Causation

[rosemerrychill]

So i'm one of those people who were duped into believing powerscore bibles were the sh!t until i read manhattan books.

i just have a problem with causation. i learnt from powerscore that if stimulus says A->B, the author believes A is the only thing in the world to cause B, and no other thing causes B. is this logic still valid? if it is, then to weaken a causation you can just show A occurs and B did not, or C occurs and B occurs, or no A but there's B.

does manhattan endorse this line of thinking?

[tommywallach]

Hey Rosemary,

Well I don't know anything about Powerscore, but what I can tell you is that I'm nervous about anything that simplistic. If a passage says that A causes B, that ABSOLUTELY does not imply that A is the only thing that causes B. I doubt Powerscore put it that simply, but if they did, they're wrong.

However, it could also be that you're explaining it slightly wrong. Causation issues typically do not have any actual causation described in the stimulus. That's because causation creates correlation, so there's no error to be pointed out (i.e. if smoking causes heart disease, then there is logically (and irrefutably) a correlation between smoking and heart disease). A typical passage will give you correlation, then attempt to conclude causation. If a passage creates correlation, the error is that the author is missing anything else that might be causing the correlation (as you described, some third thing C, or else it's B causing A rather than A causing B).

Make sense?

-t

[hdw217]

powerscore is damn wrong in this regard. i explicitly remembered they said if stimulus says A causes B, then the author of the stimulus believes only A in the universe can cause B, and nothing else can cause B, so/thus a way to weaken causation would be if A did not occur and B does occur, since only A can cause B in the universe.

thanks so much for your help in clarifying this and this is why you guys should basically shut down the other test prep companies for good.

[hdw217]

and to follow up and help others who went to powerscore first,

the LR bible says to weaken: show when cause occurs and effect does not occur OR show effect occurs but cause did not occur

this is why for PT 39, S4, Q20, it left me scratching my head because it says informed lifestyle choices cause good health and 2 answer choices says informed lifestyle choices but no good health and another one says good health but no informed lifestyle choices.