#17 - Specific Reference, Must Be True

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

The correct answer choice is (A).

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

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D):

Answer choice (E):

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

[6341va]

Could someone please walk me through how to solve this question? I had a very difficult time with this one; how does A represent reading the experimenters' minds? Thank you!

[kavyakarthic]

Hello,

Could someone explain why A is better than D? How could an experiment where the researchers don't know about the pigeon's home show that the pigeon's read the researcher's name? I thought familiarity with the pigeon would be a better indication of that

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Kavy and 6491,

Answer choice (A) is meant to describe a control condition for an experiment involving mind reading pigeons. If the question presented is if the pigeons typically are finding their way home by reading the minds of the researchers, then if you use researchers that don't know where they are from, you could tell if the pigeons are navigating by mind reading. If they still make it home, then they weren't reading minds (because that isn't an option). If they can't make it home, that suggest mind-reading is still a possibility.

Answer choice (D) talks about the difference between a group of researchers and individual researchers. That wouldn't clearly implicate mind reading, which we'd need for the answer choice to be correct. Answer choice (D) would work if the number of people who interact with a pigeon impacted their ability to read minds. But that's not what the passage states, and therefore, it's not correct.

Hope that helps!