Logical Reasoning

PT5 · S1 · Q24 Certain minor peculiarities of language

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Certain minor peculiarities of language are used unconsciously by poets.

Goal

Conclusively figure out which author wrote a given poem.

Plan

Find in that poem an idiosyncrasy that has previously only appeared in the work of poet X, to then surmise that poet X wrote this one too.

Evaluate

The question stem assigns us a goal of showing how this test, or this plan, would fail to achieve its desired result.

So, we should consider any potential exceptions or weaknesses in this "fingerprint" approach.

Goal

We need a way to argue that we could do this plan but fail to achieve its goal.

We could find a poem with unknown authorship, spot an idiosyncrasy (a weird choice, like when Kanye first started auto-tuning vocals, or when Dr. Seuss makes up new species of animals to create a lazy rhyme), match that idiosyncrasy to a known poet, but still be wrong in thinking that this poet is the author of the unknown poem.

24.

For which one of the following reasons can the test described above never provide conclusive proof of the authorship of any poem?

The labor of analyzing peculiarities
No Impact
This choice is talking about cases in which we wouldn't bother to execute this Plan. That's irrelevant to our goal, which is to show a case where we DO execute the Plan but don't achieve the Goal.
7% picked this
A peculiarity of language that
No Impact
This has more to do with False Negatives. We might find an unnamed poem that really is by Poet X, but since it doesn't contain one of Poet X's telltale idiosyncrasies, we don't match it up with X (this doesn't show the plan breaking down, though, because it's not like we would match it up with some other poet. We need an answer that would provide a False Positive, where we think this unnamed poem is by Poet X, even though it really isn't).
21% picked this
Correct
A peculiarity of language in
Why this is right
As the background of the paragraph explains, sometimes a peculiarity / idiosyncrasy is something common to the times (as auto-tuned vocals became, once Kanye popularized them). So if we find a poem that has quality A, and previously we'd only seen that quality in the work of Poet X, it could mean that the poem was written by Poet X, but it could also mean that Poet Y wrote the poem, and quality A was one of those peculiarities that was shared by multiple poets of a given era.
Skill tested: Weaken · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
59% picked this
Minor peculiarities of language contribute
No Impact
We don't care whether the peculiarities contribute to the literary effect of a poem. We're only concerned with whether they provide us with a reliable way to judge who authored the poem.
3% picked this
A poet’s use of some
No Impact
We don't care whether the peculiarities where consciously or unconsciously included in a work. We're only concerned with whether they provide us with a reliable way to judge who authored the poem.
10% picked this

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