#19 - Politician: Of the candidates running, Thompson is the

[Sophia123]

Hi!

I just have a question about the wording in answer choices A and B. Upon review, I really actually wanted to remove both of these answer choices because they both referenced the idea of "good leadership" which was not ever discussed in the stimulus. What if Thompson and all the other candidates are actually all terrible leaders, but out of them all Thompson is just the least bad one? This made me veer a little closer to answer choice C. I get how A removes the evidence by disproving what "many people" think, but I will still thrown by the idea of "good leadership"

Are we to assume that if someone is better than everyone else, that they are "good" in this question? I've been trying to stay away from making additional assumptions or trying to help out any of the answer choices, but this seems like one that you have to add that extra assumption for it to be correct.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best,
Sophia

[Adam Tyson]

You're correct that "good" and "better" are not the same thing, Sophia, and that's an important distinction in this and many other questions. Good job for remaining alert to that "relativity" issue, where an author takes a relative claim (X is better than Y) and then makes an absolute claim (X is therefore good).

In this case, though, the relativity issue isn't a problem for answer A. If it's true that, despite what many people think, opposing higher taxes is not a factor in contributing to good leadership, doesn't that also mean it cannot be a factor in making one leader better than another? That is, if opposing higher taxes don't matter in determining whether you are any good, then it cannot be a differentiating factor between two candidates, can it? For that reason, the relativity issue is a non-issue here.

I hope you find that explanation to be relatively helpful, and not absolutely useless!

[freddythepup]

Hi Adam,

On a previous post (not the most recent reply) you talked about why B is incorrect. As I read through the paragraphs I went from understanding and then getting confused again :/ Sorry.

I just want to make sure I understand correctly. So, B is incorrect because by saying that being opposed to higher taxes is NOT a sufficient condition for good leadership, it's saying that the necessary condition, good leadership still can happen without it? I'm confused because when I first read B, I thought saying the being opposed to higher taxes part is not sufficient MEANT that sufficient part is not filled. Am I reading this right? Is there any difference between saying it's NOT a sufficient condition vs. saying sufficient condition is not proved?

Second part of my confusion is you had mentioned that the politician in the stimulus is not relying on the conditional for support. I get that the argument is weak, but isn't he relying on the weak support for his conclusion. The weak support being that many people agree that those who oppose higher taxes will make a better leader than someone who supports them-which is the conditional mentioned in B? Can you explain this part? When I read this I got more confused. Thanks!

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Freddy

This is a complicated question, so no need to be sorry for your confusion! On the test, students were split almost equally between answer choices (A) and (B). Answer choice (B) was incredibly tempting.

One of the big issues with answer choice (B) is that it references a conditional that was never really proposed. It doesn't say that opposing higher taxes is sufficient to make a good leader. It doesn't even say that many people believe that opposing higher taxes is sufficient to make a good leader. It just says that many people think that those who oppose higher taxes are better than those who support them, but that's different than being an objectively good leader. It's also different than saying that opposing higher taxes is sufficient for good leadership.

The big issue with the stimulus is that the Politician doesn't establish that opposing taxes has anything to do with good leadership. He gives information about popular opinion, but that's not really establishing a connection in a strong way. It's a paper thin argument that can be knocked down easy as pie. So answer choice (A), which states that there is no connection between opposing taxes and good leadership, really weakens his argument.

Hope that helps!
Rachael

[mgardella]

Hello,
I don't think anyone has addressed my specific question about this one.
What confused me most is that the argument never states that opposing higher taxes will make them a GOOD leader. It just says that it will make you a better leader than someone who supports them. For that reason (and how darn obvious it was), I eliminated A, and ended up choosing C. It doesn't matter if you're a good leader to be the best candidate, just that you're a better leader than the other candidate.
Can you clarify please?
Thanks

[Adam Tyson]

You bet, mgardella! First, let's deal with answer C. How does this weaken that claim that Thompson would be a better leader than the other candidates? It does so only if you help it by assuming that the other candidates have better, or less questionable, ideas than Thompson has. You need a comparison, not an absolute claim about just one of them. Answer C might weaken a claim that Thompson would be a perfect leader, or a good one, but it has no impact on the relative claim about being better than the others unless and until we know something about the opinions of the others!

Answer A, now, deals a mighty blow to the argument. The argument depends entirely on the tax issue - Thompson is the only one to oppose higher taxes, therefore he's better than they are. If answer A is true - if opposing higher taxes is not a factor, at all, in good leadership, then how can it make one candidate better than another? If it's irrelevant to the issue of leadership quality, as answer A indicates it is, then it cannot possibly be a deciding factor between two candidates on the question of leadership. This answer strips away the only evidence the author offered, and that is a death blow to an argument. The conclusion might be correct, but the argument - the structure of premises supposedly supporting a conclusion - is junk.

You're right that good leadership is not the issue, but if something doesn't have anything to do with being good, then it cannot contribute to making one better. I hope that clarifies things!

[mgardella]

Makes a lot of sense now. Part of me said there was no way the answer was so obvious. If it was a question #5, i probably would not have overthought it so much. Thank You!

[dyogenes]

Hi all, thank you for all the hours you guys put in responding quite literally to every thread on the forum. I, like others, had a question/was confused by the wording of question A (absolute claim present in A vs relative claim in prompt)

In your responses to other commenters, you guys mention that relativity isn't a problem for answer A. Namely:

If answer A is true - if opposing higher taxes is not a factor, at all, in good leadership, then how can it make one candidate better than another? If it's irrelevant to the issue of leadership quality, as answer A indicates it is, then it cannot possibly be a deciding factor between two candidates on the question of leadership.

I don't take this to be the case. Just because opposing higher taxes is not a contributing factor to good leadership says nothing about whether supporting higher taxes is an irrelevant factor to bad leadership. In a situation where candidate x has some arbitrary 'good candidate' rating, it could be the case that opposing higher taxes does not increase this rating. So while it is true that Thompson may be no better than other candidates who do not oppose higher taxes, we know nothing about her relative fitness weighed against candidates who support higher taxes.

We are told that the other candidates support higher taxes, but I do not take this to be equivalent to the opposite of "opposition to higher taxes"; opposition and support seemingly find no coherent opposites in each other, at least in this case. Conceivably there are candidates who neither support nor oppose higher taxes? That maintain taxes may acceptably be at or above their current rate, but would no sooner say taxes should be higher than say they should remain the same? I'm convinced that it's a bit incoherent if we were to say that such a candidate supports both raising taxes and not raising taxes.

I understand how C gives us no connection sufficient for a relative comparison between Thompson's contenders and herself, but at least to me it doesn't seem like A gets us there either. Support is not the opposite of opposition in a world where one may be indifferent. Sorry if it feels like I've belabored the point. My confidence in choosing answers goes out the door when it (perhaps mistakenly) appears to me that no answers are right and where I have to decide which inferential/(subjective) linguistic rule I have to break to find an adequate answer.

Thanks for reading, and apologies if it sounds like I'm off my rocker.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi dyogenes,

Great question! It's clear that you have thought a lot about this question. Let's break down exactly what is in the stimulus.

Premise: Thompson opposes higher taxes.
Premise: His opponents support higher taxes.
Premise: Many would agree that anyone who opposes higher taxes would be a better leader than someone who supports them.

Conclusion: Thompson is the best person to lead this nation.

Even before looking at the answer choices, we should prephrase. How does the politician draw the conclusion? Only based on the taxes issue. He doesn't provide any information on why opposing higher taxes makes someone a better leader than someone who supports higher taxes. That's a huge weakness and a huge problem.

Let's look at answer choice (A). What happens to the argument if it is true? It means we can't use opposing higher taxes as a factor for good leadership. If we can't use that opposition to support the conclusion. It turns our argument into this:

Premise: Thompson opposes higher taxes.
Premise: His opponents support higher taxes.
Premise: Many would agree that anyone who opposes higher taxes would be a better leader than someone who supports them.
Premise: Opposition to higher taxes is not a factor for good leadership.

Conclusion: Thompson is the best person to lead this nation.

We don't need to know if supporting higher taxes makes you a bad leader. We can hurt the argument just by knowing that opposition can't make you a good leader. If you think of leaders as having a "leadership rating" opposition to higher taxes can't move that score up at all. That means we can't use his opposition to distinguish him from his opponents.

Would it be stronger if it also said that supporting higher taxes didn't impact leadership either? Sure. But remember that for weaken questions we aren't trying to find the best possible weakness we can come up with in an answer choice. We just need to find something that weakens the argument in any way. Answer choice (A) does that by making it so that we can't use his opposition to higher taxes to help Thompson's leadership score.

Here's the problem with answer choice (C). You don't know anything about any opinions by any candidate about non-tax issues. Answer choice (C) says that Thompson's opinions on non-tax issues are questionable, but it seems possible that that was already considered. On it's own, it doesn't impact the argument because of the premise that "many would agree that anyone who opposes higher taxes would be a better leader than someone who supports them." Everyone has positives and negatives, but that premise seems to say that for many people, taxes alone are decisive. Answer choice (A) on the other hand directly addressed taxes and how they impact leadership.

Hope that helps!
Rachael

[wwf]

Hi-

I have a quick question about this one. I chose (B), mainly because I couldn't see anything else that resembled my prediction. I rightly predicted that the issue was with "many would agree", but (A) didn't jump out to me as being something I could choose. It seemed to me an awful lot like I would be questioning a premise if I chose it. So I went down to (B), even though I wasn't entirely happy about that.

Can someone explain why this isn't an example of questioning a premise? Is it because "many would agree" is about a belief system.. or?

Because I see exactly how (A) being true destroys the argument, but I just felt like it wasn't something we were able to question.

Cheers!