Argument137--Hermes 求拍

qhx17UID: 142079

TOPIC: ARGUMENT137 - The following appeared in an editorial in the Mason City newspaper.

"At present, Mason City residents seldom use the nearby Mason River for any kind of recreational activity, even though surveys of the region's residents consistently rank water sports (swimming, fishing, and boating) as a favorite form of recreation. Since there have been complaints about the quality of the water in the river, residents must be avoiding the river because they think that it is not clean enough. But that situation is about to change: the agency responsible for rivers in our region has announced plans to clean up Mason River. Therefore, recreational use of the river is likely to increase, so the Mason City council will need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River."
WORDS: 625          TIME: 上午 12:30:00          DATE: 2006-10-29

In this argument, the author recommends that city council need to in crease its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River. To justify his assertion, he points out that the quality of the water will be improved. And he also cites a survey about residents still like water sports. However, close scrutiny of the evidence and of the editorial's line of reasoning reveals that they provide little credible support for the conclusion.

A threshold problem with the argument is that the author commits a fallacy of causal over simplification in assuming that the. reason residents frequently use the nearby Mason River is that they consistently rank water sports as a favorite form of entertainment. While they still ranking water sports as a favorite term of recreation is an important contributing factor to people use Mason River, it is hardly the only one. There is no evidence to support the assumption. Yet, it is entirely possible that other places can satisfy the residents' water sports in Mason River, such as swimming polls in communities, lakes in several public parks in Mason City.  To establish the general causal relationship between the both, other results should be considered and eliminated. The author's failure to investigate or even consider other possible results in residents' favorite water sports rends the conclusion based upon it highly suspect.

Moreover, the survey cited by the author is described in vaguest possible terms. The claim does not indicate who conducted this survey, who responded the survey, when and how the survey was conducted. Lacking information about the number of people survey and the number of respondent, it is impossible to evaluate the validity of the results. For that matter, there is insufficient evidence about the survey content. It is entirely possible that residents are consistently like to take part in water sports in summer and are willing to do other sports in other seasons. Because the argument offers no evidence that would be rule out this kind of explanation, until these questions are answered, the results of the survey are worthless as evidence for the conclusion.

Even assuming that people still like water sports and the use of Mason River increases, the author unfairly recommends that the quality of the water in Mason River will be clear up by agency responsible for river. Although government announced that they would adopt to clear up the river, the results whether the quality of water reaches norm of doing water sports is unknown. Otherwise, the protection of safe sports is not indicated as well. Without rule out other possibility of the results, the author unjustifiably draws any conclusion whatsoever.

In addition, even assuming that the quality of water can be cleared up, and people would like to do water sports in Mason River, the author fails to make a assertion that the city council should increase the budget to improve the public land along the river. There is no evidence to indicate that people use Mason River and they use the public land along the river as well. Meanwhile, the author overlooks the possibility that the land along the river is too poor and need to be improved largely or a large amount of money. If that is the case, the author's assertion would be seriously undermined.

In sum, the argument is unconvincing as it stands. To bolster it, the author must provide clear evidence that people who like water sports indeed use the Mason River frequently and the most of whole year. To better assess the argument, it would be useful to know whether the quality of water would satisfy the people requirement. Also useful would be any information concerning about the profit of improvement of land along the Mason River.