#6 - The decisions that one makes can profoundly affect

[Chandler H]

Thanks for your answer Luke,

what I meant was something like this:

Conclusion: we should not regret missed opportunities

Evidence: for had one decided to take opportunities, one would not have some close personal relationships one currently has

We can diagram that conditional like this:

Sufficient: "If one took opportunities"

Necessary: "then would not have some close personal relationships"

To me, if we follow this conditional, it doesn't follow logically to say that therefore,

Sufficient (negated): "if one did NOT take those opportunities,

Necessary (negated): then it is guaranteed that one WOULD have those close personal relationships"

But seems like that's what B exactly said - ""if one did something that brought about something that one cherishes" AKA "if one didn't take opportunities"

This seems like an illegal negation of the logic to me. Which is why I then said B's "If something to helped to bring about something that one cherishes" sufficient condition was never established - because it was illegally negated (?). I'm wondering where I went wrong here!

Hi, Teddy,

It's great that you're giving this question such thorough consideration! However, I think I've identified a few flaws in your approach.

First, it is not quite correct to approach this question as a conditional reasoning problem (i.e., it's not helpful to introduce sufficient and necessary conditions.) To demonstrate why, I'll write a bit about the issues in diagramming this stimulus.

The first sentence isn't really diagrammable, because there is no conditional relationship there. The second sentence could feasibly be diagrammed like you said, but it's strange:

SMO CPL
If you had seized missed opportunities, then you would have lost your close personal relationships.

The contrapositive of that looks like this:

CPL SMO
If you have those close personal relationships, then you did not seize those opportunities.

This is all kind of weird, right? Typically, conditional reasoning doesn't deal with these odd past hypotheticals. The big issue comes when we try to incorporate the last sentence into our diagramming process. How can you diagram the idea of cherishing your close personal relationships? What variable would that entail? How does it connect to our current diagram of SMO CPL?

The whole diagramming process kind of falls apart here. Instead, it's best to approach this problem simply by looking in the stimulus for the "missing piece." This will enable you to pre-phrase the correct answer. In this case, the author reasons that "one should not regret the missed opportunities [because] everyone deeply cherishes their close personal relationships." This doesn't make sense immediately, so we need to find the missing piece that justifies that line of reasoning. We can pre-phrase that as something like "having something you deeply cherish negates the need for regret."

This is basically what answer choice (B) says, right? The principle in (B) is "Don't regret something if it resulted in you having a thing you cherish." That's what we needed in our prephrase!

Finally, Teddy, it's important to remember that this question stem asks for the answer choice that "most helps to justify" the reasoning. Even if (B) isn't perfect, you should be able to look at the other four answer choices and conclude that they are all even LESS perfect!

Does this help?

[teddykim100]

Got it Chandler,

thank you.