Logical Reasoning

PT138 · S3 · Q16 Political scientist: People become

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Political scientist: People become unenthusiastic about voting if they believe that important problems can be addressed only by large numbers of people drastically changing their attitudes and that such attitudinal changes generally do not result from government action.

Conclusion (thus)

The decreasing voter turnout is entirely due to a growing conviction that politicians cannot solve the most important problems.

Evidence

If people believe that important problems can then people be addressed only by → become large numbers of ppl unenthusiastic drastically changing about voting their attitudes and that Big attitudinal changes usually don't result from government action.

Evaluate

Well, this feels like a mess. When we're doing Flaw and we see conditional logic, we want to immediately consider the #1 famous Necessary vs. Sufficient flaw. Does the author use her conditional premise in an illegal backwards or negated fashion?

Does she seem to be thinking, ?

No. So she's not doing an illegal negation. How about an illegal reversal? Is she arguing, Maybe in a diffuse way, but not in any obvious way.

The author's conclusion discreetly establishes that there has been decreasing voter turnout recently. This would be a Curious Fact that would prompt an author to try to Solve the Causal Mystery, and the author's conclusion is doing just that. It's saying,

Curious Fact ... what's causing decreasing voter turnout?

Author's Explanation ... it's exclusively being caused by people's belief that big problems require big attitude shifts combined with people's understanding of the fact that big attitude shifts rarely come from government action.

Goal

We can object to / weaken this argument by pointing out some Alternate Explanation (even if it's in addition to the one the author supplied) for decreasing voter turnout.

Or we can object to / weaken this argument by attacking the plausibility of the author's causal story that people believe big problems requires big attitude shifts and don't believe that politicians or government action can trigger those attitude shifts.

16.

The reasoning in the political scientist's argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that the argument

  1. Correct

    presumes, without providing justification, that

    Why this is right

    This answer is weirdly friendly in its essence -- the author presumes that there is not something that would directly contradict her conclusion. Whenever we see presumes / takes for granted, we can ask ourselves whether the author assumed the idea that follows. Since the idea that follows has the lovable Ruling-out "not" we see in so many correct Necessary Assumption answers, we should consider negating this to see if it would weaken. Would it hurt the author's argument if we said, "There is some cause of decreasing voter turnout other than the belief that few important problems can be solved by government action"? Yes, that's basically contradicting the conclusion! The conclusion was that decreasing voter turnout is entirely due to the belief that important problems can't be solved by politicians / government action.

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

    75% picked this

  2. presumes, without providing justification, that

    Too Strong: no Belief vs. Reality

    Does the author need to assume that there are zero political solutions to the most important problems? No, because her argument isn't about whether the government can / can't solve any of the most important problems. Her argument is about whether people believe that the government can / can't solve any of the most important problems.

    4% picked this

  3. infers that important problems can

    Bad Evidence/Conclusion Match

    Any time we see a Flaw answer describing a two-part reasoning move, we can ask ourselves whether we can match up the parts. inters that X from the premise that Y This means that Y should match our Evidence and X should match a Conclusion the author drew (implicitly or explicitly). Was there a premise that said "important problems cannot be addressed if people's attitudes do not change"? No, there wasn't. There was a premise that said, "If people believe that important problems can only be addressed by changes in attitude, then they will become unenthusiastic about voting". If the premise part (or the conclusion part) doesn't match, we can ditch these answers.

    7% picked this

  4. undermines its claim that people

    Doesn't Undermine

    The idea of undermining something you say elsewhere in the argument is the general gist behind the famous Self Contradiction flaw (which shows up a lot in answers but is almost never correct). In this case, the two ideas don't seem in conflict at all. People believing that there are no longer political solutions to big problems and people being dissatisfied with politicians seem to go hand in hand. Perhaps this answer wanted people to be thinking, "if you think politicians are powerless to fix the big problems, then you wouldn't blame them or get dissatisfied with them for failing to fix the big problems". But the actual argument had nothing to do with that.

    7% picked this

  5. presumes, without providing justification, that

    Reversed Causal Relationship

    The author doesn't seem to ever be suggesting or assuming that voter apathy stops there from being the big attitude shifts that we would need to solve big problems. The author is telling a story that reverses the causal direction there. She is saying that "the belief that we would need big attitude shifts to solve big problems and that government can't cause big attitude shifts causes voter apathy."

    6% picked this

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