Logical Reasoning

PT104 · S4 · Q7 If you know a lot about history

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If you know a lot about history, it will be easy for you to impress people who are intellectuals.

Conclusion (therefore)

not know a lot → not easy to impress intellectuals about history (b/c haven't read lots of hist books)

Evidence

know a lot → easy to impress about history intellectuals

haven't read → not know a lot lots of hist books about history

Evaluate

Given that we're doing Flaw and seeing conditional logic, we should immediately be looking out for the Nec vs. Suff flaw.

The two conditional premises don't chain together, but the author wants them to. That's how she's trying to connect "not having read history" to "not easy to impress intellectuals".

If I don't know history because I haven't read history, then I won't be able to impress intellectuals with my knowledge of history. But who said that's the only way to impress them.

They might be astounded by my ability to do 15 consecutive push-ups, or to burp the Pledge of Allegiance. Maybe they'll like my piano skills.

Goal

Knowing a lot about history is presented as one Sufficient path to easily impressing intellectuals. But the author's conclusion is treating it as a Necessary path: if you don't know history, you've got no way to easily impress intellectuals.

Let's point out that there could be other ways to achieve the same result.

Since the answers are all prefaced by overlooks the possibility, we can essentially read these answers just as if we're doing a Weaken question.

7.

The argument's reasoning is flawed because the argument overlooks the possibility that

  1. Many intellectuals are not widely

    Bad Objection

    The author only promised that intellectuals would be easily impressed by someone who had a knowledge of history, not that they themselves have a knowledge of history. So it doesn't go against the author's thinking to say that lots of intellectuals don't know history. (If I don't know chemistry, it's probably even easier to impress me with your knowledge of chemistry. The same could be true for history.)

    7% picked this

  2. There are people who learn

    Bad Objection

    Was the author thinking that "everyone who learns about history will impress intellectuals"? Almost! The first sentence is saying "If you know a lot about history, you will impress intellectuals". But does "learn about history" mean the same as "know a lot about history"? Not quite. The author wasn't guaranteeing us that any person who ever did any amount of learning about history would impress intellectuals, so this answer doesn't go against anything the author was thinking.

    11% picked this

  3. It is more important to

    Out of Scope

    The argument is about whether you can easily impress intellectuals, not about whether impressing intellectuals is the right goal. It's a descriptive argument, not a normative one. Whether non-intellectuals are more important to impress doesn't affect the argument's reasoning at all.

    0% picked this

  4. Correct

    There are other easy ways

    Why this is right

    This basically allows us to fight the conclusion. We can argue that "even if you're not well versed in history, you could still easily impress intellectuals, because there are other easy ways to impress intellectuals." This gets at the idea that "knowing a lot about history" was one Sufficient route to impressing intellectuals, not a Necessary route.

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

    80% picked this

  5. People who are not intellectuals

    Out of Scope

    The argument is only about whether certain people could easily impress intellectuals. What sort of stuff impresses non-intellectuals, or how easy/hard that is to do, is completely irrelevant to this conversation.

    0% picked this

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