Q7 - There is no reason why the work

[WaltGrace1983]

This is a weaken question.

System in place for confirming/disconfirming scientific findings
+
Poor scientific work is not harmful and will be exposed eventually
→
There is no reason why the work of scientists has to be officially confirmed before being published

This seems like a fairly simple core with a very strong conclusion which is very good for us! There isn't a reason that we should confirm scientific findings before publication. Why? Oh well there are systems in place that will weed out the bad stuff and it is not like poor scientific work is harmful anyway! No way!

What do we do? Well actually it's pretty simple. In order to weaken the argument, we just have to show that there is some reason why we should confirm scientific work before publishing it. Maybe the system in place for confirming/disconfirming scientific findings is terribly inadequate or inefficient. Maybe poor scientific work, while being able to be exposed and rendered harmless, will still lead to some terrible effects for the people who are testing out one's scientific hypothesis. Maybe university students will depend on one's scientific work and will use it before it is tested by other scientists only to find that that work is garbage. Who knows?

(A) I am very unsure how this one weakens to the argument but it does have a few good things in here. It talks about replication, which is good, and says that it can be many years before one's experiment is replicated which is probably a bad thing. This is not the strongest answer in the book so I am going to move on while keeping this one in mind.

(B) This one might even s strengthen the argument because it shows how most scientists submit their work to peers before publication. This probably means it gets checked over by others to show that maybe there isn't a reason to get the findings "officially confirmed," whatever that means, because - after all - other people are already looking at it!

(C) But should their work be confirmed before publication? That is the question and this does not help us with the answer.

(D) We are not comparing careless reporting to fraud! This is also out of scope.

(E) This doesn't say anything about how good/bad the scientific work is and doesn't say anything about whether or not work should be officially confirmed before publication. I cannot see how this is relevant.

(A) is the last man standing and, while it doesn't weaken very much, it weakens way more than the others. It gives us a disadvantage to not getting something confirmed before publication: it can take a very long time for scientists to replicate it. The premises supporting the conclusion hinge on this idea that "one shouldn't worry! Those experiments will be confirmed by scientists anyway!" but (A) is saying, "nuh uh! scientists are going to take forever to test this stuff!"

[seychelles1718]

In the stimulus, the author says poor scientific work is "exposed and rendered harmless when other scientists conduct the experiments and obtain disconfirmatory results," which means,

experiments challenged --> harmless

However, if experiments go unchallenged for many years as A states, we can't guarantee that scientific experiments are harmless and this attacks the core of the argument. Therefore, A weakens the argument.

Am I on the right track?

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah! As I read this I heard him saying, "Why do we need THIS quality check (pre-publication confirmation). We already have this OTHER quality check (replication by other scientists)?"

So I was thinking, "Well, you're kinda assuming that scientists are jumping to replicate every experiment they read about in a journal. Maybe we don't have the bandwidth to try to replicate everyone's findings. In that case, our scientific research would have received NO quality check."

(A) speaks to that scenario.