QUESTION TEXT: Art student: Great works of art evoke…
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning
CONCLUSION: Ezekiel Reilly’s art is great.
REASONING: Great works of art produce passionate responses, and Reilly’s art produces intense emotional responses.
ANALYSIS: This is a classic case of necessary and sufficient conditions. All great works of art produce passionate responses. This means that production of passionate responses is necessary for a great work of art. However, it is not sufficient – not everything that produces such a response is a great work of art. The death of a family pet might produce a passionate response, but that does not make it a great work of art.
If you’re still a bit confused by the difference, my go-to illustration of this concept is applicable here. If I said “all cats have tails”, it means that having a tail is necessary for something to be a cat. It does not mean that anything that has a tail is a cat. Similarly here, not everything that produces a passionate response is a great work of art.
___________
- None of the premises here assume that Reilly’s art is great.
- CORRECT. The author has taken a necessary condition (producing a passionate response) and treated it as sufficient. This is a common error on the LSAT.
- This is not what’s happening here – the author is not misapplying a general claim about any class. An example of this error would be something like saying “Most of my family members are women, so my brother must be a woman”.
- The argument does not make this error. We have no evidence to suggest that the author’s statement about great art is based on an insufficient sample.
- This is not what’s happening here at all. The author is making a statement of value about art, but it’s based on criteria that the author has specifically linked to the value of art.
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