Logical Reasoning

PT157 · S2 · Q19 Committee chairperson: No new course

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Committee chairperson: No new course will be approved for next year’s schedule unless a proposal for it has already been received either by this committee or by Dean Wilson.

Facts

conditionals (unless / all) course → proposal received by committee approval or by Dean Wilson

received by → upper level course committee

upper level → must have prerequisites course

statement Dean Wilson has received only one proposal.

Evaluate

The #1 thing we read for on Must Be True is conditionals. We had three of them here. Do any of them chain together?

The 2nd and 3rd definitely do, because of the Overlap of "upper level course". We could have this chain:

Received by → upper level → must have committed course prerequisite

The first rule has some Overlap, with "received by the committee", but it wouldn't chain together super easily.

Does the fact about Dean Wilson trigger any rule?

Not really. We don't know if the proposal he got was upper level or not.

Goal

They might just be testing the conditional chain we got, saying .

They might otherwise try to get that first rule involved. We know approving a new course for next year requires either the committee or the Dean receive it. Everything the committee got is for upper level, which must have a prerequisite. It sounds like the upper level courses might not run next year (because they first need to have a prerequisite).

19.

Which one of the following can be properly inferred if the chairperson's statements are true?

  1. If there are no new

    Negation

    We know that "if there is an upper level course, then there needs to be a prerequisite". This is illegally negating that idea and saying "if there aren't upper level courses, then there won't be any prerequisites". We know that illegal negations and reversals are the lifeblood of trap answers on Conditional Logic based questions.

    9% picked this

  2. If all of the new

    Reversal

    This answer is trying to derive that certain courses will be approved. To derive that, we would need a rule like this xyz → course will be approved But we don't have any rule with "will be approved" in the outcome. Our only rule about approval is the first sentence, where "won't be approved" is the outcome ("will be approved" is the trigger"). There's no way we could prove that a course will be approved when we only have a rule that would put "won't be approved" on the right side of the arrow.

    8% picked this

  3. Correct

    If there is more than

    Why this is right

    Wow, this is a fun thoughtful combination of everything, and does reward our conditional chain. We can pause after the Trigger and ask ourselves whether we know anything: if I know that at least two new courses will happen next year, then what (if anything) would I know? Well if a new course is happening, it got approved, which means it was received by the committee or by the Dean. If there are at least two new courses, then at least one of them was received by the committee (since the Dean only received one proposal). Since we know that at least one of them was received by the committee, we know that at least one of them is for an upper level course, which means we know at least one of them has prerequisites.

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

    55% picked this

  4. If the new course proposal

    Too Strong

    "All courses" goes far beyond what we could prove. The facts only tell us that new upper-level courses will have prerequisites, not that existing courses will also need prerequisites. There's no way we could prove that all courses will have prerequisites, because we can only say that upper-level courses need that, and there could be many continuing lower-level courses on the schedule without prerequisites.

    26% picked this

  5. If there are no new

    Unsupported

    This answer is trying to derive that a course will be approved. To derive that, we would need a rule like this xyz → course will be approved But we don't have any rule with "will be approved" in the outcome. Our only rule about approval is the first sentence, where "won't be approved" is the outcome ("will be approved" is the trigger"). There isn't anything in the paragraph that would force us to approve a course. It's possible we don't approve any new courses for new year.

    2% picked this

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