Logical Reasoning

PT126 · S4 · Q24 Advertisement: Our oat bran cereal

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Advertisement: Our oat bran cereal is the only one that has printed right on its package all of its claimed health benefits.

Conclusion

Our cereal makes true claims about its health benefits

Evidence (since)

If the claims weren't true, health-conscious people wouldn't be buying it.

Intermediate Conclusion (implied)

The people buying it are health-conscious.

Evidence for Intermediate Conclusion

If the claims weren't true, then no health-conscious consumer would be buying it.

Evaluation

Yikes, this is a train that wrecked into a dumpster fire. It seems to be doing something Circular.

It's trying to prove that its printed label is accurate by pointing to evidence that health conscious people by the product. But how do we know health conscious people by the product? Because the label is accurate.

Let's look at our two provided rules:

Health conscious consumers → health claims buying this cereal on label true

Health conscious consumers → health claims buying a food on package true

The author is trying to establish that the health claims on the package are true, so he needs to establish that health conscious consumers buy this food.

But he's never established that the people who buy the food are health conscious. He tries to prove that by citing a rule in the last sentence that is essentially the same as the rule stated in the second sentence.

Goal

We would probably anticipate that these answers could be a slog, so I might gamble on the first one I see I like. We seem to need a circular-feeling argument where the author is trying to use a rule to prove his conclusion, but we can't tell that rule is being triggered without some other rule that seems to hinge on itself.

24.

Which one of the following employs a flawed argumentative strategy that is most closely parallel to the flawed argumentative strategy in the advertisement above?

  1. Greeting one’s coworkers must be

    Not Quite Circular

    Our author provides the conditional that people considered polite always greet coworkers, considered polite ? greet coworkers And then she reasons that "if greeting coworkers, must be polite" But the proof that they're polite is not a circular argument. It's a detail about their consistency of being polite in other contexts. This argument contains a distinction between considered polite and really are polite. The original argument didn't play off some distinction between considered health-conscious and really are health-conscious.

    6% picked this

  2. Correct

    This card game must be

    Why this is right

    Here we're trying to prove that a game is intellectually challenging. We're given a rule that says played by highly ? intellectually challenging intelligent people game Okay, do we know the people who play it are highly intelligent? The author offers support for that in the final sentence: play this game ? highly intelligent This structurally is not a perfect match for the original, but it seems to be vulnerable to a similar objection of circularity. Why should we accept this premise that "playing this game demonstrates you're intelligent". The author would say "because this card game is intellectually challenging", but that would be the author presuming the truth of the conclusion as evidence (i.e. circular reasoning). In the original argument, we're asking why we should accept the premise that "the people who bought this cereal are health-conscious", and the author is like "because they bought something that has accurate information on the label", but that would be the author presuming the truth of her conclusion as evidence. (The original argument does have a Necessary vs. Sufficient flaw that this answer doesn't. It's trying to prove "health-conscious" with a rule that can only prove "not health conscious", but that doesn't get captured in this answer. Overall, I would have to rank this argument / answer choice in the Top 3 LR problems for which I genuinely do not understand if I get what the test writers were going for (I can't tell if I'm wrong about the mistakes I think they made in writing this problem or if they were aware of those mistakes and didn't care).

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

    83% picked this

  3. When coffee is being chosen,

    Missing the Circular

    Brand Z was chosen by people with great taste. How do we know? If this matched the original, it would say something like "only people with great taste would buy this coffee". Instead, it says, "we know because they performed really accurately in a taste test.

    3% picked this

  4. That jacket must have been

    Missing the Circular

    Nothing in here regurgitates an idea in that circular style. It contains three unique ideas. - made for a short person - only short people could fit in it - we saw them before they tried it on Circular would sound like "that jacket must have been made for a very short person, because only a very short person would have a jacket like that made for them".

    3% picked this

  5. This painting is a poor

    Missing the Circular

    How do we know that the people who mistook the painting for an original have poor eyesight? If this were matching the original, it would say "that they have poor eyesight is demonstrated by the fact that they mistook this painting for an original". Instead, it provides a distinct idea bout mistaking a vase of flowers for a peacock.

    5% picked this

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