast which is the hot spot in our society,
data mining in computer science, hundreds of even thousands of
samples are needed to build model, so that the result can be close to reality. However, the arguer failed to show us any information about it. So we have no idea whether the result of the first study reflects the truth, let alone whether people have other reading habits.

Another main problem existing in the deduction is the arguer’s misunderstanding of the definition of literary classics. In this argument, it can be inferred that the arguer does not classify the mystery novel into the range of literary classics, which is misleading to the readers. Literary classics, as the name tells us, refers to those work made in the ancient time, such as those from ancient Rome or ancient Greek. Some of them are also about mystery. So, only judging from the fact that the books receiving the warmest welcome are mysteries novel, we cannot conclude that people are misrepresenting their reading habits.

Furthermore, the deduction that for the books borrowed most in libraries are mainly mystery novel, then the first study’s result should be reviewed, is not so convincing. Albeit it is possible that most people really do not have interest in literary classics so they prefer borrowing other books, like mystery novel, in turn, it is not the case. There are many factors that can result in people’ check-out of mystery novel. May be the mystery novel is of expensive price, may be those libraries receive a few new famous mystery novel that attract people’s eyes around the time the research is made. So, the arguer’s deduction is too hasty to be convincing.

In summary, the author fails to validate the conclusion that people should have other reading habits rather than what the first study tells us, that is the literal classics. To make it logically acceptable, the author should collect a large amount of samples into the study. Furthermore, it’s better to do more related researches into the cause-and-effect relationship between the people’s reading habits and their favorite books in libraries.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

2

yogurt4UID: 198389

帮你顶 跟你互改的人呢？