#16 - The prevailing view among historians

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[amiru77]

Hi PS
Could you please break down the stimulus? I cannot understand it I could only get the correct answer after spending 5 minutes on closely examining each answer choice. So if I could understand the stimulus and the type of logical error made I could go through the ACs much faster and eliminated wrong choices without having to examining them all through.
Thanks

[nicholaspavic]

Hi amiru,

So this is a Weakening question, and I always zero in on the conclusion to see what I am being asked to weaken. Here, the author tells us that we are supposed to doubt the historians' view that European peasants were pious. So let's weaken his argument. We also get a couple of premises to support this conclusion.

Premise 1: Clergy were the record keepers.
Premise 2: Clergy were obsessed with religion and that made them "exaggerate" people's (note not just peasants) dedication to religion.

So after looking at those premises and conclusion, I want to do my prephrase. In other words, I want to cast doubt on the stimulus's connection between the premises and conclusion. My prephrase for this question was to think about what caused the historians to think that way. In the author's view, the cause was the clergy exaggerating about people's piety and the effect was historians thinking peasants were pious. In my prephrase, I thought perhaps there's some other reason, other than the clergy, that caused them to think peasants were pious. Like peasant artists painting religious scenes in their homes for private worship. Maybe there was going to be an answer choice that showed that most historians didn't actually hold this view even though the cause was there, casting doubt on the "prevailing" idea in the stimulus. But I also thought about an answer choice that would show no cause, but still the effect that the historians thought the peasants were pious. In other words, the connection between clergy exaggerating and historians believing peasants were pious would be severed. Looking at the answer choices, here was my thought process:

(A) Well, so there's some mixed documents out there with religious and non-religious ideas. That's not weakening our author's argument about exaggeration. He didn't say all the source material was religious.

(B) The amount of time that clergy may have spent with peasants does not tell me anything about their propensity to exaggerate or tell the truth about the peasants. I spend a lot of times with my kid, that doesn't mean I don't exaggerate his accomplishments.

(C) The correct answer. There are documents out there that do not have any exaggeration about people's devotion to religion (note they are non-peasants). So this answer choice severs the idea that the clergy's exaggeration about people (in general) caused the historians' view of people's piety.

(D) I don't know what the prevailing historians have or have not considered. This is not a bad argument to make in real life, but I just have not been told the historians exposure to the amount of material in the stimulus.

(E) Hey, nobody is doubting that the medieval peasants had some exposure to religion. But I am concerned with whether the clergy was exaggerating that influence on them. Cross this one off with confidence.

What is my guide here? When I see a weakening question, my first though is towards causality and how I can attack it.

Thanks for the great question and I hope this helps!

[vbkehs]

Thank you for the explanation above. However, I'm still confused as to why D is wrong, or would weaken the argument less than C. My thought was to use the "unless equation" on the phrasing in D: "Historians cannot develop a reliable account of the religious attitudes held during any given historical period unless they have consulted all of the relevant surviving records from that period."

I thought that if historians had a prevailing view, it indicated that they consulted all surviving records, including those of non-clergy people, and still concluded that peasants were religious. So, this eliminated the cause of clergy members exaggerating, because I thought other non-clergy sources corroborated their records. Is this wrong because the stimulus says only clergy members were record-keepers?

Many thanks in advance!

[Adam Tyson]

You're welcome in advance, vbkehs!

Focus on the conclusion here: the author thinks we have some reason to doubt that peasants were particularly religious. What's the evidence for that claim? The clergy may have exaggerated. Certainly the possibility that the sole record-keepers exaggerated should give us pause! So to weaken the argument, we need to attack that evidence. We need some reason to believe that maybe the clergy keeping the records did NOT exaggerate. It's not about what the historians did, but about whether the evidence cited in the argument is good or not.

Answer C directly conflicts with the evidence. It's fine to say that the clergy may have exaggerated, but here we have evidence that they didn't do that. If they did not exaggerate the religious beliefs and activities of merchants and nobles, why would we think they did so with regard to peasants? Now the claim that we wouldn't be surprised to find they exaggerated looks wrong - we SHOULD be surprised to find that out! The conclusion based on that position is thereby undermined.

Answer D doesn't weaken the argument because we really aren't concerned with whether the historians can develop a reliable account or not. The argument isn't about what is actually true or has been proven. Instead, the argument is just that there is some reason to doubt one particular view. Put another way, answer D might STRENGTHEN the argument, because the author wants us to have doubts about the prevailing view, and D tells us that the prevailing view just might be inaccurate, if the historians haven't looked at all available evidence.

One last note: Using the "Unless Equation" on answer D should give us this conditional relationship:

IF historians' accounts are reliable, THEN they consulted all relevant surviving records"

the contrapositive would then be:

IF historians have not consulted all relevant surviving records, THEN their account is not reliable.

Neither of these statements weakens the claim that we should doubt the prevailing view held by historians!

[grunerlokka]

Is this one of the cases where one DOES have to attack the premise directly?

[Adam Tyson]

It looks that way, grunerlokka! To some extent we are attacking a premise, rather than directly going after the conclusion. But to some extent we are not actually attacking the premise, but the relationship between the premise and the conclusion, because we are saying that even if exaggeration on the part of the clergy would not be surprising (the premise), it appears not to have happened in this case (answer C). That's not denying the truth of a premise, but bringing in additional, outside information that makes that premise less convincing, so that the conclusion is placed in doubt.

[g_lawyered]

Hi P.S.,
After reading the explanations posted, I had a similar yet different approach to this question. I correctly ID the conclusion that there was reason to doubt the peasant's religious devotion (they could have NOT been religious). I also correctly predicted that the assumption was that because the clergy exaggerated, there was bias in the records about the actual peasant's religious devotion. However, I predicted that to weaken this argument, I needed an answer choice that weaken the conclusion- something that stated/introduced that there was a possibility that the peasants COULD be religious. Or answer choice that questioned the evidence the clergy members produced (possibility that shows peasants COULD be religious).
For this reason, I picked answer choice E. Answer choice E introduces evidence that shows that peasants were religious. I thought this weaken the conclusion and some of the evidence also. Can someone please explain why or what part of this answer choice is incorrect?

I eliminated answer choice C because I thought it strengthen the conclusion that the peasants weren't religious (confirming the conclusion in argument).

Also, I eliminated answer choice A because of "documents detailing NONreligious". Is this what makes answer choice A incorrect?

Can someone please explain where my reasoning is wrong? I'm having a difficult time with weaken questions.

Thanks in advance!

[Robert Carroll]

GGIBA003,

But the argument is already saying that clerical-produced documents of the peasants' religious dedication are unreliable because the clergy themselves would write them in such a way as to exaggerate people's religious devotion. Answer choice (E) gives more evidence from the clergy that peasants (and others) engaged in religious activities. That's the very kind of evidence the author doubts.

Imagine an argument that says "The Economist magazine wrote an article claiming that Losers will increase in value in 2022. However, the editors of The Economist are known to have a large financial stake in the success of Losers. Therefore, there is reason to doubt the latest article's claims about Losers in 2022."

An answer that says "Another article, this one in the Financial Times, also claims that Losers will do well in 2022. Most of the editors in the Financial Times have a large financial stake in the success of Losers." This hypothetical answer gives more support for the idea that Loser may actually do well, but it's again from a source the author already gave a reason to doubt in the original argument. More evidence from sources the author would consider untrustworthy, without any extra information rebutting the idea that such sources are untrustworthy, does not weaken the argument.

Answer choice (C) does not support the idea that peasants weren't religious at all! If the clergy portrayed the peasants as religious but merchants or nobles as NOT religious, then it can't simply be the biases of the clergy that caused them to depict peasants as religious - otherwise, they would have portrayed everyone as religious.

I don't see how answer choice (A) affects the argument at all.

Robert Carroll

[g_lawyered]

Robert,
Thank you for that clarification! I think the reason why I was eliminated/didn't like answer choice C is because it introduces "merchants and nobles". I took this group of people to be different and unrelated to peasants. I thought the answer choice had to directly mention/affect the peasants. Essentially, by saying that merchants and nobles weren't religious we're suppose to imply that affects the peasants? I didn't take that leap.

Also, answer choice C weakens the premise/assumption that clergy were biased (weakens by proving clergy weren't biased because they reported that other group of people- nobles and merchants- weren't religious).
Did I understand that correctly? I'm having trouble and trying to improve on my technique for Weaken questions.

Thanks in advance!