ARGUMENT23

TOPIC: ARGUMENT23 - A recent sales study indicated that consumption of seafood dishes in Bay City restaurants has increased by 30 percent over the past five years. Yet there are no currently operating city restaurants that specialize in seafood. Moreover, the majority of families in Bay City are two-income families, and a nationwide study has shown that such families eat significantly fewer home-cooked meals than they did a decade ago but at the same time express more concern about eating healthily. Therefore, a new Bay City restaurant specializing in seafood will be quite popular and profitable.
WORDS: 422 TIME: 00:30:00 DATE: 2008/8/6 23:38:22

In this argument, the arguer draws a conclusion that a new Bay City restaurant specializing in seafood will be quite popular and profitable, merely based on unfounded assumption and dubious evidence. At first glance, the argument seems somewhat convincing and reliable, but further meditation reveals that it omits some concerns that should be addressed to support the argument. In my point of view, it suffers from 4 logical flaws.

To begin with, the argument alleges that the new restaurant specializing in seafood will be popular and profitable in Bay City, because the consumption of seafood dishes in Bay City restaurants has increased by 30 percent over the past five years. Admittedly, the arguer assumes that the tendency will remain the same unconditionally at different time. It is possible that in the next years, the increase will stop or even the consumption will decline. Perhaps the seafood will be unpopular in Bay City in the future.

Moreover, the argument indicates that there are no currently operating city restaurants that specialize in seafood, so such a new restaurant will be profitable. It is entirely possible that the reason why there are no such restaurants is that these restaurants were unprofitable and therefore have bankrupted in the past.

In addition, the argument's indication that the fewer home-cooked meals will result in the behavior that the families will eat in restaurant specializing in seafood as the argument predicts. It is possible that they just want to save their time and eat something simple and convenient outside rather than seafood. And the argument cannot draw the conclusion based on the fact that these families are more concern about eating healthily. Because eating so much seafood have no good efforts to our eating health, or even do harms to our body.

Although the factors discussed above are all possible, there are other problems of the argument. The argument assumes that the nationwide statistics about the families eating habit and eating health applies equally to Bay City, which is not the case, because of a variety of possibilities. Perhaps the people in Bay City cannot afford such a lot of money to eat seafood.

In a word, the arguer fails to substantiate its assertion that a new Bay City restaurant specializing in seafood will be quite popular and profitable. In addition, the arguer would have provided more information in order to make the argument more convincing. Therefore, if the argument had considered the given factors and possibilities discussed above, it would have been more thorough and logically acceptance.