argument45 飞越dreams-第1次作业 请猛拍

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TOPIC: ARGUMENT45 - The following appeared as an editorial in a wildlife journal.

"Arctic deer live on islands in Canada's arctic region. They search for food by moving over ice from island to island during the course of a year. Their habitat is limited to areas warm enough to sustain the plants on which they feed, and cold enough, at least some of the year, for the ice to cover the sea separating the islands, allowing the deer to travel over it. Unfortunately, according to reports from local hunters, the deer populations are declining. Since these reports coincide with recent global warming trends that have caused the sea ice to melt, we can conclude that the decline in arctic deer populations is the result of deer being unable to follow their age-old migration patterns across the frozen sea."
WORDS: 262          TIME: 1小时          DATE: 2008-1-27 下午 04:57:00

In this argument, by citing the reports that the deer populations are declining according to the local hunters the arguer conclude that declination of arctic deer is result from global warming, which cause melt of ice and disable those deer follow their age-old migration patterns across the frozen sea. The arguer . This argument suffers from several critical fallacies.

First, the report of declination of arctic deer populations is not liable because of the conductor of the survey.Although hunters is very familiar with the deer, their knowledge is still in limitation. Perhaps Arctic deer find a new way to hide from the hunters, and perhaps these deer move to other place that far from local residents, and therefore actually the population of the deer dose not decline at all. With out ruling out of those possibilities, the arguer simply cannot convince me that arctic deer population is in declination.

Secondly, provide that the amount of those deer is indeed in declination, it is not necessarily caused by global warming. correlativity is necessary for a causal relationship, but in itself, does not sufficient to prove such a relationship. Alternative explanation might exist. Maybe there are more hunters and thus killed more deer than before, and consequently decline the population. It is also possible that deer population is result from lacking of food somehow. Without accounting for these possibilities, the arguer can not convincingly put a causal relationship upon the two factors.


In conclusion, it would be necessary for the arguer to rule out all the possibilities before we could better evaluate the conclusion.

[ 本帖最后由 prestige11 于 2008-1-28 01:20 编辑 ]