【TRANSFORMER】_ARGU165_0815

blade134UID: 2328542

TOPIC: ARGUMENT165 - The following appearedin a business magazine.

"As a result of numerous consumercomplaints of dizziness and nausea, Promofoods requested that eight millioncans of tuna be returned for testing last year. Promofoods concluded that thecans did not, after all, contain chemicals that posed a health risk. Thisconclusion is based on the fact that the chemists from Promofoods testedsamples of the recalled cans and found that, of the eight chemicals mostcommonly blamed for causing symptoms of dizziness and nausea, five were notfound in any of the tested cans. The chemists did find that the three remainingsuspected chemicals are naturally found in all other kinds of cannedfoods."

blade134UID: 2328542

WORDS: 321
TIME: 00:30:00
DATE: 2009-8-15 17:29:20

In this argument, the Promofoods Companyclaims the cans they have produced will not lead to dizziness and nausea. Tostrengthen his point, he uses a test, in which Promofood had checked thechemicals in some returned cans. However, his deduction is not perfect becausethere are some flaws in it.

First, The disease, dizziness and nausea,are probably not caused by chemicals. In this test the chemists had onlychecked the suspected chemicals, but if these dizziness and nausea were comefrom other source, for instance, the unqualified cans which cannot preventbacteria or the improper preservation method of these customers, the test wouldhave been meaningless because it was not connected with those potential factorsof illness.

Besides, The test of Promofoods isinconvincible since the detailed number of samples is not revealed. If thepercentage of which are involved in the test is small to all returned cans, theresult is not representative. Maybe some other cans containing unwanted chemicalshappened to be missed with this test. Without the detailed number andpercentage of the cans in test, we can not admit that the result of test isobjective and accurate to prove the author's proposition.

Still another fallacy is from that cans cannot lead to symptoms since the three suspected chemicals are found in otherkinds of cans can deduct the cans of Promofoods are safe. We do not know thepercentage of these chemicals in Promofoods and other caned foods. Maybe thepercentage is high enough in the cans produced by Promofoods to cause thedisease where others not to.

Even if the cans will not cause dizzinessand nausea, we need to clarify if these cans have other unwanted side effects.Maybe the dizziness and nausea of these consumers are not from cans themselves,but from the medicine used to cure the side effect, such as a food poison.

In sum, without thefurther investigation of these consumers, without detailed number of samples ofthe test, the quality of cans are still suspicious.