Because

  How to Analyze and Evaluate Ordinary Reasoning

  Examples for analysis

 G. Randolph Mayes

 Department of Philosophy

 Sacramento State University

Instructions:  You may assume that each of the following examples is either an argument or an explanation, not a mixture of both. To analyze these in Rationale 2.0, simply copy them from this document and paste them into your Rationale 2.0 scratchpad.  These are just for practice, but your first analysis will be very similar to this assignment so be sure to work hard on them.

1.  On Wednesday Senator John McCain called for a suspension of the presidential campaign so that he and Senator Barack Obama can head to Washington to forge a bipartisan solution. It's not clear what, exactly, McCain thinks that they should do in Washington once they get there. They don't sit on any of the relevant committees, and everyone is already deep in negotiations.  The only way to understand it is politically:  McCain hopes the rest of the country will conclude that he is a true leader, one who cares most about the health and safety of the American people, not party politics.  McCain clearly needed to do something sensational.  He is slipping in the polls both nationally and in the battleground states.  

2.  Sharply rising medical costs are partly due to people unnecessarily using expensive services like the ER.  Lots of people think that it is mainly poor uninsured people who are the culprits, but that's actually not the case.  The majority of people who use the ER are fully insured.  Why do they use the ER unnecessarily?   One answer is that we scare easy.  Patients are constantly being given the message from TV ads and health articles that apparently innocuous symptoms may be the sign of extremely serious conditions.  We aren't smart enough to grasp that the likelihood of this is normally so low that we are endangering ourselves more by going to the ER, which is- surprise!!-- filled with sick people.  Second, primary care doctors, who know better, have no real incentive to discourage patients from rushing to the ER.   They don't get paid extra for answering calls or e-mails from their patients, and there is always a very slight chance that the patient has a problem that that really does need immediate attention.  Those ones come back to sue you.

3. Despite the fact that financial collapse of Wall Street is due to the irresponsibility of incredibly wealthy people in charge of major financial institutions, at the end of the day it is still hard working , responsible, middle class Americans who are going to have to bail them out.  This basically means that the U.S. government needs to to borrow an incredible sum of money from foreign nations to buy up all the bad debt currently held by failed institutions like Lehmann brothers and AIG.  There are two reasons why this has to be done.  First, if we fail to do it, the rest the economy will actually collapse.  Banks will begin to fail, average Americans will be unable to get credit, and trade  will gradually come to a grinding halt.  Second, the plan will probably work.  In the near term it, combined with significant reform on Wall Street, will restore confidence in financial system.  In the long run, most of the debt the government ends up owning will be paid back.