by giladedelman Tue Jan 04, 2011 5:13 pm
Thanks for posting your thought process in such detail!
To answer your first question: although we don't have any explicit necessary assumption language (i.e., "required," "depends on," etc.), the fact that we're asked to pick an assumption on which the argument is based indicates to me that we're looking for a necessary assumption, an assumption that must be true for the argument to work.
Now, the argument concludes that Hartley has been dishonest in not acknowledging his debt to Lawrence -- in other words, that he plagiarized -- because his book contains passages that can be found verbatim in Lawrence's earlier published work. But, what if Lawrence actually got the ideas from Hartley? What if Hartley wrote his book first but didn't get it published for a while? The argument clearly assumes that this isn't the case.
That's why (D) is correct: if Lawrence had gotten the ideas from Hartley, then it would be Lawrence, not Hartley, who owes an intellectual debt. But I disagree with your claim that "if we assume Lawrence did not get their formulations orginally from Hartley then Hartley must have gotten them from Lawrence." Maybe they both stole the ideas from somebody else! So you see, this is a necessary assumption, but not a sufficient one. It has to be true, but it doesn't mean the conclusion is definitely correct.
(A) is out because it doesn't matter whether Hartley needed to use the passages in question; the point is, he did use them, and didn't attribute them, which according to the argument was dishonest. But we need to know why that was dishonest; we need to know that the passages should have been attributed to Lawrence.
(B) is incorrect because a manuscript refers to the unpublished version of the book written by the author, before he sends it to the publisher. Since we're told Lawrence's book was published, it doesn't have to be true that Hartley had access to his manuscript; he could have bought a published copy.
(C) is incorrect because the argument doesn't say Hartley shouldn't have used the passages, it just says he has been dishonest in not acknowledging their source.
(E) is incorrect because, again, the issue is that Hartley used the passages without attribution, not that he needed to or thought he needed to.
Does that answer your question?
