Logical Reasoning

PT8 · S1 · Q22 For the writers who first

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For the writers who first gave feudalism its name, the existence of feudalism presupposed the existence of a noble class.

Statements

conditional (presupposed) / belief (for the writers)

Inventors of the word "feudalism" believed: feudalism → noble class exists

pivot / rebuttal (yet / although) conditional (unless)

noble class → titles indicating noble status and inheritance sanct by law

facts

Feudalism existed in the 8th century.

Prior to the 12th century, there was no legal recognition of how one could inherit noble status through hereditary lines.

Evaluate

A lot of common Most Supported patterns seem to converge here: we've got a Conditional idea whose contrapositive is being triggered by a fact. And we've got an initial position that the author seems to be reubtting.

Let's start with the conditional + contrapositive. The "unless" conditional allows us to say that,

The final fact in the paragraph says that until the 12th century, there was no legal way to show hereditary transfer (i.e. inheritance) of noble status.

Thus, we know that prior to the 12th century, there was not really a noble class.

This goes against the writers who first gave feudalism its name. They thought that feudalism required a noble class, but feudalism existed in the 8th century, even though we know that prior to the 12th century there wasn't yet a noble class.

Goal

Look for a safely worded answer dealing with the fact that feudalism (in the 8th century) seemed to exist even though there wasn't yet a noble class, which goes against the thinking of the writers who first gave feudalism a name.

22.

The statements above, if true, most strongly support which one of the following claims?

Correct
To say that feudalism by
Why this is right
This captures the Rebuttal aspect of this paragraph: those writers in the first sentence seem to be wrong. They say that feudalism requires a noble class, but history says feudalism started in the 8th century while there wasn't a noble class until the 12th century.
Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
53% picked this
Prior to the twelfth century,
Too Strong
Too Strong: no dominant class Dominant vs. Noble We can infer that prior to the 12th century, European feudalism functioned without the presence of a noble class. But is a "noble class" the same as a "dominant class"? It doesn't seem like those are interchangeable. For a long time, the Catholic Church ruled the land, and so the clergy would be the dominant class. But we don't call the clergy a class of nobles. So even though we know that feudalism functioned without nobles, it still could have had a dominant class.
12% picked this
The fact that a societal
Out of Scope
Out of Scope: not a social class To prove a claim like, "The fact that X is true is not in itself sufficient to show Y", we need to know that sometimes something is X but not Y. So here we would need to know that sometimes a societal group has distinct legal status but is not properly considered a social class. We don't have any information to support that type of thing. By the time nobles had all their legal status in the 12th century, couldn't they have been properly considered a social class?
20% picked this
The decline of feudalism in
Too Strong
Too Strong: the only Out of Scope: cause Nothing in this paragraph makes any causal claim about what led to the rise of European nobility. We can't infer that the decline of feudalism was a cause of the rise of nobility, let alone the only cause.
1% picked this
The prior existence of feudal
Reversal
The passage told us that feudalism required a noble class. This answer is saying that nobility requires feudalism. So this is just an illegal reversal of a conditional we were provided.
13% picked this

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