#13 - Criticism that the press panders to public sentiment

[sblack1998]

I'm confused about how the last sentence was diagrammed. In the LR Bible, there were two similar examples.

1) "No Robot can think," which means if you are a robot then you cannot think. It was diagrammed as R--->NOT Think

2) "No citizen can be denied the right to vote," meaning If you are a citizen you cannot be denied the right to vote so it was diagrammed as C--->NOT denied the right to vote.

The last sentence says, "No one will subsidize honest journalism." I restated it as All will not subsidize honest journalism, and diagrammed it as NOT subsidize ---> honest journalism, which is reversed from the explanation. Can someone explain how "no one" should be diagrammed? I thought it was a sufficient condition indicator.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi sblack,

The difference between your examples and the example here is that the examples from the bible all have a specific noun. The grammatical structure is different between "no robot" and "no one." The meaning of the last clause of the last sentence is that if you have honest journalism, you can't have a subsidy (or if subsidy, you can't have honest journalism). It can be helpful when diagramming to think about what they are saying is necessary. They are saying that subsidies and honest journalism cannot go together. If you have one, you can't have the other. That's what the diagram shows.

The examples you show work the same. They are saying that you can't have robots and thinking together (if robot, you can't think; if you think, you can't be a robot). In all the cases, the negation is in the necessary. They are saying two ideas/terms that cannot go together. Your proposed diagram of this question does not represent that idea. It says the absence of something (subsidy) would be enough to guarantee honest journalism. We don't see that relationship in the stimulus.

Hope that helps!

[rlouis1993]

For this passage, I set up two separate logical conditions. Below are the logical conditions along with the rationale:

(1) For the sentence that reads, "If the press were not profit making ... the only alternative is subsidies," I wrote out the condition:

<strikethrough>PM</strikethrough> ---> subsidy

(2) But within that sentence in passage (1), it mentions THE ONLY! We know (based off of indicator table) that ONLY is a trigger word for a necessary condition, and it appears that necessary condition is subsidy. So, I set up a second logical condition between subsidy and outside control:

outside control ---> subsidy

With these two conditions written out as is, I am unable to make a chain relationship as you have done to help answer the question stem.

Do you mind helping me out with the structure I have laid out?

[rlouis1993]

For this passage, I set up two separate logical conditions. Below are the logical conditions along with the rationale:

(1) For the sentence that reads, "If the press were not profit making ... the only alternative is subsidies," I wrote out the condition:

<strikethrough>PM</strikethrough> ---> subsidy

(2) But within that sentence in passage (1), it mentions THE ONLY! We know (based off of indicator table) that ONLY is a trigger word for a necessary condition, and it appears that necessary condition is subsidy. So, I set up a second logical condition between subsidy and outside control:

outside control ---> subsidy

With these two conditions written out as is, I am unable to make a chain relationship as you have done to help answer the question stem.

Do you mind helping me out with the structure I have laid out?

Also, I should point out that by creating the second logical condition, I set up a contrapositive that lead me to choose answers choice A.

outside control ---> subsidy
<strikethrough.subsidy</strikethrough> ---> outside control

[Jeff Wren]

Hi rlouis1993,

The wording in the stimulus is a bit tricky.

The relevant sentences are "If the press were not profit-making, who would support it? The only alternative is subsidy and, with it, outside control."

One tricky part here is that these sentences actually contain two separate conditional statements.

The first you correctly diagrammed:

If the press were not profit-making, then subsidy would be necessary. You correctly identified the word "only" as the indicator for subsidy as the necessary condition here.

So far so good.

The problem comes in the second half of that sentence (containing the second conditional statement)

"subsidy and, with it, outside control."

This part of the sentence is also tricky because it doesn't contain any of the common/standard indicator words that are really helpful in identifying the parts of the conditional statement. Here, you need to look at the context to figure out what the statement means in plain English. In other words, which term guarantees/indicates that the other must happen.

Here, what this is basically saying is that subsidy brings along (or guarantees) outside control.

In other words, if there is subsidy involved, then there will also be outside control.

It is not saying that if there is outside control, it must be due to subsidy. In theory, there could be many ways of gaining outside control besides subsidy; we have no idea based on the stimulus. The stimulus only tells us that subsidy "brings along" outside control with it.

Here "subsidy" is the sufficient condition, even though it was the necessary condition in relation to the first half of the sentence.

A more strait forward example would be the sentence, "If A, then B, and if B, then C."

With the correct second diagram:

Subsidy -> Outside Control

You will see that Answer A is a Mistaken Negation of this diagram.

Also, recognizing that "no one will subsidize honest journalism" in the last sentence is also conditional and should link to the other conditional statements due to the common/shared term of "subsidy" is a clue that the correct answer will likely be an inference created by linking these diagrams together, which is exactly what Answer D does.

[ericsilvagomez]

Hi,

I understood most of the question, but can you briefly explain how you got the conditional relationship down for the last sentence? From what I remember from reading the LR Bible, this problem is an example of creating a chain and then combining them!

[Robert Carroll]

ericsilvagomez,

"No one" is a conditional indicator. When we have a statement of the form "no one who does X does Y", the conditional is:

X Y

You keep the "no one" statement as the sufficient condition, and negate the rest to make the rest the necessary condition. Applying that here:

subsidize honest journalism

Since this is a conditional, it can be contraposed:

honest journalism subsidize

Dave's post at the beginning of this thread should then allow you to combine this conditional with the rest of the stimulus to get the answer.

Robert Carroll