#24 - There are only two plausible view about where the

[Administrator]

Please post below with any questions!

[ryanos12]

Could someone please explain this one?

[Adam Tyson]

I'll do my best, ryanos12! For Parallel Reasoning and Parallel Flaw questions, one method is to use a test of abstraction. Strip away the details of the argument, all the stuff about paintings and aesthetics and formal qualities, and get down to how the argument is built underneath. The stimulus here might be described as "there are only two ways that this thing could work, and one of them has never really been explained very well, so it has to be the other one."

This is obviously a terrible argument. So what if one way isn't all that well understood or hasn't been explained? It could still be the right way, couldn't it? And even the premises are questionable - why does it have to be purely one or the other, instead of a hybrid of the two, or some third thing? The flaw could be described in a few different ways - it's a little bit of a "lack of relevant evidence" flaw, a little bit of a false dilemma, a little bit of a "lack of evidence" flaw (just because we haven't shown how a thing works doesn't prove it cannot work). But the label for the flaw doesn't matter, and struggling to name the flaw is a waste of time and effort. Just focus on that abstract structure, and look for an answer that has the same abstraction.

Answer C has the same underlying structure, with the author saying it has to be either one thing (economics) or else a second thing (politics), and we don't have a good explanation for how it could be the first one, so it must be the second thing. But what about a hybrid, or a third thing, and why does it even matter that the first thing hasn't been explained? It's a perfect match.

Answer A doesn't set up an either/or choice of only two things, so it's a loser. Answer B sets up a conditional relationship, which the stimulus didn't have, and also it never comes to a conclusion about choosing one of two things, so it's out. Answer D is also conditional, and fails to be about saying since one choice is not understood the other must be correct (it's more like "one of the necessary conditions won't happen, so the other necessary condition also won't happen), so cross it out. And while answer E does set up two opposing possible outcomes, it never indicates that one of them is wrong and therefore the other is right.

Look for that abstraction in arguments by stripping away the details and focusing on the underlying structure, and questions like these (and many others!) will become much more clear and easy.

[rozewiczp1]

Hello,

I ruled out answer choice C because of the word "Primarily." Could you explain why that was a mistake? Is that word choice not enough to eliminate it as an option?

Thanks,

Peter

[Jeremy Press]

Hi rozewicz,

That would only be a problem for answer choice C if the "primarily" didn't carry over to the conclusion. For example, if the author said in the conclusion that "History must be driven by political forces," then the reasoning error would differ from that in the stimulus. But since the author's concern in the argument (both in premises and conclusion) remains on what "primarily" (or "mainly" drives history), the reasoning error is the same. The author has rejected one thing as the "primary driver," and decided in favor of a second thing as primary driver, without ruling out that there may be other things that are primary drivers, and without telling us why the lack of a "convincing showing" means definitively that economic forces can't be the primary driver.

So the errors are precisely the same as what we've got in the stimulus, despite the slight "softening" of language. It's a good reminder that you can't rely solely on how "strong" the language is for determining whether there is a matched flaw from stimulus to answer.

I hope this helps!

Jeremy