Can anyone help me to understand whether weakening questions are (1) only supposed to address the logical relationship between the premise and conclusion, and (2) are subject to general flaw reasoning. I thought so, but two questions have been throwing me for a loop, both from Kim's The LSAT Trainer. They are:
(1)
"Professor Watkins just received a significant raise, and now Professor Jenson has requested one too. However, Professor Watkins was only eligible to get a raise if she received tenure; she recently was awarded tenure, and was given the raise. Professor Jansen has no desire to get tenure, is not on track to get tenure, and will not get tenure. So, Professor Jenson's request will likely be denied."
Apparently, the answer that "Professor Jenson is well known for the work he does in his field, and the school is known to give raises in order to retain professors who are significant in the areas in which they work" is a weakening response. I don't understand how this can be, considering it has no logical bearing on the connections between the premise supports or conclusion. If it simply said "The university plans to give him tenure regardless," would that be an appropriate weakening response? The same book warns that "attractive wrong choices strengthen or weaken the point but not the reasoning." Is this possible because the answer here provides its own reasoning (Jenson -> well known and well known -> raise)? Otherwise I cannot make sense of it.
(2)
"Medical Expert: For the past six months, we have been keeping statistics on surgery time for prostatectomies performed through traditional means, and through a new procedure that uses robotics. The study revealed that the surgeries using robotics took a average of forty-three minutes, whereas traditional surgeries took an average of over seventy minutes. The study involved sufficient enough mix of doctors and hospitals to guarantee that personal surgical skills and access to other types of equipment were not a factor in the study outcome. Therefore, we can conclude that in general it is faster to perform prostatectomies robotically than it is to perform them using traditional means."
Apparently, the answer "For the most simple prostatectomies, traditional surgeries take, on average, less time than robotic surgery" is a weakening response. I thought it was irrelevant, given this is clearly a part to whole flaw, but the book says that, because the fundamental flaw is that the stimulus ignores that different types of surgeries may take different time and that may be why the robot is faster (it could have just been getting faster surgeries), that this weakens the conclusion. I am confused, as it could be that some fraction of surgeries is faster without robots, but that does nothing to weaken the conclusion that /in general/ surgeries are faster robotically. Do very general reasoning flaws not apply when one is saying that a response weakens a conclusion? Is the statement "Most cars are red" weakened by the response "but my car is blue"?
To note, I don't believe these passages come from PrepTests, they were just made for the book. Please let me know what you think!
