#26 - Global Reference, Must Be True, Author's Perspective

[Etsevdos]

I narrowed this down to B / E. I perhaps read too deeply and incorrectly eliminated B.

Pos evidence is never conclusive --I took this to read that it may / may not be helpful, but not guaranteed. Therefore, "no role" did not read to me as something that A necessarily suggested.

Is E incorrect simply bc we have no idea of B's opinion on E? Thanks.

[Shannon Parker]

Etsevdos,
You are correct that E can be eliminated because there is not enough to draw on the author's overall opinion to the approach of scientific research. If you were debating between B/E and however, the strongest support for the answer can be found in the last sentence of passage B.

Answer choice B states that: Positive evidence plays no role in supporting a theory. Yet the last sentence of the passage states that the new theory, along with the old auxiliary assumptions predicted the observed orbit of Mercury (positive evidence), it led to increased confidence in Einstein's theory. Thus the author of passage B believes that there is a role for positive evidence in supporting a theory.

Hope I could help.

[ronibass]

Is this an answer that could have been prephrased? If so, how would we know how to prephrase it?

[Malila Robinson]

Hi ronibass,
It is certainly possible to pre-phrase this, and if that was done you would have loosely focused on the things that seemed to be different between passage B and passage A. One of the things you would need to have noticed is that passage A makes an absolute claim "Positive evidence is never conclusive" but there is nothing in passage B that would support the absoluteness of that claim, so it is possible that the author of passage B would be skeptical of it. That would lead you to Answer B.
Hope that helps!
-Malila

[ashnicng]

Why not D?

[James Finch]

Hi Ash,

The issue with answer choice (D) is that there is simply nothing in Passage B that allows us to to infer the author's attitude about whether positive and negative evidence are logically asymmetrical or not. We just have an example of each given, both of which helped bolster Newton's theory (Neptune) and one of which helped undermine it (never finding Vulcan), which doesn't really tell us anything about the author's view on any asymmetry, they're just two similar examples. Just because they happen to presented as logically symmetrical doesn't mean the author believes that positive and negative evidence are always logically symmetrical. Contrast this to (B), which clearly goes against the Neptune example of having positive evidence confirm a theory.

Hope this helps!