QUESTION TEXT: Pieces of music consist of sounds and…
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning
CONCLUSION: A big distinction between music and painting is that music is heard over time while art doesn’t change over time.
REASONING: We have to listen to music in the order it is played, but we can look at paintings however we want.
ANALYSIS: This is a pretty good argument. But answer choice E does raise a slight difficulty. We are prone to looking at paintings according to a certain order, even if we’re not forced to.
In fact, great artists can force us to follow a set order when looking at their paintings.
___________
- This is a different meaning of time. With music, we listen to a song in order. With a painting, we can look at it in any order, even if we look at it for a long time.
- So? All music has a temporal dimension, no matter the style. You listen to it as it is played.
- The argument didn’t say that painting and music are entirely different. It just said that they have one major difference: time and the lack thereof.
- There is no circular reasoning. The argument uses evidence about music to distinguish paintings from music. Circular reasoning is where the evidence is exactly the same as the conclusion.
- CORRECT. The eyes often does follow a path when looking at a painting, even if we don’t realize it. So in that way our experience of a painting can be like our experience of music. First we look at one spot, then the next, and so on.
This isn’t a very powerful objection, but it’s better than the other answer choices.
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