Logical Reasoning

PT152 · S1 · Q20 Politician: Our government’s Ministry of the Environment

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Politician: Our government’s Ministry of the Environment issues scientific assessments of the ecological impacts of industrial activities.

Conclusion

The Ministry of Health should not issue scientific assessments that relate to health issues.

Evidence

The MoH will be subject to political pressures in relation to health issues, and when the MoE has been subject to political pressures in relation to the ecological impacts of industry, their assessments have been inaccurate.

Evaluate

At its core, this argument is saying

The author is Assuming a Similarity: if political pressure caused inaccurate assessment in Situation X, then we should expect political pressure to cause inaccurate assessments in Situation Y.

Goal

If we're trying to remove the topic and make it sound more Principled, maybe something like,

The answer should say something that we know is applicable to the MoE / MoH and then give us the power to conclude something that pushes in the direction of "the MoH shouldn't issues assessments for health issues".

20.

Which one of the following principles, if valid, would most help to justify the politician's argument?

  1. If there was no need

    Bad Premise/Conclusion Match

    It doesn't seem like either half of this answer matches up well with Evidence or Conclusion, but in particular we can glance at the right side of this conditional and judge how close it is to the wording of the Conclusion. This Principle would only allow us to conclude "assessments are unnecessary". The actual conclusion is "X should not issue assessments". Those feel different enough that we could bail from this on a first pass without looking closer.

    2% picked this

  2. Correct

    Scientific assessments should not be

    Why this is right

    The match to the Evidence isn't super compelling, but what is attractive about this answer is that its right side sounds like the wording in our conclusion. don't have very strong reason to believe scientific assessments issued → assessments should by govt ministries not be issued by is accurate govt ministries Does our evidence establish that we don't have very strong reason to believe that assessments from government industries will be accurate? Sure. It provides a previous example in which assessments were not accurate. If we trigger this rule, we get language that sounds very useful towards deriving our conclusion: the MoH should not issue scientific assessments.

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

    61% picked this

  3. Individuals and organizations should not

    Unrelated to Goal

    This principle would allow someone to chastise organizations for putting political pressure on government ministries. Our goal is to find a principle that allows someone to say, "The MoH should not issues scientific assessments on health".

    3% picked this

  4. A government ministry should issue

    Opposite Conclusion

    The "if" tells us to put the second half of this answer choice on the left side of the conditional. The right side of this rule is going to say "a government ministry should issue scientific assessments", but we're trying to prove "should not issue scientific assessments". So this rule is worthless to us. (If we contraposed it, we'd have "should not issue" on the Left Side, but that's useless to us. We can only prove/conclude the stuff on the right side of the arrow.)

    29% picked this

  5. The government ministry in charge

    Unrelated to Goal

    This is a principle that would allow one to conclude "the ministry should resist political pressure". That's not anywhere close to our actual conclusion: the ministry should not issue scientific assessments on health.

    5% picked this

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