QUESTION TEXT: My father likes turnips, but not potatoes,…
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Parallel Reasoning
CONCLUSION: It is not true that whoever likes potatoes likes turnips.
REASONING: My father likes turnips but not potatoes.
ANALYSIS: The argument gets this backwards. It makes a conclusion about people who like potatoes. But the father like turnips and dislikes potatoes.
To prove the conclusion we would need evidence of someone who likes potatoes but dislikes turnips.
___________
- This is just a terrible argument. It concludes something about paperbacks based on a book that isn’t a paperback.
But the conclusion is that no paperbacks are expensive. The stimulus only said that not all people who ate potatoes like turnips. Two different concepts. - CORRECT. This makes the same error: It takes information about something that is not a novel and uses it to make a conclusion about novels. Ugh. And like the stimulus, it concludes “not all.”
- This is a good argument.
- This is a good argument. It’s not true that everyone who likes physics also likes pure math: Erika is at least one exception
- This is a bad argument. The premise is: OC ➞ CF. The conclusion reverses this and gets CF ➞ OC. But it isn’t the same error as the stimulus.
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