#22 - Director of personnel: Ms. Tours has formally

[teddykim100]

Hello,

just to circle back on the argument's core itself, everyone seems to agree that the core is comprised of the support for the conclusion: "her complaint would jeopardize" and the conclusion "her request should be denied"

However (and the first few posts touched upon this), what of the second part of that support? The one talking about "by sending a message that employees can get their salaries raised if they complain enough". I thought that at the very least, this was a substantial part of the premise , and a potential flaw of the premise.

The structure being:

to raise Ms. T's salary would jeopardize firm's merit based system by sending message you can complain => therefore, her request should be denied

doesn't the "complaining" part of the premise play a role here?

[Luke Haqq]

Hi teddykim100!

There seem to be two different senses of complaint in this stimulus. One sense is a formal complaint, that is, something filed for processing through some sort of adjudicative process. This meaning takes up the bulk of the stimulus. But in the final sentence we have a reference to if people "just complain enough." This is a more informal, colloquial sense of complaining.

The director of personnel is arguing that a specific person's formal complaint should be denied because other people would "just complain" to get raises, which the director thinks would jeopardize the integrity of the firm's merit-based reward system. But in making this argument, the director does not consider the ramifications of denying the specific person's formal complaint--since this person was well-qualified, denying the complaint would certainly seem to call the integrity of the merit-based system into question.