TOPIC: ARGUMENT137 - The following appeared in an editorial in the Mason City newspaper.
"At present, Mason City residents seldom use the nearby Mason River for any kind of recreational activity, even though surveys of the region's residents consistently rank water sports (swimming, fishing, and boating) as a favorite form of recreation. Since there have been complaints about the quality of the water in the river, residents must be avoiding the river because they think that it is not clean enough. But that situation is about to change: the agency responsible for rivers in our region has announced plans to clean up Mason River. Therefore, recreational use of the river is likely to increase, so the Mason City council will need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River."
WORDS: 584 TIME: 0:29:00 DATE: 2007-8-10
In this argument the author comes to the conclusion that the Mason River will change to be clean and the Mason City council will need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River. To justify the conclusion, the author points out that residents complaint about th4e quality of water in the river and they seldom use it. The author also points out that plans to clean up Mason River have been announced by the agency responsible for rivers in their region. Close scrutiny of this argument reveals that it is unconvincing in several aspects.
To begin with, the author unfairly assumes that people in Mason City rarely use the Mason River is due to that they think the water in the river is not clean. The only evidence the author gives is that there have been complaints about the quality of the water in the river, yet it is insufficient to prove his poor assumption. It is quite possible that only a small percent of residents there complain about the water quality, but the majority of people are satisfied about it or pay no attention to it at all. Perhaps due to some other reasons, such as that they consider it dangerous to do water sports in the river for it is too deep, they seldom use the Mason River. Without ruling out all other reasons that may lead to the rare use of the river, the author cannot convince me that after the river is cleaned up people will tend to use if for recreational activity.
In addition, the author claims that plans to clean up Mason River has been announced, but this fact contribute little to support that recreational use of the river will increase. First, the plan has not yet been put into practice and it is entirely possible that it will never been put into practice for some other more urgent social problems that the city need to solve. Second, even if that water in the river can become clean in the future, it is not necessary that residents in Mason City will use the river more often. Perhaps they do not have enough time to play on the river although they expect to, for some reasons about their work or something else; or perhaps they are not interested in recreational use of the river at all.
Finally, even if that all the foregoing assumptions are justified, the argument still suffers from claiming that the city need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River. The arguer shows no evidence that people use the river for recreational activities will to some extent complain about the lands along the river. Perhaps the lands is of enough high quality already. Lacking evidence that the lands need to be improved, I can not accept that increasing its budget for the lands is a must.
In sum, the conclusion reached in this argument is invalid and misleading. To make it logically acceptable, the arguer should have to demonstrate that most people complain about the quality of the water in Mason River and that the plans to clean up the river will soon be put into practice, leading to higher quality of water in the river. Moreover, I would suspend my judgment about the credibility of this argument until the author can provide more evidence about whether the lands of the river is of poor quality and need to be improved.
