#11 - Weaken

[hassan66]

Hi,

I was hoping someone could shed some light on C vs E as I struggled between the two of them. My main concern with E was why would judges being going back to review previous decisions. I just imagined judges sitting in their chambers reading their past decisions and I didn't see why they would need to go out of their way to rectify a faulty decision. I now obviously understand that it is in the context of them reviewing a case that challenges a previous decision.

On review, one of the reasons I thought that C was incorrect was because of "socially inappropriate." I thought that just because something is socially inappropriate, it doesn't tell you whether or not it was a well reasoned argument. But then lines 46-50 seem to suggest that socially inappropriate arguments could be a result of faulty reasoning. Would this still weaken because it could strengthen or weaken? Or is C only wrong because of the word "many," which I did not catch on my own, because the question stem contains the phrase "significant degree" and many is subjective while rarely can objectively be recognized as much stronger language.

It can be hard to catch all these when under a time crunch so I wanted to know what to be on the look out for.


Thank you!

[Brook Miscoski]

Hassan,

You're correct that yielding to popular opinion doesn't mean the popular opinion was smarter, eliminating (C).

The way to pick (E) quickly under pressure is to note that the passage (last paragraph) indicates that judges being willing to abandon past decisions when presented with better arguments is crucial to intellectual authority, and (E) explicitly challenges that judges are willing to do so.

[cd1010]

Hello -- I just wanted to clarify why the wrong answer choices are wrong. I interpreted the question stem basically as a weaken question. To me the key to this is the last sentence: "...the conclusion that legal systems contain a significant degree of intellectual authority even if the thrust of their power is predominantly institutional". So, I thought A - D are wrong because the author allows for these possibilities or are not that relevant to evaluating the author's contention.

A -- answer is a bit weak since it just discusses judges occasionally doing something wrong
B -- passage doesn't really do with a comparison, and the author would just say "sure that's possible, but that doesn't disprove my argument that intellectual authority is still possible"
C - similar to A
D - similar to B
E -- Correct because it shows that even when judges are seeing faulty reasoning, they're not doing anything about it, so they're sustaining institutional consensus / legal precedent

Just want to check my reasoning and reading of the passage! Thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

That looks good to me, cd! Nice job. Yes, it is a Weaken question, and anything that shows institutional authority as dominant over intellectual authority would do the job. If poorly reasoned decisions are allowed to stand and act as precedent, that would indicate that institutional authority is dominant, while intellectual authority is taking a back seat.

Well done!