#1 - Journalist: One reason many people believe in extrasensory perception (ESP)

[sunshine123]

Hello,

I understand that E most closely relates the flaw committed by the journalist: she or he dismisses the legitimacy of ESP on the grounds of one deceptive researcher. And, as E suggests, the author presumes this applies to the rest of the ESP research. So, on the basis of a lack of evidence ALONE the author discredits the belief in ESP. Spelled out in conditional logic: No evidence ------> not a supported belief. Contrapositive: Supported belief ---------- > evidence. That contrapositive matches quite nicely with C: "presupposes that, in general, only evidence from experiments can support beliefs."

At the very least, it seems to me that the author DOES believe that in the case of ESP evidence alone can be used to support the belief, seeing that it was the lack of evidence alone that led him to discredit the belief. Is C wrong, then, because it speaks about what is the case in "general," while the journalist limits his discourse to ESP research? Or, should I have simply accepted E on the grounds that it better describes what is at face value going on in the stimulus?

Thank you in advance,
Sunshine

[Adam Tyson]

To start with, Sunshine, this argument is not based on a lack of evidence, so we should not analyze it in that way. Rather, there IS evidence that one researcher was lying. The problem is that the author assumes that ALL researchers must be doing the same thing. Answer E perfectly describes this error.

Also, the argument is not conditional, so taking a conditional approach in your analysis could be leading you astray.

Finally, answer choice C is incorrect because it simply isn't true. This author does not necessarily presuppose that experiments are generally the only evidence that could support beliefs. This author might be willing to accept other evidence, such as direct observation or a logical argument, rather than just the results of an experiment. Since the author doesn't have to assume that experiments are the only acceptable form of evidence, this answer cannot be describing their flaw.