Christopher Prisbrey Signature Assignment Philosophy 1010

For my signature argument I decided to use my second argument analysis paper. For this paper is analyzed a political cartoon entitled Train Wreck by Nick Anderson, the editorial cartoonist for The Houston Chronicle. (See Reference 1) The cartoon is about the issues that have occurred with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its perceived shortcomings by citizens of the United States of America. In my paper my thesis was that the author was using a false dilemma to make his point. For my signature assignment I will attempt to develop a strengthening argument to fix the flaws that I believe exist. According to the reading provided us for the Logic Excursus assignment, a False Dilemma is one of the common Fallacies of Reasoning that cause an argument to be defective. In a false dilemma, the argument offers implies that the user must decide between two possibilities. It is called a false dilemma because there can be other possibilities other than the two that are offered. In a false dilemma it does not matter whether or not one of the possibilities is right, the problem is not with the possibility, but instead the issue of only being offered two possibilities when there are many. In the Train Wreck, the author gives us two choices, either the ACA is just a train wreck, or it is merely the result of bad driving by congress. In my paper I made the argument that all that I had to do is show that there was another possibility besides the two that the author made and it would make the argument defective. I claimed that there was other organizations that had a more direct involvement that congress, government as well as private, and that any one of them could be held responsible for the train wreck. Now in order to fix this argument, I need to make it so that there is more than the two possibilities provided. Due to the argument being a cartoon, I cannot add lengthy text explaining

Christopher Prisbrey Signature Assignment Philosophy 1010

other solutions, I can really only change the writing on the side of the train. One option would be to include a few of these organizations in addition to the word Congress on the train. That would show that there were other possibilities. We could also replace the word Congress with a more general term that would imply mismanagement or poor planning or implementation. With generalized terms we are not blaming anyone specifically but instead are blaming the lack of management or implementation of the ACA. As another option the word Congress could be replaced with Administration to imply that whoever was over it, they are responsible, and would then allow the reader to research more to find out who was the Administration. I believe that with any of these simple changes the cartoon would no longer be a false dilemma, but would now be a valid argument.