Logical Reasoning

PT137 · S2 · Q16 Marife: That was a bad movie

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Marife: That was a bad movie because, by not providing viewers with all the information necessary for solving the murder, it violated a requirement of murder mysteries.

Marife's 1st Claim

That was a bad movie Does N argue it wasn't bad (it was good)?

Not quite. We can't really derive N's opinion about whether or not this movie was good overall.

Marife's 2nd Claim

It didn't provide viewers with all the information necessary to solve the murder. Does N argue that it did provide enough info?

No, it almost seems more like N is agreeing to this idea.

Marife's 3rd Claim

Not providing viewers with enough info to solve the murder is a violation of a requirement of murder mysteries. Does N argue that it isn't a requirement of murder mysteries to provide enough info to solve the murder?

No, N doesn't say anything like that.

Evaluate

Since we got through all of Marife's explicit claims and didn't find any disagreement from Nguyen, we turn to ask ourselves,

M's argument says, because that movie violated a requirement of murder mysteries, we can conclude that was a bad movie.

What is M assuming there? - this movie was a murder mystery - if you violate a requirement of the genre you're in, then you're automatically a bad movie

Does N object to either of these ideas? Is N arguing either of these claims? - this movie was not a murder mystery - you can violate a requirement of the genre, but still be a not-bad movie

Yes! It seems like N is arguing that the move was not a murder mystery, since he says that the murder just provided context and should not be taken as a defining characteristic of the film.

Goal

Let's look for an answer saying something like, .

16.

Marife's and Nguyen's comments indicate that they disagree about

  1. whether the movie was a

    Unsupported Person 2

    We adjudicated this with our up-front thinking and decided that N doesn't make any comment that suggests whether he thinks it's a good / bad movie. He's objecting to Marife's basis for calling it bad, but he isn't saying it's good.

    8% picked this

  2. whether the relationship between the

    Unsupported Person 1

    We have no idea whether Marife would say this relationship was an important or unimportant part of the movie. Even believing, as he does, that this movie was a murder mystery, Marife still might have thought that the relationship between chief and assistant was an important part of the movie.

    2% picked this

  3. Correct

    whether the movie should be

    Why this is right

    Marife would say YES, since he is downgrading the movie for failing to do something that is expected of murder mysteries (thus, he was under the impression he was watching a murder mystery). Nguyen would say NO, since he is saying that "the murder is not a defining characteristic of the film", as it would be if it had been a murder mystery.

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

    63% picked this

  4. the appropriateness of trying to

    Trap

    Unsupported Both Too Strong: all mystery movies Marife is only talking about one criteria that he thinks a murder mystery must meet. We don't know if he thinks it's appropriate to find criteria that all mystery movies meet. Nguyen, similarly, says nothing about the category of "all mystery movies".

    12% picked this

  5. whether the filmmaker wanted viewers

    Trap

    Both Probably Agree Out of Scope: filmmaker's intention Nguyen didn't directly comment on whether the movie provided enough info to let viewers solve the murder, but since he didn't push back against that claim, he's probably implicitly accepting it. Both people seem to accept that there wasn't enough info for the viewers to solve the crime. Really, neither of them is specific enough about whether or not that was the filmmaker's intention.

    16% picked this

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