Assignment # 2 : PETA
When my group and I were working on assignment #2, it helped me understand the concept of critical thinking and to spot the slippery slopes, false dilemmas, and other fallacies found in articles. We choose PETA as a subject because they are known to be extreme but also many of their claims were found to be dubious. We found out that PETA used bad appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, bad appeal to common belief,and reasoning in a chain. They used captions like "meat is murder" or pictures of mistreated animals to capture the audience's attention. The use of celebrities or activists is an example of bad appeal to authority because people will believe them just because of their fame. Looking through the articles, my group members and I found out that some of their statements were not updated and were claim taken from data's back in the 80's. Working on this project helped me how to analyze an argument and determine if it is valid or weak.
I liked reading what you and your groups wrote about PETA. I don’t have the stomach to look at PETAs website and some of my group members didn’t like it as well so we went with the ASPCA, which is much calmer. From what I know about PETA, I feel like all of the things you mentioned about the organization, using a bad appeal to authority, bad appeal to common belief are things I can believe. It was nice to get an insight about what you wrote about – and I think that if my group analyzed PETA we’d come up with the same conclusions.
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