#21 - Professor Riley characterized the university

[David Boyle]

Hi Emily, Thanks for your reply

Could you clarify which part of the author's argument relies on it?
"unless" part?
I'm still not sure why it's the error discussed in A...

Hello 15veries,

"unless there are independent reasons to deem the president's speech inflammatory, it is not true that her speech was inappropriate" can be diagrammed something like

inappropriate inflammatory

, at least in a simplified version. Thus, inflammatoriness is a requirement for inappropriateness. So the author is assuming that if there wasn't inflammatoriness, there couldn't be inappropriateness.
However, all that "Professor Riley characterized the university president's speech as inflammatory and argued that it was therefore inappropriate." seems to tell us is that inflammatoriness is sufficient for inappropriateness, not necessary. Thus, the author is wrong to think there couldn't be some other reason which could cause inappropriateness, and wrong to think that inflammatoriness is an absolute necessity for inappropriateness.

Hope this helps,
David

[chance123]

Hi, Powerscore,
I chose this one incorrectly because I am searching for some Character Mistakes in the answer choice, however, I didn't find one. Upon reviewing I understand why A is correct but I just want to be sure there are also some character mistakes occurring in the stimulus, is that correct?

The author tries to convince the reader not to rely on Professor Reliey's opinion simply because of the long-standing feud btw the president and him, i.e. the motivation behind Professor Reliey.
So there are two flaws happening in this stimulus?

[KelseyWoods]

Hi chance123!

It's good to be on the lookout for those ad hominem arguments! In this case, the argument is made to look like it contains an ad hominem argument, but it actually doesn't.

The stimulus states: "Riley has had a long-standing feud with the president, and so we should not conclude that her speech was inflammatory solely on the basis of Riley's testimony." That's not quite an ad hominem argument.

An actual ad hominem argument would be: "Riley has had a long-standing feud with the president, therefore her conclusion that the speech was inflammatory is false."

Do you see the difference? It's subtle, but important. In the actual ad hominem argument, the conclusion is much stronger. It says that Riley's conclusion must be false because Riley dislikes the president. The stimulus doesn't make such a strong conclusion. It just says that we need to go off of more than just Riley's word to determine if the speech was inflammatory. This is actually valid reasoning. If you have a biased source of information, it is reasonable to want to corroborate that information. That's different than the usual ad hominem argument in which the author would conclude that the information is definitely false just because it comes from a biased source.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey

[lsat 2025]

Hi, I'm still confused. Is this a case of mistaken reversal? The stimulus states: inflammatory --> inappropriate, therefore: inappropriate --> inflammatory

Is this why the reasoning is invalid?

[atierney]

Yes, that is correct.

[lemonade42]

Hi! Can you help explain more why E is not the answer. I feel like if the author addressed the feud and found out it was well-founded, then the author wouldn't even make the comment that says "and so, we should not conclude her speech was inflammatory". Because it seems like the author is making her conclusion and mistakes based on that feud. So the flaw was not addressing the feud's strength.

[Luke Haqq]

Hi lemonade42!

The conclusion in this stimulus is the final sentence: "Therefore, unless there are independent reasons to deem the president's speech inflammatory, it is not true that her speech was inappropriate."

Prior to that, we're given the following conditional reasoning made by Professor Riley:

Inflammatory Inappropriate

The problem, as noted in posts above, is that the author of the stimulus makes a Mistaken Negation or Mistaken Reversal, depending on how you diagram it. Effectively the author concludes,

Inflammatory Inappropriate

That is, the author concludes that if it's not inflammatory, then the speech must not be inappropriate. This fails to consider the possibility that the speech could have been inappropriate for reasons other than being inflammatory (for example, such as being raunchy or discriminatory). This flaw is reflected by answer choice (A).

Answer choice (E) states that the author "fails to adequately address the possibility that Riley's animosity toward the university president is well founded." Whether Riley's animosity is well-founded or not, there's still that Mistaken Negation/Mistaken Reversal going on. Even if Riley's animosity is well-founded, it still might be the case that the president's speech is inappropriate for reasons other than being inflammatory.