Chapter 3, Question stem drill #14

[UnicornChainsaw]

Hiya,
So the question says; " The professor challenges the student's reasoning by..."

It says the answer is "Method" and additionally explains that it is not a "weaken" question because the stem asks for a description of the way the student reasoning was challenged.

My question is: why would it not be a "Flaw" question? Wouldn't the professor be pointing out the flaw in the student's reasoning?

Thank you for your help!
UC

[Dave Killoran]

Hi UC,

Thanks for the question! There are two relevant points here:

First, a "challenge" by itself does not reveal that a flaw is present. Someone can challenge another's reasoning, but that reasoning might be sound and the challenge can fail. So, by itself, just saying that a challenge occurred doesn't automatically show or prove that a flaw was present. Thus, we don't know for sure that there's a flaw in the reasoning here, and this is just a Method question.

Second, as you can see, Method and Flaw are like brother and sister question types. They are very closely related, and the nice thing is that even if you make a mistake and think a question is asking for the wrong one of these two, you will still probably do well on the question since they are asking for answers that will be very similar, and will have to pass the abstract Fact Test.

Please let me know if that helps. Thanks!