Q5 - some people have questioned

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Association wants to attract more businesses to town.
Evidence: If the Association wanted the mayor to help attract more businesses, then Cooper is the only one to supoprt, and the Association is supporting Cooper.

Answer Anticipation:
When we're reading a Flaw argument, we want to keep a keen eye out for conditional language. When there IS conditional language in a Flaw argument, the question is normally testing us on Conditional Logic flaws.

In the evidence we're given a rule and a fact.
The rule: "If you wanted a business-friendly mayor, you'd have to support Cooper"
The fact: "The association supports Cooper".

Does this allow us to conclude that "The association wants a business friendly mayor?"

It does not. That would be reading the rule backwards. It would be the same as if we said "If you play in the NFL, you make more than $100k per year, and Wendy makes more than $100k per year, so Wendy must play in the NFL." Clearly there could be other people who also make $100k per year. The NFL is one sufficient way to guarantee that kind of income, but it's not necessary.

Similarly, wanting a business-friendly mayor is one way to guarantee that you'd support Cooper, but there might be other reasons to support Cooper. Maybe "if you want an environmentally conscious mayor, then Cooper's your only choice."

Correct Answer:
B

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This conclusion, this court case, is only about the truth value of whether or not the Association is trying to attract more businesses to the town. We don't need to know WHY the association would have that goal; we're just trying to assess IF they have that goal.

(B) Yes. The author erroneously reasons that "If you support Cooper, you must want to attract businesses" (when in reality the rule he gave us was "if you want to attract businesses, you must support Cooper"). If the Association was supporting Cooper for some reason unrelated to attracting businesses, then that allows someone to argue, "Hey, author, the Association doesn't have the goal of attracting businesses. Yes, it's supporting Cooper, who is business-friendly, but it's supporting Cooper for non-business related reasons."

(C) We don't care about "other" groups. The conclusion is only about whether the Association has a certain goal.

(D) We are only trying to investigate IF the Association has a goal of attracting businesses. We're not trying to evaluate whether that goal is a smart one to have or whether that goal would ultimately result in good/bad things. This answer deals with whether or not realizing that goal would be good/bad for the Association. That's a separate conversation from the argument, which is merely about whether not the Association has that goal.

(E) Similar to (D), we don't care whether the goal is achieved. We're only trying to assess whether or not the Association has the goal in the first place.

Takeaway/Pattern: The correct answer could have described the Conditional Logic flaw more abstractly: "the author takes a quality that is sufficient to make one support Cooper and treats it as though that quality is necessary to support Cooper". If an author made an illegal conditional move, (our author illegally went from "if you support Cooper, you want to attract businesses") then you can make a specific objection by pointing to a situation that IS the left side but ISN'T the right side. We would want an example of someone that DOES support Cooper, but DOESN'T want to attract businesses. (B) gives us that type of scenario.

#officialexplanation

[skdygks03]

Could you explain why (D) is not correct?