Q14 - The arousal of anger is sometimes a legitimate

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Sufficient Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Not all legitimate art has beauty as a characteristic. (i.e. "At least one piece of legitimate art does not have beauty as a charcteristic")
Evidence: At least some legitimate art has the arousal of anger as its aim and calls intentionally for concrete intervention in the world.

Answer Anticipation:
The word "beauty" appears in the conclusion but nowhere in the evidence, so we know the correct answer must have the word "beauty" (that's the New Term in the Conclusion shortcut for Sufficient Assumption).

To prove her conclusion, the author just needs an example of legitimate art that doesn't have beauty as a characteristic. The evidence presents legitimate art that does have arousal of anger / call for intervention as a characteristic.

So the missing link saying something like
"if your art is trying to arouse anger, then it doesn't have beauty as a characteristic" or
"if you art is calling for concrete intervention, then it doesn't have beauty as a characteristic".

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Not at all what we're trying to prove (which is yes-legitimate, no-beauty)

(B) This says "If legitimate, then concerned with beauty". This would actually destroy the author's argument.

(C) Almost, but we need an example of legitimate art where beauty is NOT a characteristic. This answer only makes it a secondary characteristic.

(D) YES. If it calls for intervention, then it's not concerned with beauty. This was one of the two possible answers we predicted.

(E) This says "If legitimate, then calls for intervention". Not what we're looking for.

Takeaway/Pattern: Using the "new guy in the conclusion" shortcut, we could have eliminated only (E). The hardest part for many students is all the invisible work I did to clean up the conclusion. When you're concluding "people who claim X are mistaken", you're concluding "X is not true". So this author is saying, "It's not true that 'beauty is a characteristic of all legit art'." Cleaning that up, we can say "beauty is NOT a characteristic of all legit art" or "not all legit art has beauty".

We always want to translate "Not all A are B" into the easier to digest form of "Some A are ~B". So saying "not all legit art has beauty" is the same as saying "some legit art does not have beauty". From there, it's pretty easy to hear what they told us some legit art DOES have, and then build a missing link that says "If you DO have ____ , then you DON'T have beauty."

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