1) The first quiz question this week is who is your favorite comic and what type of fallacy seems to be their main format for their jokes? I use as an example https://www.wpr.org/mosaic-view-comedian-steven-wright who says “I mean, from the moment you wake up ’til you go to sleep, thousands of things pass your mind and that’s where the comedy comes from, from noticing pieces that aren’t usually connected together.” So he is basically using equivocation or amphiboly. Such an example is going to a tourist information desk and asking the attendant what the people were like who visited last year.length 200 words 2) The second quiz question was do unicorns exist? (Last week’s question about the Ontological argument is a fascinating focus on the relationship between language and existence. Can something we say taking advantage of the grammar of our language entail something true about the universe? I.e., does God exist, or rather, is there a necessary Being because it seems like language requires it? By the way, notice that argument seems to work not just with “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” but also anything that seems a superlative of something we have an existing example for. So I use pizza. Everyone agrees there must be a largest pizza. (Unless they misunderstand what we are doing.) You can say the greenest thing, worst thing, happiest thing, etc… But this quiz question is do unicorns exist? So here you have an example of something we have clearly defined but that there are no examples of in existence. People have been arguing about the existence of abstract ideas since Plato – at least. What do you think?length 250 words Here is a great source on Aristotle: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/3) Here are the 15 syllogisms assigned for test 2: EAE-1IAI-3EAO-2OAO-2AII-4EEO-2AIO-2OOO-4EAA-2AOO-2IEE-3EEO-4AAA-1IAO-2IEE-2The object is to write out the syllogism, draw a Venn diagram of the argument, determine if it is valid or not and say which it is, and if it is invalid explain which rule or rules it breaks and email these to me as pictures.
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