Logical Reasoning

PT120 · S4 · Q21 Administrator: Because revenue fell by

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Administrator: Because revenue fell by 15 percent this year, the university needs to reduce next year’s budget.

Conclusion

We must reduce faculty salaries.

Evidence

We need to reduce next year's budget. We could do that be eliminating faculty positions. We could also do it by reducing salaries. And we're not going to eliminate faculty positions.

Evaluation

This almost seems like airtight logic, where you lay out the available options, eliminate all but one of them, and then conclude that the final option must be the case.

So where's the wiggle room? They never actually said that these are all the available options. They are just assuming we only have the two options mentioned. We call that False Choice, when you present two options and assume that they represent an exhaustive set of possibilities.

Goal

We need an answer that says,

21.

The administrator's reasoning is flawed because the administrator

  1. presumes, without providing justification, that

    Unsupported Comparison

    The author never implies that one options would save more money than the other. She just asserts that we're NOT doing option 1, and thus she thinks that all that's left is option 2.

    4% picked this

  2. Correct

    presumes, without providing justification, that

    Why this is right

    This expresses the False Choice the author presented, that budget reduction requires either cutting jobs or reducing salaries. If we negate this assumption, we get the powerful objection of "The budget could be reduced by other means besides those two you mentioned".

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

    87% picked this

  3. ignores the possibility that, though

    Not an Objection

    The author doesn't imply that we're seeking a budget cut that equals 15%. Just because a 15% drop in revenue has impelled us to reduce our budget doesn't mean that we're planning to do so in an exact 1:1 ratio of 15% smaller budget.

    1% picked this

  4. presumes, without providing justification, that

    Not an Assumption

    There's nothing in the author's comments that would allow us to derive the idea that she's assuming some people will quit rather than accept a reduced salary.

    3% picked this

  5. ignores the possibility that the

    Does Not Ignore

    The author addresses this possibility by saying "we will not be eliminating any positions". We may have thought to ourselves initially, "Why does it have to be one or the other? Just cut some jobs and reduce salaries by a little?" But that would not be evaluating the author's reasoning. Evaluating their reasoning means accepting their premise (there will be NO jobs cut) and figuring out why that still doesn't prove their conclusion.

    4% picked this

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