74 LR Two Question 25
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Hi! I thought that "because" signified the 'if' part in a conditional statement. So when I diagrammed the first part, I had "not T so not A". I got the second part just fine. Would you mind explaining this? Thank you :)
You are absolutely correct about causes! True causes are always sufficient conditions.
[It's worth pointing out here that your diagram for (A) should have matched your diagram for the passage—the two are parallel, no matter how you choose to talk about them. So the differences in our treatment of this question shouldn't have any effect on your getting the right answer, right?]
That said, notice that this passage is not conditional. The introduction of "most" tells us that—the PM's tax support doesn't really cause people to disapprove of her. It only causes some people to disapprove of her. And if a cause is only sometimes a cause, then it's not really a cause. It's a contributory factor or somesuch—no matter what you call it, it's clear that it is not sufficient by itself to produce the effect.
Thus, if we want to more accurately describe the passage, we'd need to forego conditional symbols altogether. The problem with that is that we have no practice in dealing with complex non-conditional relationships, since they're rare, and since structural reading practices give us other ways of dealing with them.
So, my solution here was to use a conditional approximation, because I find that it helps me to think more visually about the information. My diagrams are therefore inherently inaccurate (it's not a conditional statement, so any conditional treatment of it must be inaccurate!), but they are still useful to me.
To wit: we are describing most people within a class. That is like (though not precisely the same as) taking a true conditional:
"Disapproving people are Angry about the PM's tax support," or D → A,
then modifying it with a most, so that it becomes:
"Most Disapproving people are Angry about the PM's tax support," or [most] D → A
I'm not absolutely certain that I've made my point clearly, and I'd be totally happy to talk more about it if you'd like!
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am i reading the question stem wrong that this is a flawed arg. and i'm looking for a match or does it make any diff in these matching args?
You're correct; the question stem indicates that the argument is flawed and that we therefore want an answer that is flawed in the same way.
You're also right that it doesn't matter whether the question says that the argument is flawed or not: either way, we want a match in reasoning.
this question completely blindsided me to the point of utter forlorn confusion...had me rethinking my idea of how "because" works...it was a relief to hear you say these are the normal conditionals...even though i mixed the suff and nec sides of the faux conditional, i still matched it w A) immediately whivh made me further skeptical about my reasoning, sheesh....i went ahead a drew B) and it was and it seemed to be correctly flawed
This was my reasoning:
MOST who think increase Population-> Want to build school
Bonita NOT think increase pop-> PROBABLY not want School
So this in simple form is jsut switching and negating, something impermissible for normal conditional rules whivh made me think it was the answer bc the stem asked for flawed conditionals i thought...
I guess my question is, is language that uses MOST and PROBABLY and SOME usually useful in these question types but in this case meant to distract us?
And if so what was this question testing us on? Our conditional matching skills but NOT our logic skills?
Felt like a trick.
I'm not sure about the language being any more distracting here than normal. But you're absolutely right that bad answers can mirror the linguistic tics of the passage as a means of distraction; I just think that phenomenon is pretty widespread on this test.
Here, (B) is logically different from the argument.
Our argument starts with one group (people who disapprove) and then talks about their reason for belonging to that group (they disapprove because of taxes).
(B) is essentially backward from that: it does start with the members of a group (people who expect the population to increase), but then it gives us a consequence of their belonging to that group (because they expect the population to increase, the result is that we should build a school).
It may help you to see it symbolized:
Argument: a Thing (in this case, taxes) causes Group membership: T → G
(B): Group membership causes a Thing (here, a new school): G → T
Clearer?