Q3 - A recent study of perfect pitch

[adarsh.murthy]

can someone please explain how the option A strengthens the arguement? Thanks

[noah]

When you post a question, please type in the first 5 words as they appear in questions into the bar - it'll make it easier for future users of the forum to find questions. Thanks! (I edited this one for you).

The conclusion of this argument is that people have perfect pitch because of genetics. Why? Because folks who have it generally have relatives that do, and folks that don't have it, generally don't have relatives that do.

Compelling argument? Imagine you have perfect pitch because your parents made you sing songs before every dinner. If you have a sibling, it stands to reason that he or she also is singing those songs and learning perfect pitch.

In short, couldn't there be another reason (other than genetics) that explains why relatives tend to share having or not having perfect pitch.

The specific version of this that (A) addresses is that folks who have relatives with perfect pitch might tend to get lessons in music more often than others, perhaps helping them too get perfect pitch. If this were true, that might be the reason that family members share perfect pitch. (A) strengthens the argument by assuring us that there is NOT this other cause. If you need to strengthen a causal argument, it's useful to "block" other possible causes.

(B) is out of scope.

(C) is about what folks do with their pitch - this has no apparent effect on relatives.

(D) is tempting but it is the opposite of what we want! This establishes another cause for family members sharing perfect pitch.

(E) is tempting but there's no connection to family members here. If anything, this weakens the argument by bringing up other causes for perfect pitch.

[adarsh.murthy]

Thanks!
But for A, you are assuming that musical classes can infact help to attain perfect pitch! And I was not convinced I can assume that. So, I thought A is irrelevant. Can you tell what in stimulus made you assume that perfect pitch can be attined through training?

[noah]

Good question. If the argument were connecting training to perfect pitch, your suspicions would be well-placed. However, here we're trying to "block" other possible causes, so we don't need to know for sure that training does in fact do that, but we want to be able to rule it out. (A) is basically a version of "There isn't some other reason that these relatives share perfect pitch." We don't have to assume that the other way is definitely a successful way - we have to make sure it isn't working out in this case.

Another way to think about this is that we have no reason to rule out musical training as a possible cause for perfect pitch (and training shared among family as the way this training disrupts the argument). It's a commonsense other cause, not requiring any significant outside knowledge.