Because

  How to Analyze and Evaluate Ordinary Reasoning

  Reasoning with propositional attitudes

 G. Randolph Mayes

 Department of Philosophy

 Sacramento State University

Instructions:  Here are some examples that involve first and third person propositional attitude statements.  Analyze them in rationale 2.0 and we will go over them in class.  They also may involve multiple rationales, meaning more than one argument, more than one explanation, or a combination of both.

1.  I really believe that most new technologies aren't doing much to improve our overall happiness in the world.  I mean, sure I have a cell phone and a laptop and an iPod, but that's just because I kind of need them to function normally in this society.  People today don't seem to be any happier than they were in the 50's when none of this stuff existed.

2. Mom, I really don't think you should  have to do all the housework around here.  Nobody else is doing anything important. Dad just sits around watching ESPN all weekend and Jenny is upstairs in her room listening to music and text messaging her friends.  She says she’s doing homework but she’s not. She just knows that if you think that, you won't ask her to help with dinner. 

3. The main reason prostitution is illegal in most parts of the United States is that people think it’s immoral to have sex in exchange for money.  That’s what most people are raised to believe.  But another reason is that people really don’t care about the poor women who are forced into prostitution when it’s an illegal, underground industry.  They don’t care because they don’t ever have to witness their pain:  the disease, the squalid living conditions, and the physical abuse that prostitutes experience when they have no recourse to police protection is all hidden from the average citizen. 

4.  Obviously, the reason that people drive hybrids is because they get better gas mileage.  The Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Hybrid gets over 40 miles a gallon.  But they also must think the better mileage is saving them money, and this just isn't the case for most drivers.  The main problem is that these cars cost a lot of money, so if you go trade in a perfectly good car and buy one like this, you end up both losing money on your old car and spending a lot more money than you would have on a new car. Even at the current price of gas it would literally take decades to recover that money in saved gas.  And that's not even considering the fact that people who buy these cars end up driving more than before!

5.  Women tend to dress more attractively when they are ovulating for the obvious biological reason that women can only get pregnant when they are ovulating and dressing attractively raises the likelihood of having sex. Skeptical?  Studies have actually been done in  which people are asked to look at pictures of college women and determine which of the women portrayed were trying to look attractive.   The judges picked women who turned out to be ovulating 60% of the time.