Q4 - A club wanted to determine

by **Laura Damone** Fri Nov 06, 2020 1:31 pm

Question Type:
ID the Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: The attendance problem is not due primarily to schedule conflicts.

Premises: The president surveyed those present at a Tuesday meeting, and 95% of them said they had no problem attending on Tuesdays.

Answer Anticipation:
Sampling Flaw! That sample is unrepresentative. Of course folks who come on a Tuesday have no problem coming on Tuesdays.

Correct answer:
B

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Circular Reasoning? Nope. The premise and conclusion of this argument aren't the same.

(B) Correct! The conclusion is a generalization about all potential attendees based on a sample drawn only from Tuesday, which is therefore likely to be unrepresentative of who can and can't attend on Tuesdays.

(C) Tempting, but the issue here isn't that we go from a premise about "most" to a conclusion about "all." The issue is that the evidence is drawn from an unrepresentative subset of a group and projected onto the group as a whole.

(D) Self Contradiction? Nope. The premises are totally consistent. The survey was taken on a Tuesday, and 95% of folks surveyed said they could attend on Tuesdays.

(E) Conditional Logic Flaw? Hmm... What's tempting here is that the conclusion does imply that the change isn't necessary. The president concludes that the "problem was not due primarily to scheduling conflicts" so we can infer that changing the schedule is unnecessary. However, E says that this conclusion is drawn "solely from the claim that a change is not sufficient to solve a problem." But in the premises, there is no claim that a change isn't sufficient to solve a problem. The background info poses the question of whether changing from Tuesday would solve the problem, but the premises don't say the answer to that question is "no."

Takeaway/Pattern:
If you know your Famous Flaws, questions like this are straightforward. If you don't recognize which Famous Flaw an answer choice describes, you're in for a lot more time and effort!

#officialexplanation