Logical Reasoning

PT145 · S4 · Q6 Letter to the editor: Your newspaper’s

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Letter to the editor: Your newspaper’s advertisement claims that you provide coverage of the high school’s most popular sports.

Conclusion (clearly)

Your ad's claim that you provide coverage of the high school's most popular sports is false advertising. (i.e. Your paper does not provide coverage of the high school's most popular sports)

Evidence

Track gets no coverage, while basketball gets full-page coverage.

Intermediate Conclusion (hence)

Track is more popular than basketball.

Evidence

15% of the students are on the track team, while 5% play basketball.

Evaluate

Whenever we're doing Flaw questions, we read the paragraph with a special ear for the 10 famous flaws (since the flaw ends up being one of those about 1/3 of the time).

Sure enough, we have a famous flaw here. This is the rare bird known as Equivocation, the flaw of using the same term (or concept) in two very different ways.

Previous examples have featured talking about maturity, as in how responsible you are, vs. maturity, as in whether you've gone through physical puberty.

Or there was one about happiness, as in a prolonged satisfaction with your life, vs. happiness, as in a fleeting moment of pleasure.

In this case, the argument is trading on an ambiguity in the term "popular".

The newspaper was saying, , meaning, .

The author is interpreting "popular" to mean the sports that are most participated in by students.

A lot of questions earlier in an LR section play off our real world common sense, and this is definitely trying to tap into people's awareness that the only high school sports random people in the community are likely to care about are the big spectator sports like football, basketball, baseball.

Goal

We want to look for an answer calling out the Equivocation flaw (saying that the argument used the term "popular" in two different ways) or an answer that is otherwise spelling out the idea that the newspaper was probably referring to most popular in terms of what its readers want to see, not in terms of what percent of the student body participates in it.

6.

The reasoning in the letter to the editor is most vulnerable to the criticism that it

  1. infers a cause from a

    Wrong Flaw

    This refers to the famous Causal flaw, specifically a subtype in which the author presents a correlation between X and Y (e.g. people who are X are more likely than those who are not X to be Y), and then overconfidently assumes that this means that X causes Y. There was no correlation in the evidence and the conclusion is definitely not causal. (It's just a rebuttal -- a rejection of an idea)

    3% picked this

  2. bases its conclusion on a

    Wrong Flaw

    This refers to the famous Sampling flaw, in which an author relies on a sample that seems untrustworthy, because it's either too small, biased, self-selecting, or likely to have skewed data for some other reason. This flaw is saying, "Because X was true in these cases, X will be true in this wider set of similar cases". That doesn't resemble this argument.

    9% picked this

  3. Correct

    misinterprets a key word in

    Why this is right

    The key word is "popular", which the advertisement meant in terms of "which sports are most popular with our readers", and which the author interpreted as "which sports are most popular in terms of student participation".

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

    85% picked this

  4. employs as a premise the

    Wrong Flaw

    This refers to the famous Circular reasoning flaw, although this is the most creatively overwrought wording I've ever seen for it. Circular reasoning sounds like: the premise restates the conclusion the premise assumes the truth of the conclusion more variations establishes what it seeks to prove presupposes what it sets out to establish employs as a premise the contention it purports to show The conclusion is that "the newspaper does not cover the most popular sports (guilty of false advertising". Was there also a premise that said "the newspaper does not cover the most popular sports"? Nope.

    2% picked this

  5. criticizes the source of a

    Wrong Flaw

    This is the famous Ad Hominem flaw, in which an author dismisses an idea or an argument, because of the source of the claim/argument is someone with a biased/vested interest in the matter or someone with conflicting past behavior. This argument doesn't resemble that at all. The conclusion is literally criticizing a claim "your advertisement's claim is false advertising".

    1% picked this

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