Logical Reasoning

PT102 · S3 · Q10 There are rumors that the Premier

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There are rumors that the Premier will reshuffle the cabinet this week.

Conclusion (Therefore)

The rumors are most likely false. rephrased: The Premier will probably not reshuffle the cabinet this week.

Evidence

Every previous reshuffle was preceded by meetings w/ senior cabinet members.

But no such meetings have occurred or are planned.

Evaluate

The author is leaning heavily on historical precedent, as a way to estimate the likelihood of something occurring this week.

The author thinks if .

The answer is essentially going to express that form, although it will probably try to condense the two premises into one thought.

Goal

Look for an answer like .

10.

Which one of the following most accurately expresses a principle of reasoning employed by the argument?

  1. When a conclusion follows logically

    Out of Scope: conclusion follows logically

    This argument didn't establish in the evidence that a certain conclusion follows logically from some premises and then conclude something that compares the probability of the conclusion to the probability of the premises. The conclusion is only about the probability of a reshuffle. And it's based on historical precedent, not some "follows logically" relationship.

    15% picked this

  2. Correct

    A hypothesis is undermined when

    Why this is right

    There are rumors (a hypothesis) that the Premier will reshuffle this week. The conclusion is doubting the veracity of that hypothesis (it considers that hypothesis to be undermined). The evidence for this doubt is that, if there were a reshuffling (if the hypothesis were true), we would expect to see the Premier meeting with senior cabinet members (we'd expect that state of affairs to obtain). But the Premier hasn't met / doesn't plan to meet with senior cabinet members (that state of affairs does not obtain).

    Skill tested: Principle-Conform · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    69% picked this

  3. It is possible for a

    Bad Evidence Match

    The conclusion could potentially be matched with it's possible for a hypothesis to be false, since the author is saying "It's possible (in reality, likely) that the hypothesis of a reshuffle this week is false". But the author's evidence never suggests that "the hypothesis that there will be a reshuffle this week is supported by all the available data". We'd fix this answer by saying, It is likely that a hypothesis is false because it is not supported by some available data.

    1% picked this

  4. Even if in the past

    Opposite, if anything

    This principle is saying, "even if there's a historical precedent for X causing Y, we shouldn't assume that this pattern will always hold." But the author is trusting the historical precedent. That's how he's arriving at his conclusion. Also, the precedent was not causal, so as soon as we see, "even if in the past a phenomenon was caused by particular circumstances", we could get rid of this.

    8% picked this

  5. If two statements are known

    Out of Scope

    Out of Scope: known to be false Being logically "inconsistent" means contradictory. As soon as we read "if two statements are known to be contradictory", we can bail. There weren't two statements that contradicted each other in the evidence. We definitely can't match up anything with "If one of the statements is known to be false". And the conclusion isn't saying, "We can't know for sure if statement X is true". It's saying, "it's most likely that statement X is false".

    6% picked this

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