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471 days ago
Ours is an age of highly sophisticated division of labor. It seems that this principle of specialization has been embraced everywhere as indispensible to human development in industry and trade. Yet, it seems to me that in the world of science and technology, such a principle should be qualified and cautioned against. It is true that specialists can never be done away with. Without specialization, modern science could never have been developed. It is hard to imagine that the very enormous volume of knowledge could be acquired and mastered by a single person, provided man's life is always short against his ambitions. It is no longer that age of a certain Aristotle, nor of a certain Leonado da Vinci, but an age of endowed chairs and funded laboratories, of department deans and professors. Therefore, a scientist has to specialize in his own, at most several, fields while entrusting his citations to other specializers. Likewise, an engineer has to be focused in his part and leave other ...
473 days ago
The advertising director of the Silver Screen Movie Production Company ascribes the decline of movie attendence to poor advertising. In order to support his argument, he takes the favorable reviews of the company's movies as the proof that blames should not be put on the quality of the movies. He further prescribes, after drawing his conclusion, that more money should be invested in advertising so as to boost ticket sale. At first glance, it seems that this argument posesses some plausibility. Yet in failing to prove that his line of causality is the only possibility, the director's reasoning is an insufficient deduction, and consequently his prescription is also sussceptible to failure. First, the director erroneously assumes that quality of movie is the only criterion by which people decide wether to attend a certain movie or not. This assumption is both arbitrary and unfounded. There are many other possible variables that affect movie attendence. For example, people normally go ...
