Q15 - Counselor: Hagerle sincerely apologized

[noah]

Wow, that's a doozy of a question in terms of the wrong answers. I agree that the right answer fits much better, but I sure was tempted by those wrong answer Sirens.

Let's take a look and master it!

The conclusion of this principle support question is that Hagerle (great name) owes me an apology for lying to me? Why Because Hagerle apologized to someone else for telling the same lie to that person.

So, the gap is that if the liar apologized to someone else for a lie told to that person, then you should receive an apology if the liar told the same lie to you. (That was sort of tough to write out!)

(C) clearly fits the bill.

But, what about these juicy wrong answers?

(A) is about something being good. Out of scope - not such a juicy answer.

(B) is quite tempting and complex. It breaks down to this:

lied to both --> (~ both owed apology --> neither owed apology)

Or, using the contrapositive of the second relationship:

lied to both ---> (at least one owed --> both owed)

(The negation of "neither" is "at least one" - think about it.)

This all looks pretty good still! Let's use the second version as it seems a bit easier to manage. We know that Hagerle lied to both, so now we know that if at least one was owed an apology, they're both owed. So, do we know that Hagerle owed at least one person an apology? Think about it before reading on.

Thinking?


Keep thinking!

No, we don't all we know is that Hagerle apologized to someone else--a physician--but perhaps that physician wasn't owed an apology, but received one anyway.

(D) is out of scope - we have no idea if Hagerle is capable of sincerely apologizing to the counselor.

(E) is tempting, like (B). Remember that "unless" is generally equivalent to "if not." With that in mind, let's translate:

IF someone can NOT sincerely apologize to everyone that he or she told a certain lie to THEN a person shouldn't apologize to someone for telling that lie.

And, it's contrapositive: IF a person should apologize to someone for telling a lie THEN...

Wait, same problem as (B)!

We don't know if Hagerle should have apologized to the physician. We just know that Hagerle did.

Now that I'm done, I've decided against naming my child Hagerle. Too many bad memories now attached to that name...

#officialexplanation

[lorrainebaer]

I correctly chose C, mostly because each part of the answer choice matched up nicely with each part of the counselor's argument. I was just wondering if someone could explain why B is wrong.

[NatalieC941]

Hello!

I've been trying to work on this through diagramming the conditional statements, but I am having a difficult time understanding how B wouldn't work. The explanation of "owing" above doesn't convince me.

Is it possible to re-explain this?

[ohthatpatrick]

Ask yourself first whether the trigger for (B) applies.

Did H tell the same lie to two different people?

Looks like it. H apologized to the physician for lying, and H told the same lie to the author.

We have triggered this rule. What does (B)'s rule let us conclude about H?

H doesn't owe either person an apology unless he owes both people an apology.

Does he owe both people an apology?
Not as far as we know. (Remember, the Conclusion is not "something we know" ... only premises are facts we know)

Since he doesn't owe both people an apology he doesn't owe either person an apology. Thus (B) failed to get us to our conclusion, which is that "H does owe the author an apology".

Conditionally speaking, "unless" is treated as "if not".

Neither person lied to is owed an apology unless both people lied to are owed an apology.

TRANSLATE
if it's not the case that both people are owed an apology --> neither person is owed an apology

CONTRAPOSITIVE
If either person is owed an apology ---> both people are owed an apology

Again, the problem is that there's no way to trigger the left side of that. We don't know if the physician was "owed" an apology. We just know that the physician received one.

The correct answer meanwhile is (C)
If someone else already received a sincere apology for the same lie --> then anyone else who received the same lie from the same person is also owed a sincere apology.

Based on our available facts, we can trigger that left side and it allows us to derive the conclusion that H owes the author a sincere apology as well.

[CharlesS800]

This question was a toughie for me, in particular I think because of the conditional diagramming needed to really lock down a solid answer and the time needed to do that, which I felt I did not have while taking this as a practice test.

I diagrammed the argument as:

H sincerely apologized to doctor for lying + Told the same lie ---> Owes counselor sincere apology as well

I immediately got rid of answer choices A and D because they seemed way out of scope and irrelevant to the argument and its conclusion.

I was left with B, C, and E, all of which seemed appealing.

After reading the explanations of why B and E were wrong I think this question make more sense but the subtleties of the reason the answer choices are wrong still makes this question difficult I think.

After using the IF NOT trick, E seems to eliminate itself much more clearly, the presence of "should" there is something that does not appear in the argument above, so I deaded it.

B I tougher to get rid of I think, especially because of the presence of the tricky, "unless both are" hanging out at the end. I've read over Noah's explanation for why this question is wrong and I still think it's hard to wrap your head around, particularly in the limited time you have to consider the test. It seems like it comes down to the word "owed," much like the crux of answer E was "should," this is something that we don't know for certain and therefore can't move forward with.

I think one of the important takeaways from this question is that close reading of the stimulus and of answer choices is crucial, you need to be able to quickly identify extraneous language added in answer choices that would change the complexion of the argument and eliminate these answer choices. So, in the future I think I'll just have to work on focus to ensure that questions like these come a little bit more easily.

[abrenza123]

I was stuck between C and D. D confused me because I thought that by apologizing to the physician, that meant Hagerle IS capable of apologizing sincerely and therefore owes the counselor an apology....

[ohthatpatrick]

As a rule of thumb if you're down to 2 on a principle question, just ask yourself which one better matches the wording of the evidence and the conclusion?

Yes, we can infer that Hagerle was capable of sincerely apologizing to the physician, but that was never stated directly. Expect more of an explicit match on principle.

The actual problem with the answer, functionally, is that this rule would only allow us to say that H owes "the physician" an apology.

From the evidence, we know that H is capable of giving the physician a sincere apology. So the rule in (D) says that H owes that person (the physician) an apology.

But do we know whether H is capable of sincerely apologizing to the Counselor?

We don't. Hagerle might still resent the Counselor from happened at the harvest dance, and he just canNOT look her in the idea and sincerely apologize.

We know from the evidence that Hagerle was capable of lying to the Counselor, but not whether he's capable of sincerely apologizing to her, so we can't use the rule in (D) to force Hagerle to apologize to the Counselor.

Hope this helps.