Logical Reasoning

PT140 · S2 · Q20 Recent medical and anthropological

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Recent medical and anthropological data show that prohibitions on the use of certain foods served important social, economic, and medical functions in ancient cultures.

Conclusion

The recent data showing that food taboos served important societal and medical functions in ancient cultures can't explain the origin of these food taboos.

Evidence

The people who originally adopted and enforced these taboos didn't have access to this type of data.

Evaluate

At a basic Missing Link level, this argument is assuming if X didn't have access to data set Y, then data set Y can't explain X's behavior.

On a more conversational level, given that these ancient societies didn't have the medical data we have to show how, for example, a taboo against eating shellfish actually served a valuable socioeconomic and medical function for these societies, could this data still explain the origins of the taboo?

i.e., given that ancient cultures wouldn't have had the ability to scientifically prove that refraining from eating shellfish was good for them, can data showing that eating shellfish would have been bad for them help convince us that the reason they avoided shellfish was for health reasons?

Sure. Before there was data showing that smoking cigarettes led to lung cancer, there were probably families who prohibited their kids from smoking cigarettes because they were worried that the cigarettes would do harm to the kids' lungs.

Even though they didn't have access to the data, the origin of the smoking prohibition might still have been fear of the medical dangers that we now can demonstrate with actual data.

Goal

Look for an answer linking , or an answer ruling out an objection that would allow us to say that

20.

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

Correct
The origin of a food
Why this is right
This answer sounds potentially too strong: must be explained. But, the author's conclusion justifies that strong wording, since she's saying "these data cannot explain the origin of the prohibitions". Let's consider her argument move, and then contrapose it: ppl who adopted and this data can't enforced taboos didn't → explain origins have access to this data of taboo The contrapositive would look like this, in order for data to explain the origin of a food prohibition, then the people who adopted and enforced the taboo must have had access to this data. That's essentially what this answer choice is saying, only instead of saying "access to this data", it's saying "an understanding of this data". If we negated this answer, would it weaken the argument? When explaining the origin of a food taboo, you don't need to consider the understanding of the people who adopted/enforced the taboo. That definitely weakens the argument, because it's saying that the Author's premise isn't really essential to the conclusion. The author is acting like, "this data can't possibly explain Y, because the people who created Y didn't know about the data". And this negation would be objecting, "We don't need to worry about whether or not the people who created Y understood the data in order to explain the origin."
Skill tested: Necessary Assumption · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
66% picked this
The social, economic, and medical
Out of Scope: Contradictory Prohibitions
Nothing the author is saying has anything to do with a society's food prohibitions being internally contradictory.
4% picked this
The social importance of the
Out of Scope
Out of Scope: Nutritional Value Unsupported Relationship Nothing the author says is talking about the nutritional value of foods, or relating it to social importance.
3% picked this
The original purpose of a
Out of Scope: Forgotten
The author is never claiming that the original purpose was forgotten within 100 years of it being adopted. She's just saying that our modern data can't explain the original purpose of this ancient culture, because they didn't have access to our modern data.
6% picked this
The people who originally adopted
Too Strong: generally nontechnical
This is the most tempting trap answer, for me. Our author is certainly assuming that these ancient cultures were more primitive than ours in terms of the sophistication of their data (her premise is that they wouldn't have had access to our fancy modern data). In fact, they may have had no data to go off of. It's too strong to say that the people creating and enforcing these taboos usually had a nontechnical understanding of the medical value of those prohibitions. The author is perfectly happy to believe that they had no understanding of the medical value of the prohibition. If anything, it sounds like our author is saying, "Great, you found a rationalization for their food taboo using modern medical data, but that can't be why they started the food taboo --- after all, they had no idea their food taboo had any medical benefit." If we negated this answer, we're saying "most of the time, the people who created a food taboo did not have a nontechnical understanding of the medical function of that taboo." That doesn't mean they did have a technical understanding. It could just mean they didn't have any understanding of the medical function. That would hurt the argument; it might even strengthen it.
21% picked this

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