Q11 - a group of citizens

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Development of the trail should proceed.
Evidence: The opposition to it was groundless. People were worried that trail users might litter, but most of the users will be dedicated hikers with great concern for the environment.

Answer Anticipation:
If we play devil's advocate and stick up for the concerned citizens, it seems like they would say "GREAT …. so 51% of the users won't litter. But couldn't the 49% who AREN'T dedicated hikers and who DON'T necessarily care about the environment still lead to a pretty big litter problem?"

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Correct. If this said "merely" on a claim that the opposing argument is weak, we could strike it down, because the author DOES introduce a premise that most users of the trail will be environmentally responsible. The author has not given us an reasons in FAVOR of the hiking trail. She has only shot down an objection. So, yes, we can say this answer choice fairly describes the argument.

(B) This describes Part to Whole. The author does infer that what's true of "most users" will basically be true of "all users", but that's not a Part to Whole fallacy. Part vs. Whole is about a trait of an individual/component vs. a trait of an entire group. If I say "each individual human has a brain, thus all humans have brains", that's not part to whole. The 'whole' needs to be something more than the sum of its parts ("team" vs. "members", "community" vs. "each house"). If we said "Each individual human has a brain, thus the human species has a brain", that would be part to whole.

The easiest way to disqualify this answer is just to notice that it's factually inaccurate. At no point did the author introduce a premise that said (each member of a set has a certain property) "Each user will be environmentally concerned .."

(C) This describes Circular reasoning. The author did NOT argue "Development of the trail should proceed because we should continue to develop the trail."

(D) This describes a Sampling flaw. It's tempting here beucase the author illicitly infers that an attribute of the majority of the users will characterize the remaining users of the trail. But this choice is saying the author's argument was "Because a few users are X, most users wil be X."

(E) The author specifically addresses their objection, by explaining that most users will not litter.

Takeaway/Pattern: Wow --- well disguised example of an Unproven vs. Untrue flaw (since there's isn't a good reason AGAINST the trail, we can conclude that there IS good reason FOR the trail). Even experienced LSAT readers wouldn't necessarily react to this paragraph with an Unproven vs. Untrue accusation (mainly because there is another, most easily available, objection ... "What about the REST of the trail users? What if THEY litter?!"). This reminds us that when we're reading answer choices, we need a flexible mind and we need to simply address
1. Is this true?
2. Does it represent a reasoning problem?

The other four answers simply weren't true.

#officialexplanation

[judaydaday]

i don't know why this question gave me so much trouble... So here's my breakdown. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

P: most trail users will be dedicated hikers who have a great concern for the environment.
SC: so the citizens argument they the trail users will litter the area is groundless
MC: development of the trail should proceed

So the flaw is between the sub-conclusion and the main conclusion. The premise only supports the idea that the argument is groundless, but does this mean that the development should proceed?
This is what (a) points out. A weak argument does mot allow you to infer what you should or should not do.

(B) is incorrect because the premise doesn't say that "each" member has a certain property, only that "most" do.
(C) incorrect - this is not a circular argument
(D) incorrect - there is no overgeneralization happening. Also, doesn't infer from "few" users.
(E) incorrect - this doesn't occur in the argument at all.

[olaizola.mariana]

Thank you for your explanation. I actually still think the argument is sound, but perhaps it's because I am assuming that no other reasons for opposing the development of the trail have been raised. It seems perfectly natural to defeat an argument for stopping a project and then conclude that the project should go on [i.e. because there are no other reasons for stopping it]. Perhaps that last part is an assumption that I shouldn't be making, and that's why I got it wrong.

[kyuya]

Weird question in my opinion.

Argument breakdown:

- people don't want the railway to be turned into a hiking trail.

Why?

Because they believe hikers will litter.


The author of the statement says that the above objection is groundless.

Why?

Because MOST (meaning at least 51%) trail users have great concern for the environment and presumably won't litter.

Whats wrong here? Well, even if MOST care a lot about the environment, the argument made for opposing the hiking trail still holds. Litter and damage to the environment could still occur from perhaps the 49% of people who really don't care about the environment.

I'll go from wrong to right.

(B) It doesn't go from individual member, it makes a generalization about the group of hikers as a whole (that most care about the environment)

(C) I didn't recognize this as a circular logic statement, so I'll make sure to remember this. If I had recognized it as such I would have eliminated it a lot quicker. The argument does not presume the truth of the conclusion in this case, there is a premise supporting the conclusion, the issue is that the premise is weak and doesn't fully address the concern of people opposed to a hiking trail.

(D) Similar to (B), this does not go from a few users to the whole. It actually just makes a statement about the majority of hikers caring about the environment.

(E) this suggests an ad hominem (sp?) attack, but as stated above, he actually provides a legitimate premise (albeit weak) to support his argument. It directly attacks their objection concerning environmental health by suggesting it wont be as bad as they claim it will be.


On to the correct..

(A)

Essentially what is happening in the stimulus is that the person making the argument is weakening the argument of the citizens group by claiming that most of the hikers are good to the environment, and therefore their objection is groundless (which as discussed previously is not necessarily true). So the force of the argument is insufficient in his eyes, thus being sufficient to state that the development of the trail should go on.

In other words, basing a conclusion mainly on the weakness of an argument (not allowed - the argument must stand on its own merits).

[kylesinghal]

Two notes:
1. The classical fallacy of “argument from ignorance” (or ad ignorantiam in your ordinary over-the-counter logic textbook) can be described by “just because an argument is weak doesn’t mean its conclusion is false,” as in (A) here: just because hikers might litter, doesn’t mean that we should do rails-to-trails; all we know is that the argument against rails-to-trails is weak.

Citizens’ premise: Hikers on the trail will likely litter.
Citizen’s conclusion: So we shouldn’t convert the rails to trails.

Author responds: Actually, hikers won’t likely litter.
Author could logically conclude: So your argument against converting rails to trails fails.
Author actually concludes: So we should convert rails to trails.

This is a variant of the old “just because you haven’t shown that x is true doesn’t mean that x is false” argument. It’s flawed, no matter how good it might sound, because we don’t have a logical principle that says “if you haven’t proved x, then we should do or think the opposite.”

2. There are two fallacies here. Arguably the more obvious fallacy is that just because most hikers won’t litter doesn’t mean that trail users won’t “likely litter” the area with food wrappers. The author is illicitly inferring that an attribute of most users of the proposed trail will characterize all (or at least more than just most of) the users of the trail… and you have an answer that attempts to get at this fallacy (D) but errs: D would be right if we were going from few to most, but we’re not, we’re going from most to something. Even if I’m not quite accurate in saying that we’re going from “most” to all, it doesn’t matter because we’re still not going from “few” to anything, so D can’t be right. It’s not precise, and flaw answers must precisely describe an actual fallacy in the passage.

[b.lin.22.13]

This question still confuses me. The flaw that I identified is a part to whole flaw, that most trail users would not be littering, but that would not be representative of all all trail users. I initially chose D, but I see now that it doesn't match the core directly by saying "few" users when it should be "most." I'm still unsure how to get to answer choice A though.

[janetT279]

I initially picked D, because I believed the argument was wrong because it failed to considered the possibility that a small part of people would pollute the place, leaving food wrappers.

The reason why I got this wrong is that I failed to identify the conclusion. I thought the conclusion is "but this objection is groundless" while the conclusion is "development of the trail should proceed" . A is correct, for the author based his conclusion only on "this objection is groundless".

[VeronicaG774]

I initially picked D, because I believed the argument was wrong because it failed to considered the possibility that a small part of people would pollute the place, leaving food wrappers.

The reason why I got this wrong is that I failed to identify the conclusion. I thought the conclusion is "but this objection is groundless" while the conclusion is "development of the trail should proceed" . A is correct, for the author based his conclusion only on "this objection is groundless".

I didn't realize that I too had made this same mistake until I read your post ! thanks !

Does anyone know of any similar tricky unproven vs untrue and/or multiple claim flaw q's in other practice tests I could look into ? questions that involve similar trickery & reasoning skills?

thanks !