Q24 - Marrianne is a professional chess player

[wj097]

This is a Principle Support question.
I did arrive at the correct answer (B) through POE, and quite frankly thought was nearly a perfect answer before reviewing it afterwords...
there seems to be a slight mismatch between the language in (B) and the argument core, and wanted to see if this is OK only because the question stem writes "if valid, most HELPS TO SUPPORT.." instead of "if valid, JUSTIFIES.." which is also a common question stem for principle support types. Bottom line..do we need to distinguish the two??

Core: Humming was involuntary --> Should not be held responsible
(B): only voluntary stuff can justify disqualification

Mismatch: not being held responsible is NOT same as not being disqualified...

Thx

[ohthatpatrick]

You're right that there is a subtle difference between
"which of the following P's, if valid, justifies the argument"
and
"which of the following P's, if valid, most supports the argument"

In terms of what the question stems literally say, it's akin to the difference between Sufficient Assumption and Strengthen. But Sufficient Assumption and Strengthen questions, while possessing some overlap, are very different question types to me.

Meanwhile, these two different wordings of Principle questions are not really different question types to me.

This is akin to the difference between Inference questions that ask for "what must be true" vs. "what is most strongly supported"

Principle-Justify vs. Principle-Support are the same question type to me, just as Inference-Must be True vs. Inference-Most Strongly Support are the same question.

What we read for and expect is the same for either wording of the same question type, but the correct answer to "most strongly supports" is allowed to be a somewhat looser fit than the correct answer to "justifies"/"must be true".

There are a couple examples of Principle-Support correct answers that just strengthen, without proving the conclusion is true. But the majority of Principle-Justify/Support questions are interchangeable.

I think for this question, (B) still does a good job of locking in what the question stem asks for.

I agree that if we are trying to lock in the logic of Marianne's argument, then we need a connection between 'involuntary' and 'not held responsible'.

But the question stem actually says to support "her argument against the order".

The order was that she should stop humming or be disqualified, i.e.
Keep humming --> disqualified.

Her argument against the order could be construed as
Humming --> involuntary --> ~held responsible --> ~disqualified

Implicitly, she was arguing that since she's not responsible for her humming, she shouldn't be disqualified on the basis of it.

So a principle that said "An action that someone is not responsible for should not be grounds for disqualification from a chess tournament" would also work here.

Anyway, this is a long-winded response to a question you probably handled with relative ease, so let's not overly dissect it.

Ultimately, on pretty much any Principle Justify/Support question, we just want something that provides connective tissue between the premise idea and the conclusion idea. (B) definitely does this better than the other choices, so we'll take it.

Hope this helps.

[uhdang]

While analyzing the wrong answer choices C) and E), I played "what if" game a bit, and want to confirm my thoughts on this with the group.

For C) and E) both, I thought that their reasoning were on the right track but are reversed. First of all, for C), reversing it would be like --

If a person is responsible for those involuntary actions, then those involuntary actions serve that person's interest.

To understand this better, when I thought of it in contrapositive way,

If those involuntary actions did not serve that person's interest, that person is NOT responsible for those actions.

This seems good enough for Marianne's defense.

And for E), when we reverse it, it would look something like this --

If Chess players are disqualified from professional chess matches, they regularly attempt to distract their opponents.

This also would work as a good defense for Marianne because she did NOT attempt to distract her opponent.

I know this "what if" game makes things unnecessarily complicated, but if anyone could share his/her 2cents with me, I would appreciate the thought.