Logical Reasoning

PT127 · S3 · Q25 Chef: This mussel recipe's

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Chef: This mussel recipe's first step is to sprinkle the live mussels with cornmeal.

Conclusion

I can skip the step of sprinkling the live mussels with cornmeal.

Intermediate Conclusion (therefore)

The mussels available at seafood markets don't contain sand.

Premise (because)

The mussels available at seafood markets are farm raised.

Evaluate

This is a three part argument, so we have to look at both reasoning moves.

There's definitely a missing link going from the premise to the intermediate conclusion, because both claims are about mussels available at seafood markets.

If farm raised, then don't contain sand.

The next reasoning move is "If mussels available at seafood markets don't contain sand, then I can skip the step of sprinkling the live mussels with cornmeal.

That sounds like a pretty awkward missing link, so it's unlikely that we'll see an answer that looks like this.

We could go into Objection mode (to prepare ourselves for a Defender answer):

GIVEN THAT mussels available at seafood markets don't contain sand, HOW COULD WE ARGUE THAT the chef still needs to go through the first step of sprinkling the live mussels with cornmeal?

The only thought that would come to my mind would be,

Goal

Look for an answer supplying a missing link or one ruling out a potential objection.

25.

Which one of the following is an assumption required by the chef's argument?

  1. Cornmeal is not used to

    Irrelevant Quality

    This has the lovable defender-style "not", so we should pause and perform the negation test. Does it weaken the argument if we say, "cornmeal IS used to clean sand out of farm-raised mussels before they reach seafood markets"? Nope. That would actually align with the author's intermediate conclusion that farm-raised mussels are free of sand. It certainly doesn't give us any way to argue that the chef DOES still need to perform the first step of sprinkling his mussels with cornmeal. If anything, it seems to do the opposite of that.

    6% picked this

  2. Mussels contain no contaminants other

    Out of Scope (other than sand)

    If we negate this and say "mussels DO contain other contaminants besides sand", that might feel like it gives us a way to say, "See, author? So you DO still need to do the first step of sprinkling your mussels with cornmeal." But ... does sprinkling mussels with cornmeal get rid of other contaminants? We have no idea. So that would be a pretty weak objection (unclear impact). The only contaminant the argument seemed concerned with was sand, so "other than sand" feels out of scope.

    22% picked this

  3. Sprinkling the mussels with cornmeal

    Irrelevant Quality

    This has the lovable defender-style "not", so we should pause and perform the negation test. Does it weaken the argument if we say, "hey, author, sprinkling the mussels with cornmeal DOES affect their taste"? Yeah, it might! I mean, maybe that's why the chef should still sprinkle cornmeal on the mussels. Even though he doesn't need the cornmeal to eject sand (since they don't have sand), he still needs it for the eventual taste? Ultimately, this negation isn't as strong an objection as that of the correct answer, because "affects their taste" has unclear impact. If the answer were phrased more like "sprinkling the mussels with cornmeal is not critical to get the desired taste from this recipe", then this would be a great answer.

    7% picked this

  4. The chef's mussel recipe was

    Irrelevant Relationship

    The timeline of when the recipe was written is totally irrelevant to whether the chef does / doesn't need to perform the first step. If we negate this and say, "the recipe was written after farm-raised mussels were already available", that doesn't weaken the argument. The recipe might just be assuming that most people don't have access to farm-raised mussels and so it contains a step for removing sand.

    2% picked this

  5. Correct

    The mussels the chef is

    Why this is right

    If we negate this, then the entirety of the author's evidence is completely irrelevant to the conclusion. The conclusion is about whether this chef can skip the cornmeal step when following this mussel recipe. The evidence is about mussels from seafood markets. If the chef is not using mussels from seafood markets, then the premises are totally irrelevant to the chef's situation. The chef may very well have sandy mussels that need a cornmeal bath. We call this style of correct answer Assumes Applicability, because it has this dumb feeling of "remember all the general stuff I talked about in the premises? We're assuming that stuff applies to the specific thing we're talking about in the conclusion".

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

    63% picked this

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