#25 - Translator: Dr. Abner, apparently scornful of my translation

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Flaw in the Reasoning. The correct answer choice is (E).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D):

Answer choice (E): This is the correct answer choice.

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[lemonade42]

I'm not understanding how the translator is flawed. It seems reasonable to me that if we don't know what the author's original intentions were, then Dr. Abner's interpretation wouldn't make any sense. Because if we didn't know the original intentions, how can he show that "most reader's feelings are other than those the original text was intended to produce"? How can he make that comparison to the original intentions if we have no evidence of the original intentions?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi lemonade,

We can know that something isn't the correct emotion without knowing what is the intended emotion. For example, if I'm watching a horror movie, and there's a jump scare, the intended emotion is probably not love. Fear, terror, unease, agitation, these could all be the intended response. Just because I don't know which one of the options was intended doesn't mean that I can't identify some options that WEREN'T intended.

All the time, we rule things out without necessarily figuring out what the correct answer is. Think about college football playoffs. By the second to last week, we can know some teams that are definitely NOT in the playoffs. However, we frequently don't know which of the teams will be in the playoffs. For example, this past season, I was confident Appalachian State was not making the playoffs. However, I was not confident which of the top 10 or so teams would make the playoffs.

This is the same structural problem as the argument. Even if we can't identify the intended emotion, we can possibly identify emotions that were not intended.

Hope that helps!