#10 - The consequences of surgical errors can be devastating

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Flaw in the Reasoning. The correct answer choice is (B).

Answer choice (A):

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

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D):

Answer choice (E):

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

[olafimihan.k]

Question 10. "The consequences of surgical errors can be devastating..."

The correct answer for this problem is answer choice B.

Could you explain why this is right? I was stuck between A and B but ended up eliminating B because the stimulus referred to "highly competent" and "extremely competent" whereas this answer choice did not. If, for example, plastic surgeons were competent but not "highly" or "extremely" competent, would the fact that they were just cpmpetent be enough to weaken this argument?

Thank you.

[James Finch]

Hi Olaf,

The difference between answer choices (A) and (B) comes down to what the stimulus tells us we already know versus what we don't. This is a conditional reasoning problem, so I'll start with the conditional statements given:

"No one would want to risk surgery unless it was performed by someone highly competent to perform surgery."

Unless is a signifier for a necessary condition here so the statement should be diagrammed as:

risk surgery performer is highly competent

and the contrapositive:

performer is highly competent risk surgery

Then we are given that general surgeons are "extremely competent to perform surgery" which we can diagram as:

general surgeon highly competent

and

highly competent general surgeon

Lastly, the stimulus concludes by saying that having surgery performed by anoyone but a general surgeon "involves highly undesirable risks," which diagrams out as:

general surgeon risk surgery

So what's wrong with the conclusion? It relies upon a mistaken negation of the second conditional statement to draw a false inference that only general surgeons are competent enough to risk having perform surgery.

Answer choice (A) is false, because the second conditional statement tells us that all general surgeon are competent, and thus there cannot be any general surgeons who are incompetent.

Answer choice (B) correctly identifies the issue that we only know that all general surgeons are competent enough to risk performing surgery, but we don't know anything about other doctors. Maybe some others are competent enough to perform surgery, or maybe not, but we cannot exclude the possibility.

Hope this clears things up!

[olafimihan.k]

It makes sense now, thanks!

[Linabear218]

Hi! Could someone explain to me why answer C is incorrect?

[Adam Tyson]

A good Flaw answer has to describe something that the author shouldn't have done, because it hurts their argument, Linabear218. So let's consider answer C from that perspective.

Let's assume that competence doesn't guarantee success, as answer C states. How would the author respond? They never said that if you go to a general surgeon, then you will definitely get a good result. What they said was if you DON'T go to a general surgeon, you're taking a big risk. So they would probably respond to answer C by saying "oh, sure, nothing is guaranteed, but it's still a much bigger risk to go to anyone else." They would have no problem with the issue raised in answer C, because they could still be correct about the risks of being treated by anyone else. Thus, that's not a flaw in their argument. It doesn't matter.

The real issue here is that the author, having established that general surgeons do have some desirable characteristics, assumes that nobody else has those same characteristics. Maybe a specialist has that same training and expertise? That's something that the author would have to say "oops, my bad, I should have thought of that," and that's therefore the real problem with the argument.

If the answer is something that the author could say "so what, that's not relevant, my point still stands," then it's not a good flaw answer. It has to be something that they would be forced to admit was a mistake on their part.