Logical Reasoning

PT148 · S4 · Q13 The Frauenkirche in Dresden

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The Frauenkirche in Dresden, a historic church destroyed by bombing in World War II, has been reconstructed to serve as a place for church services and cultural events.

Given that ...

The reconstruction effort took extraordinary care to return the church to its original form,

and that ...

the original church had an 18th century baroque organ designed for it

and that ...

a donor offered to pay the full cost of rebuilding the organ

Why is it that ...

The foundation built a modern organ instead?

Evaluate / Goal

It's real hard to predict the answers to most Paradox questions, and this one seems particularly hard to anticipate.

We know that the intent was to rebuild the church in its original form. We know the original form had an 18th century baroque organ designed for it. And we know that cost is not an issue (a donor is willing to pay for it).

So there must be some compelling reason that they don't want to replicate the organ with historical accuracy.

We just need an answer that helps us understand why having the old style organ would be bad, or why having a modern organ is good, so that we can understand why it was worth departing from their desire at historical accuracy.

13.

Which one of the following, if true, would most help to resolve the puzzle described above?

Correct
An eighteenth-century baroque organ cannot
Why this is right
This gives us a strong reason why we can't use the 18th century one, and why we'd rather have the modern organ. This reconstructed church is being reconstructed "to serve as a place for church services and cultural events". If those church services and cultural events are going to be able to make use of this bad-ass in house organ, then it needs to be the modern style organ. The 18th century style can't adequately produce much of the music that would get played at today's church services and concerts. (Maybe the old organ only has 40 keys, or maybe it doesn't have foot pedals for bass notes, or it doesn't have vibrato, who knows) The idea is that building an old-school organ would mean it's just decorative, not useful. They want to return the church to its original form as much as possible but still have it be a functional church, and today's church music needs at least six octaves, baby!
Skill tested: Paradox · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
82% picked this
The organ originally designed for
Deepens Paradox
This makes the old organ sound like a better choice and the new organ sound like the worse choice. That's the opposite of what we want.
2% picked this
The donation for rebuilding the
No Impact
We wouldn't really care if the donation had been designated for multiple purposes. The fact would remain that a donor was willing to pay for the old organ, so cost wasn't the issue. If anything, though, saying that this donation was only being offered for the organ shuts down the possibility that they decided against rebuilding the classic organ in order to funnel that donation money toward some more desired part of the reconstruction projects. So it would rule out a possible explanation for why they didn't rebuild the old organ (it wasn't because they wanted to use that donation money elsewhere).
1% picked this
By the time the church
No Impact
If the goal were to reconstruct the church in its original form, then you would presumably want the original organ, before the modifications. Even if your goal were to reconstruct the church in its original form but replicate the old organ in its final WWII form, that would still mean replicating an organ from 1942, not a modern organ.
16% picked this
In the eighteenth century, the
No Impact
No one's debating whether or not they should have an organ. We don't need an explanation for why a church might want an organ. We want to know why they went with the modern organ rather than the original 18th century organ, and this answer isn't speaking to anything that helps us distinguish between those two options.
0% picked this

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