#8 - Prominent business executives often play active roles

[jennyli0804]

Hi,

I understood all the explanations and got this question correct, but I am having trouble identifying the conclusion (and other conclusions of some Weaken Question stimuli).

I thought the conclusion was “...few [Prominent business executives] actually seek to become president themselves” and that the rest of the stimulus provided explanations for why this was the case. However, the question asks us to tackle the “proposed explanation of why business executives do not run for president.”

In Lesson 3, we are told that a stimulus can be weakened either by weakening its premises or by weakening its conclusion, and that correct Weaken Question answer choices almost always focus on weakening the conclusion. But after doing several Weaken Questions, it seems to me that the questions often ask us to tackle specific parts of the premise rather than the conclusion, and that stimuli can often contain mere fact sets that do not contain an argument (e.g. L3HW LR Weaken Q1).

What are we supposed to do when Weaken Questions have stimuli that are fact sets or have questions that do not focus on the conclusion?

Thank you.

[Adam Tyson]

The portion you have identified as the conclusion is actually just a background factual statement, jennyli0804. The author isn't trying to prove that few business execs become President - that's is just stated as a fact, with no supporting information. Instead, he's trying to prove WHY that is so. I would argue that the conclusion is best summed up with the phrase "this is understandable." The author tells us what he thinks the reasons are for why business execs don't become President, and uses that information to support the claim that it is easy to understand why the facts are what they are.

It's rare for the stimulus to a Weaken question to contain no argument, but it does sometimes happen. I've mostly seen it in the form of "this process is reliable", and we then get asked to raise doubts about the reliability of that process. While this stimulus does, in my view, contain an argument, you could approach it as just an explanation without a conclusion, and raise doubts about the explanation. The explanation is causal, so we weaken it by suggesting an alternate cause, or showing the cause without the effect, or the effect without the cause, or a possible reversed cause and effect, or a problem with any underlying data.

Most of the time in Weaken scenario you will be looking not directly at the premises, nor directly at the conclusion, but at the gap between them. Your goal will be to show why the premises, even if they are true, do not support the conclusion, even if it, too, could be true. Weaken the argument, which is the combination of premises and conclusions. Sometimes (rarely) we contradict a premise. Sometimes (more often, but also rarely) we attack the conclusion directly. Mostly, though, we just look for evidence that indicates that the premises do not support the conclusion, regardless of their truth.