PT122 · S2 · Q18 New Age philosopher: Nature evolves

This seems to be describing the #1 famous flaw, Necessary vs. Sufficient, in which the author presents a conditional premise and then gets to her conclusion by applying that conditional rule in some illegal backwards or negated way. There’s no conditional logic in these premises, so this flaw would not apply.

Because this answer starts with fails to consider / overlooks the possibility, we can treat it like Weaken and ask ourselves, “does it hurt the argument so say, hey author — sometimes the structure of a phenomenon is X but the structure of the reasoning people do about it is Y”? This would only be an objection if the author believed that the structure of a phenomenon is always the same as that of the reasoning people do about this phenomenon. She told us that the structure of nature is organic / nonlinear / holistic. Was she assuming that the structure of the reasoning people do about nature is always organic / nonlinear / holistic? No. She wasn’t saying the reasoning people do about nature is always that way, she was suggesting it should always be that way. She’s saying “if you want the best understanding of nature, then you must use organic / holistic reasoning.” If I say, “If you want to be in the best health, you need to exercise every day”, does that mean I’m thinking that “people always exercise every day”? Of course not.

This may have tempted us if we thought that this argument was potentially making a Part vs. Whole move. But the author didn’t spell out any characteristics of deliberately isolated parts of a phenomenon and then conclude that those characteristics also apply to the whole (or vice versa). This author seems very on top of the distinction between nature as a whole and nature as a series of deliberately isolated parts. That distinction is motivating her to say, “Don’t study the isolated parts. Study the whole.”

Because this answer starts with takes for granted / presumes / fails to establish, , we can treat it like Necessary Assumption and ask ourselves, “does the author have to believe that it’s impossible through abstraction to think of interconnected things as separate?” No she doesn’t. In fact by acknowledging the linear way of reasoning, in which we do deliberately separate parts of interconnected nature, she is acknowledging that we can think of interconnected things as separate. (B) was about whether people are thinking about nature in a linear, isolated way. (D) is about whether people can think about nature in a linear, isolated way. Her argument is about whether we should about nature in a linear, isolated way.