Lesson 2 Critical Reading

Lesson 2 Critical Reading

The scheduled presenters are supposed to be well prepared for presentations on Value
assumption, Descriptive assumption, Fallacies I, and Fallacies II.

Lesson objectives:
 Get to know major basic concepts: 1 ） assumption, 2 ） fact cf. opinion,
3）logical fallacies (refer to Chapters 5, 6, 7 of Asking the Right Questions).
 Learn to practice the above concepts in specific cases
 Get to learn the eight questions frequently used in critical reading

1. Assumptions
Refer to chapters 5 and 6 in Asking the Right Questions for more details.
Definition and features of assumption:
Assumptions are ideas:
1. hidden or unstated (in most cases);
2. taken for granted;
3. influential in determining the conclusion; and
4. potentially deceptive.

Clues for Identifying Value Assumptions:

1. Investigate the author's background.
2. Ask "Why do the consequences of the author's position seem so important
to her?"
3. Search for similar social controversies to find analogous value
assumptions.
4. Use reverse role-playing. Take a position opposite the author's position and
identify which values are important to that opposite position.
5. Look for common value conflicts, such as individual responsibility versus
community responsibility.

Clues for Discovering Descriptive Assumptions:

1. Keep thinking about the gap between the conclusion and reasons.
2. Look for ideas that support reasons.
3. Identify with the opposition.
4. Recognize the potential existence of other means of attaining the
advantages referred to in the reasons.
5. Learn more about the issues.

Task 1–1 Presentations (with prevision)

Refer to chapters 5 and 6, have and present your perspective to the class on value
assumption and descriptive assumption. The time limit is 5 minutes, and you may be
asked questions by the class afterward.

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Task 1–2 There are a number of assumptions in the following reasoning. What are
they? Which is the major assumption according to you?
Holidays are a time for relaxation and enjoyment. People need this time to
recuperate from the stresses of work and family life. This year, thousands of people
will have their holidays ruined by oil spills along our beaches. Therefore, people who
have already booked their holidays should receive compensation for the stress that
these holidays will bring.

Task 1–3 Read the following paragraph and identify the implicit assumptions used
as reasons to support the conclusion.
Cities are so polluted by cars’ exhaust fumes and chemicals pumped into the air.
In the countryside, the air is free of pollution. People ought to stop living in cities as it
is healthier to live in the countryside.

2. Differentiating between facts and opinions

Task 2–1 Is a fact or an opinion given in each of the following statements?

1) I want to give my opinion on the national law that sets twenty-one as the legal
age to drink alcohol and the reasons I feel this way.
2) I learned to play many musical instruments when I was young.
3) In this essay, I am going to discuss the effects of long-term drug abuse.

Optional warming-up task for Task 2-2:

Regarding human progresses in exploring whether the Earth is spherical, search
for answers to the following questions:
 What did Eratosthenes (an ancient Greek) do?
 What did Fernando de Magallanes accomplish between 1519 and 1522?

Task 2–2 Flat Earth Society Facts & Opinions

 Watch the video below, and analyze facts and opinions in what the Flat Earth
Society members (referred to as “flat-earthers” or “flatters”) advocate.
https://v.sjtu.edu.cn/course/opencourseshare5826.html
 Refer as well to the “Flat Earth Society” extracts below from Wikipedia:

The Flat Earth Society's most recent planet model is that humanity lives on a disc,
with the North Pole at its center and a 150-foot (45 m) high wall of ice, Antarctica, at
the outer edge. The resulting map resembles the symbol of the United Nations, which
is used as evidence. In this model, the Sun and Moon are each 32 miles (52 km) in
diameter.

The resulting map resembles the symbol of the United Nations, which is used as
evidence.

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Much of the society's literature in its early days focused on interpreting the
Bible to mean that the Earth is flat.

Flat Earth Society recruited members by speaking against the US government and
all its agencies, particularly NASA. Much of the society's literature in its early days
focused on interpreting the Bible to mean that the Earth is flat, although they did try
to offer scientific explanations and evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_flat_Earth_societies

3. Fallacies
Refer to Chapter 7 of Asking the Right Questions for more details.
Clues for Locating and Assessing Fallacies in Reasoning:
You should reject reasoning when the author:
• attacks a person or a person's background, instead of the person's ideas
• uses slippery slope reasoning
• reflects a search for perfect solutions
• equivocates
• inappropriately appeals to common opinion
• appeals to questionable authority
• appeals to emotions
• attacks a straw person
• presents a faulty dilemma
• engages in wishful thinking
• explains by naming
• diverts attention from the issue
• distracts with glittering generalities
• begs the question

Task 3–1 Presentations (with prevision)

Refer to chapter 7, have and present your perspective to the class on fallacies.
The time limit is 5 minutes each, and you may be asked questions by the class
afterward.

Task 3–2 Read the following paragraph with uses of faulty logic. Underline the
words with logical fallacy and specify the kind of fallacy in each case.
Next week, our fine upstanding citizens will get to the polls to vote for or against
a penny sales tax for construction of a new stadium. This law, if passed, will cause
extreme hardship for local residents. Our taxes are high enough as it is, so why do our
city’s apathetic leaders think that we will run happily to the polls and vote “yes”? If
we take a look at what happened to our sister city as a result of a similar bill, we will
see that this new tax will have negative effects. Last year, that city raised its tax by
one percent. Only three weeks later, the city was nearly destroyed by a riot in the
streets. If we want to keep our fair city as it is, we must either vote “no” on the ballot
question or
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4. Reading Critically

4.1 All thinking can be analyzed by identifying its eight elements.

In order to get these details, eight questions are usually asked. You can change
the order of these eight questions in the light of your understanding.
1) What is the author’s main purpose?
2) What question is the author/researcher trying to answer?
3) What point of view has the author/researcher taken?
4) What assumptions is the author making?
(Ask yourself: What is the author taking for granted [that might be questioned].
This is where the author’s thinking logically begins. You may illustrate
assumptions based on the analysis of each reasoning process. Without reasoning,
there won’t be so-called assumption. In addition, be aware of the differences
between the hypothesis and the assumption as well.)
5) What are the implications of the author’s reasoning?
(You may take the following patterns to work out your answer.)
a) If we take this line of reasoning seriously, the implications are
_________________________________.
b) If we fail to take this line of reasoning seriously, the implications are
_____________________.
6) What information is the author using?
(You want to identify the key information the author used, or presupposed, in the
article to support his/her main arguments. Here you are looking for facts,
experiences, and/or data the author is using to support her/his conclusions.)
7) What are the author’s important inferences or conclusions?
(You want to identify the most important conclusions that the author comes to
and presents in the article).
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8) What are the author’s basic concepts?

(To identify these concepts, ask yourself: What are the most important ideas that
you would have to understand in order to understand the author’s line of
reasoning?)

Keep asking and answering these eight questions in your future reading, and your
critical reading skills will be improved.

4.2 The ultimate goal of critical thinking is to foster the development of intellectual
traits or dispositions.

All thinking must be assessed for quality using universal standards, such as:
clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance, and
fairness.

Task 4–1 Read the following passage carefully. First of all, think about whether
there is any detail or sentence not clear or ambiguous. Then please try to answer the
eight questions listed in 4.1. (Recommendation: Since the passage is a news report,
you’d better replace “the author” with “the researcher” in the eight questions.)
Mice feel each other's pain

To most people, the phrase “I feel your pain” is just an expression of sympathy.
But it’s also a real biological phenomenon, a new study in rodents suggests. Healthy
mice living in the same room with mice experiencing pain are up to 68% more
sensitive to pain themselves, regardless of their stress levels, according to the new
study, which found that mice could scent when their fellows were suffering. The
discovery suggests that current methods for studying rodent pain may need to be
overhauled, and it may even point to a novel mechanism for pain transmission
between humans, the authors say.

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Andrey Ryabinin, a behavioral neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science

University in Portland, and colleagues stumbled on the phenomenon largely by
accident. They were studying the effects of alcohol withdrawal in mice, looking for
new ways to help people overcome addiction. One of the most common, but
challenging, symptoms of alcohol withdrawal is an intense, generalized pain
throughout the body—a difficult-to-define condition that often leads people back to
drinking, he says. Recreating those painful withdrawal symptoms in mice is difficult,
leading some researchers to question whether the rodents are a good model for
alcohol addiction.

Ryabinin and his team were using a standard setup: The mice are allowed to lap
freely at an ethanol and water solution, but then go into withdrawal after the bottle is
removed. A control group, housed in the same room, drinks only water. Using
multiple measures of pain sensitivity—including brushing their forepaws with a thin
hair and dipping their tails into hot water, the researchers attempted to gauge how
withdrawal might be affecting the addicted rodents.

The initial results were disappointing, showing no significant difference between

the two groups. Before giving up, however, the scientists decided to cage the control
mice in a different room. This time, the sober controls showed far less pain sensitivity
than the controls in the previous experiment, suggesting that the latter group had
somehow acquired a heightened pain sensitivity from their roommates, Ryabinin says.

To test that idea, Ryabinin and colleagues repeated the original experiment using
two additional forms of painful stimuli—injecting an immune molecule that causes
inflammation into one of the rodents’ paws, and forcing them into withdrawal from
morphine. Control mice housed in the same room had up to a 68% higher pain
sensitivity than those in a different room, the group reports today in Science
Advances. To rule out the possibility that they were measuring only the animals’
anxiety, and not pain sensitivity, the team put the mice through standard stress tests,
in which they allowed the rodents to explore an elevated, exposed platform before
measuring the levels of stress hormones in their blood. Their conclusion: Stress did
not play an important role in the transmission of pain from animal to animal, because
the mice housed with their suffering fellows explored the platform as readily as mice
housed without neighbors in pain, and there was no significant difference in hormone
levels. That was surprising, Ryabinin says: “Frankly, we thought that it was the
transfer of stress or arousal” that had caused the effect.

Previous studies suggest that mice can sense one another’s pain simply by
looking at each other, but the mice housed in the same room were not close enough to
give them a full view, Ryabinin says. He wondered whether scent might be
responsible instead. So the team removed bedding from the cages of mice that were in
pain, and put it in the cages of the control mice in a different room. Soon, isolated

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mice showed sign of heightened pain sensitivity, suggesting that smell was likely the
messenger.

This is the first time scientists have shown that pain in one colony of mice can
affect an entirely separate colony, even when they are out of sight, says Loren Martin,
a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Although he finds
it surprising that such a large effect would have gone unnoticed in previous
experiments, the findings are “pretty exhaustive,” and “should be taken seriously”
given that many pain studies house both treatment and control mice in the same room
or cage, he says.

It’s too early to translate these findings to humans, but there is growing evidence
that people also share their pain. For example, the spouses of people experiencing
chronic pain often have an increased pain sensitivity, Ryabinin says. Although those
results could potentially be explained by high stress levels among caregivers, “now
we’ve found another route for how this could be explained,” he says.

Homework assignments:
The following appeared as part of the business plan of an investment and
financial consulting firm: “Studies suggest that an average coffee drinker’s
consumption of coffee increases with age, from age 10 through age 60. Even after age
60, coffee consumption remains high. The average cola drinker’s consumption of
cola, however, declines with increasing age. Both of these trends have remained
stable for the past 40 years. Given that the number of older adults will significantly
increase as the population ages over the next 20 years, it follows that the demand for
coffee will increase and the demand for cola will decrease during this period. We
should, therefore, consider transferring our investments from Cola Loca to Early Bird
Coffee.”
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. Point out flaws in the
argument’s logic and analyze the argument’s underlying assumptions. In addition,
evaluate how supporting evidence is used and what evidence might counter the
argument’s conclusion. You may also discuss what additional evidence could be used
to strengthen the argument or what changes would make the argument more logically
sound.

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