#16 - There is a difference between beauty and truth. After

[Robert Carroll]

ashpine,

The Administrator's post at the start of this thread does provide a structural approach.

Robert Carroll

[ashpine17]

Is there a way to approach this intuitively, aka no diagramming? This is one instance in which I feel that diagramming makes it more confusing and cluttered

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Ashpine, if I was going to do this without diagramming, I would focus on the difference between the premise(s) and the conclusion. The conclusion is that there's a difference between beauty and truth. The premise is that the most realistic art is the most truthful, therefore it would be the best. I would focus on the idea that best is different than beautiful, and I'd like the answer to address that gap between the premise and conclusion. I know the argument assumes a link between beauty and "best" in artwork, and therefore, I would prephrase something to make that connection.

Hope that helps!

[sxzhao]

I understand the logical gap apparently exists between Best and Most Beautiful
We're already told not all Most Realistic (which is also the most Truthful) are the Best, so to bridge the gap, we need "Best paintings are the Most Beautiful paintings", which would give us the perfect reasoning: not all most truthful are the most beautiful.

Choice A tho, walks the logical bridge the opposite way, i.e., MB - > Best ... why isn't it a problem here?

[Adam Tyson]

That's not a problem here, sxzhao, because it's not a conditional statement, but a statement of equivalence. "The most beautiful are the best" and "the best are the most beautiful" mean the same thing as each other, because both statements set the two ideas - best and most beautiful - as equal to each other.

If we were looking for an answer that said "if it's beautiful, then it is good," we would not want a reversal that said "if it is good, then it is beautiful." But since we're looking for an answer that equates the two things, we don't have that problem with this answer.