Read the following passage below and answer the following questions:
a. What is the claim (conclusion) being argued for in this passage?
b. What premise or premises are being argued for to support the conclusion?
c. Is the argument inductive or deductive?
d. Do you believe reverse speech exists?
Why or why not? In the past several years, a researcher named David Oates has been advocating his discovery of a most interesting phenomenon. Oates claims that backward messages are hidden unintentionally in all human speech. The messages can be understood by recording normal speech and playing it in reverse. This phenomenon, reverse speech, has been discussed by Oates in a number of books (Oates 1996), magazines, newspapers, and radio programs, and even on television with Larry King and Geraldo Rivera. His company, Reverse Speech Enterprises, is dedicated to profiting from his discovery. We argue that there is no scientific evidence for the phenomenon of reverse speech, and that the use of reverse speech as lie detection in courts of law or any other forum, as advocated by Oates, is entirely invalid and unjust. The burden of proof for any phenomenon lies upon the shoulders of those claiming its existence. To our knowledge there is not one empirical investigation of reverse speech in any peer reviewed journal. If reverse speech did exist it would be, at the very least, a noteworthy scientific discovery. However, there are no data to support the existence of reverse speech or Oates’s theories about its implications. Although descriptions of “research papers” are available on the Reverse Speech website, there is no good indication that Oates had conducted any scholarly or empirical investigation. (Tom Byrne and Matthew Normand, ”The Demon-Haunted Sentence: A Skeptical Analysis of Revers Speech,” Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 2000)