- Mon Mar 27, 2023 12:44 pm
#100679
Hi Lsathusker,
This argument involves the concept of numbers and percentages but also involves causal reasoning. These two concepts often overlap, as somebody making an argument is often trying to provide a reason/cause to explain an unusual statistic.
In this argument, we are told that "Over the last year alone, the paper has published over five times as many movie reviews as reviews of live plays." This is the premise/data, and there's no reason to suspect that it is factually incorrect.
The next question is why is the paper publishing over five times as many movie reviews (i.e. what is causing this to happen?).
The author concludes that it must be due to a bias of the arts section of the newspaper toward movies and against local theater. While this is one possible explanation/cause, there certainly could be others.
There are a number of specific ways to weaken a causal argument that are covered in lesson 3 of our LSAT course and in chapter 8 of The Logical Reasoning Bible.
The number one way to weaken a causal argument is to find an alternate cause to explain the effect.
Here, a straight-forward prephrase that would explain why the newspaper reviews a lot more movies is that maybe a lot more movies come out each year than the number of local theater shows. This would be a reasonable explanation other than bias and is what we get in Answer B.
The problem with Answer C is that it doesn't weaken the conclusion that the newspaper is biased toward movies and in fact could actually strengthen it. At first glance, you may think that the fact that the newspaper has five movies critics and only 1 theater critic provides an alternate cause for why they have more movies reviews (because they just have more staff to cover movies).
But the problem is that you have to ask yourself "why does the newspaper have 5 movie critics and only 1 theater critic?" We don't know, but that could very possibly be due to the bias of the newspaper. And, assuming movie critics generally prefer movies to theater (which seems pretty reasonable), then having 5 movie critics and only 1 theater critic would suggest that the newspaper's art section staff may very well be biased toward movies.
