#24 - People were asked in a survey how old they felt.

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Method of Reasoning. The correct answer choice is (A)

The stimulus concludes that there is a problem in understanding what people mean when they claim that they feel younger. People claim to feel 75% as old as they actually are, but the stimulus uses the example of a 48-year-old responding that he feels like he is 36 to suggest that a mathematically rigorous interpretation of his response would mean that the 48-year-old is technically claiming to feel like a child, even though that is clearly not his meaning.

There are many flaws in the critique of the reasoning. You should probably jump to the question to avoid spinning your wheels, and in this case you will observe that the question merely asks you to identify a method of reasoning in the stimulus, so you should just match the choices against the stimulus.

(A method of reasoning implies that any trick will do, whereas the method of reasoning implies that you need to actually focus on the main line of the argument.)

Answer choice (A): This is the correct answer choice. The stimulus does project from responses collected at one time from widely differing individuals (the first two sentences), and the stimulus does project what one individual (the 48-year old) would have responded over the course of his life.

That actually describes a problem with the stimulus. The argument presumes that the wide age range of respondents means that the 48-year old would have responded similarly to other differently aged persons when 48-year old had been their age. That presumption is flawed, because it is highly likely that social expectations and trends fuel the responses at any given time, so the 48-year-old’s youth should not be compared to younger people at this time.

Answer choice (B): The argument merely criticizes the reply as difficult to understand. What the argument never does is propose a more reasonable answer. You should not assume that the argument is that people should claim to feel like children; the argument is merely that the claim is unclear in meaning. This choice is incorrect.

Answer choice (C): Actually, the reasoning in the argument and the argument’s choice of the specific counterexample is very poor, and this choice is wrong. Furthermore, simply asking many people a question and reporting their answers does not constitute any kind of generalization, let alone a sweeping generalization. However, projecting the responses at a specific time of a group consisting of different ages onto the responses at many different times of an individual at different ages does constitute a sort of flawed generalization, so it is the argument rather than the survey that commits a generalization error.

Answer choice (D): The argument does not derive a contradiction from a pair of statements. The argument merely projects the meaning of one possible interpretation of a response-- a single statement-- to suggest that the interpretation would not make sense.

Answer choice (E): The argument in no way implies that the questioners manipulated people into responding as they did; the argument focuses on the alleged difficulty of understanding the meaning of the response.

[Johnclem]

Hello,
Could you please elaborate on AC C. I'm not sure if you mean there is or there isn't a generalization .

Also.. If we're taking people's ages from the survey , and using it for a single 4
Example ( the 48 year old man ) how is that no gernalizing ?



Thank you
John

[Emily Haney-Caron]

Hi John,

The main thing wrong with C is that the counterexample is non-sensical; it could not at all be described as well-chosen.

The generalization here is not in the survey, as answer choice C suggests, but in the speaker's application of the survey to this one man; there is a generalization, but answer C misplaces it as in the survey itself.

Does that help?

[SwanQueen]

Hello,

My issue with understanding (A) is the part that states "at some of those ages" --> what does this mean?

Thanks in advance!

[Paul Marsh]

Hi SwanQueen! When (A) says "at some of those ages", it just means that the stimulus took the general response of people today at every possible age (that they feel like they are 75% of their age) and applied it to one particular person at a few of those specific ages (e.g. 36, 27, etc.). So "some of those ages" just means that the stimulus picked a few specific ages.

Hope that helps!

[anureet]

Hi John,

The main thing wrong with C is that the counterexample is non-sensical; it could not at all be described as well-chosen.

The generalization here is not in the survey, as answer choice C suggests, but in the speaker's application of the survey to this one man; there is a generalization, but answer C misplaces it as in the survey itself.

Does that help?

I got this answer right however I don't see how C misplaces the generalization in the survey itself rather than the argument. It states that "qualifying an overly sweeping generalization in the light of a single well-chosen counterexample." I am assuming this option talks about the argument itself. I understand that the counter-example is not well chosen but the generalization part is still unclear to me

[Adam Tyson]

If the argument was qualifying a generalization with a counterexample, anureet, that would mean that there had been some generalization made by someone other than the author, and then the author used an example to show that the generalization was incorrect. That's what a counterexample does - it shows that a position taken by someone is incorrect.

In this case, that would mean that the author was arguing against a generalization, showing that some sweeping claim made by someone else was unsupportable. But nobody made any such generalization! There was just a survey, and the results of that survey, and the author is arguing not about a problem with the survey or any generalization made based on that survey, but about possible problems with how the survey data might be misinterpreted. Put another way, the example is used to show that one particular interpretation of the data should be avoided because it would lead to an absurd consequence. There is no generalization at all, anywhere in the argument!

And just to clarify, a generalization would be a claim that takes limited amounts of data and projects it onto a larger group than the data directly represents. For example, "the people surveyed all felt younger than they actually were, so most people must feel that way about themselves." That's a general claim about "most people" (a pretty big group) based on data just about the people surveyed. It might be a reasonable generalization, if the survey group was a big enough and diverse enough representation of "most people," or it might be a flawed generalization if they were not a representative sample. But to go the other way and take information about a large data set and project it onto a single member of that set is not a generalization.