Weakening Questions

[lety.gordill@gmail.com]

Hello,

I was working on the HW for lesson 3 and I am bombing all the weakening questions. I was wondering if anyone has any tips for these questions or perhaps an approach that has helped them tackle weakening questions. It is a huge struggle area for me.

If there are any resources or best practices that have helped others who initially struggled with these questions I would appreciate it!

Thank you in advance.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Lety,

Great question. The key with weaken (and strengthen questions) is a bit of a multistep process.

1. Identify the structure of the argument. Understand what the premises state and what the conclusion states.
2. Think about the gap between the premises and the conclusion. In a weaken question, you want to expand that gap.

These are questions that you should be phrephrasing. Some people want to push and find the exact answer choice they think would weaken. That's possible. But more frequently, you'll recognize what the correct answer choice should DO not say. Let's imagine the following (totally made up) argument.

People who have small dogs report leading more satisfied lives than people with similarly sized cats. Therefore, dogs make people happier than cats.

How would you weaken this? You could come up with something really specific like "X has a cat and she's super happy." But that's a really specific thing to be looking for. You want to prephrase something broad. You are looking for something that undermines that conclusion. Since it's causal, you could note that you might find an alternate cause (for example, dog owners are happier not because of the dog, but because of the extra exercise the dogs encourage). Or maybe the there was a problem with the original report. Those are the sorts of big picture prephrases that can help you determine if an answer choice is correct or not.

Hope that helps!