Selena claims to have psychic powers

Answer choices

1. A

   Unrelated to Goal15% picked this

   No one else has yet been found to have

   We need to know what happens if Selena doesn't have psychic powers.

   15%
2. B

   Correct41% picked this

   If it is possible to have psychic powers, then Selena

   Why this is right

   The contrapositive says If Selena doesn't have psychic powers, then it's impossible to have psychic powers. And if she is correct about having psychic powers, then it's clearly possible to have psychic powers. So this proves the conclusion that if can find out whether she does / doesn't have psychic powers, then we'll know definitively whether or not it's possible to have psychic powers. Either way you go in that binary (she does / she doesn't have powers), you still get to a point where you know for sure whether or not psychic powers are possible.

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

   41%
3. C

   Unrelated to Goal19% picked this

   It is possible to determine whether Selena has

   We need to know what happens if Selena doesn't have psychic powers. This answer tempts a lot of people because it contains language from the argument, but whenever the author's conclusion is a conditional statement, we don't care whether the "if" condition is / isn't true. If I'm concluding, "if it were possible to live on Saturn, a lot of people would want to", you can't weaken my argument by saying, "Dumb-dumb, it's not possible to live on Saturn." I never said it was. Since you can't weaken my argument by denying the "if" condition, we're not strengthening my argument to affirm the "if" condition. Even if this answer were true, we wouldn't have proven the conclusion, because if it turns out that we determine that Selena doesn't have psychic powers, we have no idea what that means in terms of whether it's possible for anyone to have psychic powers.

   19%
4. D

   Opposite Right Side8% picked this

   If Selena’s claim turns out to be false, we will not know whether it is possible

   If this said, If her claim is false, we will know whether it's possible it would be a correct answer.

   8%
5. E

   Negation of Conclusion17% picked this

   We will not be able to determine whether it is possible to have psychic powers unless we find out

   The conclusion was "if we find out, we will be able to determine" and this answer says "if we don't find out, we will not be able to determine"

   17%