#21 - Cognitive psychologist: The majority of skilled

[izzy_tingles]

Are we to assume that the last sentence of the stimulus, "It follows that some people who are good at abstract reasoning are famous" is in fact referring to some artists? All of the posts mentioning the "most + most = some" rule makes me think that the "some people" has to be referring to "some artists?" Otherwise, I'm confused how we can draw the given conclusion with just the overlap of "most skilled artists are good at abstract reasoning" and "most skilled artists are famous." Thank you!

[Dana D]

Hey Izzy,

No, you don't have to assume "people" just means "artists". This stimulus tells us a few conditional logic rules:

Skilled artists Creative People good at abstract reasoning

Right away looking at this, we can say that at least one (some) skilled artists are also good at abstract reasoning. Do you see that as well?

Moving on, we're told

Skilled artists famous

and the conclusion, people good at abstract reasoning famous.

Remember we are trying to justify the conclusion here, so we need to look at the author's argument. The psychologist concludes that some people good at abstract reasoning are famous because not all skilled artists are famous. As it stands, this doesn't really make sense. We need an answer choice that, when added in, would let the psychologist draw this conclusion logically.

If we add answer choice (E) to this equation, we can now say

Skilled artists famous
AND
Skilled artists creative people

This means that at least one (some) skilled artist is both famous and a creative person. With that knowledge in mind, we can conclude that some people who are good at abstract reasoning are famous, because some (at least one) skilled artist is both famous and a creative person, and all creative people are good at abstract reasoning.

Does that make sense? If not, please let me know where you're getting lost in the explanation. Hope that helps!

[nne.egw]

Doesn't the sentence "not all skilled artists are famous" imply enough to make the conclusion?

[Luke Haqq]

Hi nne.egw!

That piece of the stimulus doesn't quite allow the conclusion to follow. As Dana notes above, from her first diagram, we can conclude that "at least one (some) skilled artists are also good at abstract reasoning." Or represented with a conditional reasoning diagram, we can know that:

Skilled artists Good at abstract reasoning.

The sentence you mentioned lets us add a some link, which we could put at the beginning of this conditional reasoning:

Famous Skilled artists Good at abstract reasoning

From this, we don't know that some people who are good at abstract reasoning are famous.