Logical Reasoning

PT119 · S2 · Q2 Literary historian: William Shakespeare

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Literary historian: William Shakespeare, a humble actor, could have written the love poetry attributed to him.

Statements

Shakespeare could have written the love poetry attributed to him.

Meanwhile, the dramas attributed to him are so insightful about the minds of powerful rules that they could only be written by someone who'd hung out with rulers.

Shakespeare didn't. Bacon did.

Evaluate

Since this is Must Be True, the biggest thing on our radar is conditional logic, which here shows up with the word only (a necessary indicator = put the following idea on the Right).

Wrote these insightful spent lots of time dramas about minds → with rulers of rulers

Do we have another Conditional to chain this to? No.

Do we have a fact that triggers this rule or triggers its contrapositive? Yes.

The contrapositive says, didn't spend time → couldn't have written these around rulers insightful dramas

We know that Shakespeare didn't associate with rulers, so we can output the inference that Shakespeare couldn't have written the dramas attributed to him.

They are definitely trying to bait us into concluding that Francis Bacon did write those dramas, but that would be reading backwards.

Francis Bacon may have written the dramas, since he had the required firsthand exposure to rulers, but so could any number of other people who, like Bacon, associated with rulers.

Goal

Pick anything provable, but it's most likely that they're trying to reward us for applying the fact about Shakespeare to trigger the contrapositive of the rule they provided.

So we should anticipate "Shakespeare didn't write the dramas attributed to him".

Which one of the following logically follows from the literary historian's claims?

Bacon wrote the dramas attributed
Unsupported: Bacon wrote the dramas
We have no way to prove that Bacon wrote the dramas. We only know he's a possibility, since he meets a necessary requirement of whoever it was that did write the dramas. We also have zero clue whether Bacon did / didn't write the love poetry attributed to Shakespeare. There's no accident that this answer is (A). They know when their paragraphs are causing students to think thoughts, and they love to put an illegal answer that sounds like what the students were feeling in spot (A) (on Inference questions).
6% picked this
Bacon wrote both the love
Unsupported: Bacon wrote the dramas
We have no way to prove that Bacon wrote the dramas. We only know he's a possibility, since he meets a necessary requirement of whoever it was that did write the dramas. We also have zero clue whether Bacon did / didn't write the love poetry attributed to Shakespeare.
2% picked this
Shakespeare wrote neither the love
Unsupported: didn't write love poetry
We know for a fact that Shakespeare didn't write the dramas (we applied the conditional rule and derived it). But we don't know whether Shakespeare did or didn't write the love poetry. The author indicated that Shakespeare could have written it, so it's an open question.
3% picked this
One person could not have
Too Strong: couldn't be one person
Why couldn't it be one person? We don't have any information about what needs to be true about the person who wrote the love poetry. It's certainly possible that someone who wrote the love poetry also hung out with rulers and thus was able to write the dramas as well.
7% picked this
Correct
Shakespeare may have written the
Why this is right
The first half of this just repeats the very first sentence. The second half is the inference we derived by combining the fact that "Shakespeare didn't associate with rulers" with the fact that "the dramas attributed to Shakespeare could only be written by someone who associated with rulers".
Skill tested: Must be True · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
82% picked this

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