September 24-30 Question 3

For my topic and concept this week I decided to choose emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is “the ability to perceive accurately, appraise and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feeling when they facilitate thought…” I chose this because I thought that it was interesting how different types of emotions can have a positive effect on our reasoning. Some of the emotions include empathy, moral indignation or outrage. These can actually help us to understand ourselves and our own emotions. When one is in an emotional bind, they can overcome it and learn to control it. This is part of emotional intelligence. We need to know about ourselves and about our emotions so that we can control and understand them.

                Emotional intelligence is not only for how to perceive feeling, but also how to express it. Some people have problems conversing with others or even just being around other people because of their inability to express their emotions. Emotional intelligence would help those individuals greatly.

September 24-30 Question 2

Evolution and a belief are incompatible according to Dawkins. Dawkin is an atheist which is someone who believes that there is no God at all. I personally don’t think that it is possible that both can exist because evolution claims that the world was started by a natural disaster that we now call “The Big Bang.” When one believes in God then they believe in the Bible. The Bible states that the world was created by God and not some random colliding of large masses.

Aquinas would definitely be against Dawkin’s atheism; however I do think that he would agree that the belief in evolution and the belief in God cannot coincide together. Dawkins actually questions the validity of Aquinas’s claims and states that he is assuming that God is as powerful as he is. Dawkins does not believe that God is as powerful as he claims to be. The debate between Aquinas and Dawkin would definitely be interesting.

September 24-30 Question 1

I think that one of my strongest types of reasoning is my ability to empathize with others. To empathize means to understand another’s situation and connect on a personal level. The difference between sympathizing and empathizing is that sympathizing is when you also have gone through the same situation that the other person is going through and therefore are able to connect with them.

This might be helpful in a career choice because I plan on becoming a business major with an emphasis in managing. As a manager, I would want to connect with my employees or coworkers in order to receive the best results. If my workers feel that I don’t connect with them on any level and instead of empathizing with them, I just don’t understand any of their situations and they would lose confidence in me. Therefore this is a very important strength that I have and want to use to my advantage for my future career.

September 10-17 Question 3

For this week, I decided to discuss the idea of generalization. The part of generalization that I want to talk about is stereotyping. A lot of times we see a certain race or ethnicity of people and automatically have these conclusions about them. For example, a lot of people associate Islamic religious people to be terrorists. That is a negative generalization which actually really sad. People conclude that because a small group of individuals are terrorists, then the rest of them must be terrorists. In the same way, I feel like a lot of people generalize that Asians like rice just because a lot of them eat it every day. I find it almost offensive the way that people generalize all Asians and don’t even say our real nationality whether it be Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc…  Generalization is drawing a conclusion about a certain characteristic of a group or population on the basis of a SAMPLE from that group. Sometimes this method can be positive and sometimes it can be very misleading.

September 10-17 Question 2

Dr. Novello used cause-and-effect inductive reasoning because the large increase of students beginning to smoke was from the influence of Camel cigarette commercials. In order to combat this increase of smoking and use of drugs, Dr. Novello put up ban on cigarette and alchohol ads as well. She believed that if the young generation was so easily influenced by these commercials, maybe her ads would do the same and nullify the camel cigarette ads.

Dr. Novello believed that the solution to the problem was not attacking the children directly, but instead using the media to plant the idea that doing drugs and alcohol is bad for them in their minds. This method of inductive reasoning is very common in the advertisement field and was a very good idea. I think that most likely it wouldn’t influence as many young kids, but it may prevent some people from doing drugs and drinking alcohol.

September 10-17 Question 1

An inductive argument that I used this past week is when I had to take the bus to work. I have to take the 23 from downtown to Valley Fair Mall. One day I was running a little late and I knew that I was going to be late to the bus stop. Usually, when I go to the bus stop and wait for the 23 to come, it is about 5 minutes late. So I was pretty sure that even though I was late to the bus stop, I will still make the bus because it is usually about 5 minutes late.

The reason that I could say that I would probably still get on the bus was because I take the bus regularly and therefore could say it’s usually late. The premise here was that the bus is usually late which is true. By taking that into account I could still walk to the bus stop and make it in time to catch the bus.