Hi Sarah,
Think about the basic argument the stimulus is making:
- Although everyone has already rejected finalism (i.e., concluded that finalism is wrong), here’s a book offering another (presumably different) argument for the same conclusion that finalism is wrong.
This book’s argument is invalid, because its conclusion that finalism is wrong is based on a mistaken premise (i.e., a misunderstanding of chance).
Therefore, the universal conclusion that finalism is wrong has been called into question.
In other words, all the reviewer really tells us is that a bad premise in the new book, which makes its argument invalid, can somehow be extrapolated out to all other arguments that reached the same conclusion about finalism, to call their conclusions into question.
When the reviewer concludes that “finalism therefore is clearly more plausible than people have thought,” this is really to say that these people were less than fully supported in their shared conclusion that finalism should be rejected because there must be some evidence in its favor that they overlooked. How are we supposed to know that? Because some other person drew the same conclusion by making an invalid argument based on a bad premise.
So the flaw here is an error of evidence, since the evidence offered (a single flawed argument rejecting finalism) is not enough to prove that
other arguments reaching the same conclusion were themselves not completely valid. We don’t even know what these other arguments were, so how can we agree that the reviewer has proven the conclusion that they are called into question by the existence of one bad argument that reaches the same conclusion? An invalid argument for a shared conclusion is not sufficient evidence to show that the conclusion itself is automatically questionable wherever it occurs.
Since this is a parallel flaw question, the most important thing the answer choice needs to do is to parallel this flaw in the use of evidence.
Answer choice (A) starts out by looking very promising, since it tells us that historians have universally rejected a particular view (the claim that the collection had a single author). But next we are looking for one historian rejecting the same claim (i.e., reaching the same conclusion) on the basis of a faulty premise, followed by a conclusion that therefore the rejected claim must actually be stronger than all the other historians thought. Instead, (A) offers us the premise (rather than a conclusion) that the historians actually have overlooked some additional evidence (though here it is
against the claim they rejected), so therefore it is quite likely that the claim is actually correct. I agree with you that this is definitely an error! But unfortunately it’s not the error we’re looking for.
In addition, the conclusion in (A)—that it’s quite likely that the claim is actually true—is quite a bit stronger than the conclusion in the stimulus, that finalism is clearly more plausible than people had thought, which actually tells us nothing about
how much more plausible. Even if the conclusion that finalism is more plausible is
clear, this would still be compatible with it being only one percent more plausible (and therefore still pretty unlikely to be true), which wouldn’t bring us anywhere near (A)’s conclusion that the rejected claim is highly likely to be true.
By contrast, answer choice (C) does parallel the flaw we are looking for. We are told that bicycle engineers as a group reject the view that aluminum is as good as titanium. But one engineer reaches the same conclusion on the basis of a flawed argument containing a mistaken premise (confusion about the relevant kind of pressure). Thus, the universally rejected view that aluminum is as good as titanium “makes more sense than bicycle engineers believe,” which is very similar to the flawed conclusion in the stimulus.
You are correct in noticing that this answer choice doesn’t use “clearly” or another equally strong term to introduce its conclusion; however, although this is definitely a difference in language that you want to take notice of when doing parallel reasoning questions, that omission here is outweighed by the fact that (C) commits the same flaw, of believing that one argument using invalid reasoning to reach a universally shared conclusion is enough evidence to show that other arguments reaching the same conclusion must have mistakenly overlooked evidence supporting the view they rejected.
I hope this leaves feeling better about your understanding of this question!
Laura
