#6 - Violent crime in this town is becoming a serious

[holy115]

Hi,

I have a question about the explanation of this question.

It is said in the LRB that to weaken the argument, we must weaken the casual argument implied in the stimulus (i.e., greater number of violent crimes causes more call involving violent crimes).

I disagree with the above weakening the causal argument approach.
Let's assume that there is a statement, "Hot weather induces fearlessness of committing crime for criminals and vigilance for citizens." This would weaken the causal relationship noted above. But, it doesn't weaken the stimulus argument because hot weather still increases crime. Therefore, I think approaching this question as a causation problem and finding the answer based on weakening the causation is not appropriate.


Also, another point that I want to mention is that I focused more on the temporal aspect of the stimulus. While it is stated in the premise "Compared to last year", the conclusion expands the temporal scope to "ever". Regarding this issue, I came up with a potential weakening answer as below:
(1) "3 years ago, there was a 50% decrease in the violent crime rate": If this is true, we can't necessarily say "more likely than ever" because it might be a case where this year's crime rate is lower than that of the past. Such answers attack the temporal shift from "last year" to "ever". Any thoughts on this?

[Jeff Wren]

Hi holy,

This argument does contain causal reasoning. The causal reasoning is implied rather than stated outright, but this is actually quite common in causal arguments, so it's important to be on the lookout for it, especially in Weaken and Strengthen questions, where causal reasoning appears most frequently. For many students, the hardest part about causal reasoning is spotting it when it appears, especially when it is only implied.

Generally, to weaken causal arguments, you will be looking for one of the five ways to weaken causal arguments that are listed in "The Logical Reasoning Bible." It is possible for an argument that has causal reasoning to be weakened in other ways besides these five, so these five ways are meant to be tools to help rather than a restriction to what the answer could be. That being said, the answers to Weaken questions usually are one of these five ways, so you should be thinking about these as you prephrase and sort through the answers.

As far as your example involving hot weather, I think that you're making this more complicated than it needs to be and perhaps confusing yourself in the process. That example would be a wrong answer because it provides an alternate cause for both the original cause (increased crime) and the effect (more calls), but that is not the correct way to weaken a causal argument by providing an alternate cause. The alternate cause is just an alternate cause for the effect in the causal relationship instead of the original stated cause.

What you actually should be looking for is an alternate cause for the increase calls that does not involve more crime, such as an increase in reporting the crimes. This is exactly what Answer C does and why it is the correct answer.

As for your observation that the increase in calls compared to last year does not prove that "the average citizen is more likely than ever to become a victim of a violent crime," you are correct. This argument has more than one flaw in it. While spotting that flaw is great, if you don't see an answer that addresses it, then consider each answer on its own merits and determine which one weakens the argument, even if it is not the way that you anticipated weakening it.