Lord I pray for everyone here to get their desired score in time by June 2027. Bless our hands and feet. Protect us against the Enemy

shot in the dark but lowk, realizing that this argument is a hegelian dialectic (thesis -> antithesis -> sublation) also helped me realize why D is right and A is wrong.

1. thesis = generalized rule

2. antithesis = counterexample seeming to negate the thesis

3. sublation = conclusion: a newly defined rule formed out of the original conflict b/t 1 and 2., but which now rises above it because 1 is narrowed to a smaller case in which the rule still is true, and the antithesis still sits there and isn't denied

Even though this is a method of reasoning Q, on review it really helped to think of this as a resolve, reconcile, explain question (RRE) when trying to rule out A.

In RRE, you take the two conflicting phenomena at face value. You don't negate or undermine one of them in favor of the other, you just find some 3rd thing you hadn't considered before that makes both mutually inclusive of each other.

That's exactly what's going on here --- there's phenom #1 (generalized -ee rule) plus phenom #2 (counterexample of absentee). The conclusion never favors #1 or #2, but just offers #3 (suggesting an unstated assumption, a domain that limits #1 to cases in which there are two-party transactions and which clarifies why #2 is separate from #1).

Once I thought of this as an RRE, it really hit that A is actually descriptively inaccurate --- it's emphatically not "additional support for the original generalization" because that would be like siding with phenom #1 against phenom #2. That's also why it's not a "misanalysis of the counterexample", b/c that would be like denying the factuality of phenom #2 instead of accepting that it is true, as the conclusion does.

my thought process:

A: This seems reasonable, except (1) the teacher never actually suggests that concealing sources is a marginal practice; (2) the student does not necessarily generalize this to a conclusion about multiple / most journalists --- he argues that "the journalist" (i.e. those who conceal the identity) could lie, meaning he is limiting his argument to the same set of journalists that the teacher argued

C: student never talks about any situations in which the statements were made

D: seems reasonable, but (1) it's newer stated (only assumed by us) that the student's scenario is "the most extreme case" to which it applies. Maybe that's a pretty common scenario. Or maybe there are even more extreme wrongdoings that journalists could do. Weaker, but (2) I'm not sold that the student is "judging the merits" of the teacher's position --- he could just be saying that the position leads to an undesirable or illogical end.

E: nobody here separates the three joint criteria into separate ones (plausibility, originality, interest).

Only B is good. Basically a necessary assumption. The teacher could be only talking about the concealing of sources in statements that were actually made, and if that's the case, the student's arguing about statements that were never made is just irrelevant and doesn't affect the teacher's argument. It's also reasonably clear that the teacher actually does assume this -- the teacher talks about journalists concealing "the identity of the sources they quote", in the present and indicative, implying that these sources actually do exist and whose statements were made.

I totally relate to this because I made the same error, but JY is still technically right. The "therefore" does not necessarily imply intent, it just indicates what is logically or causally true as a consequence of the preceding statement.

If we really wanna get in the weeds, I do think the grammar of "it is poets who preserve languages" is purposefully phrased to be very passive and observational. The verb is literally just "is" --- just stating the existence of poets and describing a fact about them. The "therefore" is analogous to saying "Only oxygen cannot be produced by humans, and therefore it is trees who produce oxygen, (for xyz)." There's no intent that can be inferred in a tree that produces oxygen. The "therefore" is just a logical conclusion or inference about reality that is being made based on the preceding support.

A more simple way to think of it -- maybe poets preserve languages, but they do it begrudgingly or totally unwittingly. They don't like preserving languages, but nobody else can do it. They are preservers, but not by intent.

Wow this is exactly the clarification I needed. This was not supposed to be a hard question, but I got lost in the sauce and hung up on the details when taking it, so it's helpful to see how the details actually all fit together and make sense.

@rochishatogare811 oh my goodness, I thought the same exact thing

I wasted time on C and still have a hard time understanding why it's a weakener. I get why A is definitely right, but C is confusing to me. Some folks are interpreting it to be a weakener because it weakens hte correlation b/t lobe activity and disposition, but just because the lobe "is not subject to variation," it doesn't mean that it couldn't be correlated to disposition, right? I read "is not subject to variation" to mean that implying that everyone is born with a certain lobe activity and therefore general disposition. Yet there's still a correlation per person.

Wasted 2 minutes extra on this question because I didn't translate this as a unless (A or B) and instead translated as a unless A or unless B, so I didn't see where the missing link was. Silly me!!

B vs. C --- B is a trap because it echoes Michel Leiris' warning and relies on us sort of mixing it together with the sentence preceding it, but it isn't actually responsive at all to the question's ask regarding "received attitudes".

A received attitude is the biased, uncritical, first-impression view that readers take: "oh, look at these uncomplicated, simple people!" That's C. But B is the second step, re-evaluating, let's-check-our-biases voice: "hm, looking at simple life makes me happy. I feel like these people must be happy because looking at them makes me happy too--but wait, is that true?" etc. etc.

Maybe this was obvious to other folks, but it took me like several, several re-reads for this to really click. The received attitude is the KNEE-jerk impression that readers get, i.e. (C). The impression they get should be uncritical and straightforward-- "oh they're simple," not something super meta and psychoanalytical like "seeing these folks live simple lives makes ME happy, which in turn must mean that THEY're happy" --- that's like, way too academic and self-probing and too layered and too complex of a thought to be a "received attitude".

PREPONDERANCE PREPONDERANCE PREPONDERANCE 🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨👺👺👺👺👺👺👺👺👺👺👺👺👺👺

Crazy how reading the question stem incorrectly, in fact, makes the question impossibly difficult. Who would've known.

I thought this was an MBT like a fool.

Had a hard time with this until I did the testdrive-it-until-it-falls apart test (idk if this is a thing we learned in 7sage, is it like a negation test??)

AC A claims that being based on hearsay would be a critical flaw. So let's assume there was hearsay --- if there is a scenario where there could be hearsay and still the conclusion stands, then it's not lookin good for A.

The colleague could have gossipped/lied about Chan being on business trips. That would be hearsay, and still Nance would be right that one of them (the colleague) is not telling the truth. So A can't be the flaw because the argument is fine.

In flaw questions, the trap ACs keep describing something that is actually true or conceivably true about a portion of the argument/stim, but which actually has no effect on the chain of premise --> conclusion that we are interested in. Cool!

TLDR: I have to remind myself that flaw answer choice traps are like sirens that distract me from my home destination / mission --- that being the chain of reasoning from PREMISE to CONCLUSION. They have the bells/whistles of something right, but if the answer choice just deals with something in the premise but takes it to a totally different conclusion, or if it would be a great flaw but only to a wholly separate conclusion --- then i gotta just drop it and move on.

This isn't to rationalize why D is right, but I am dissecting the kind of careless thought process that strung me along towards it --- maybe somebody will relate. If anyone got trapped by D like I did, I think the trap was laid because (like many incorrect flaw trap answer choices), it describes some kind of assumption (present or missing) in the argument that could be conceivably true in another situation but which has nothing to do with the particular reasoning that gets us from premise to conclusion.

I've noticed that some trapped flaw answer choices will dangle something that seems smart, something that if you heard a classmate bring up in class you'd be like "oh hm, I hadn't considered that yeah that could be worth thinking about" and in so doing, they totally pull the wool over your eyes and distract you from the mission at hand.

In this case, listening to this fancy, talkative classmate's obscure point made me lose sight of the fact that I am trying to oppose the conclusion of "painting has no temporal dimension" and instead was strung along to picking something that would only make sense if the conclusion were opposite (e.g., a conclusion that said something like oh the painting should have a temporal dimension).

My thinking went something like, "Yeah, I suppose it is true that the verb "reading" implies there is a direction/temporal dimension, so describing paintings as something to be "read" presupposes that paintings are something that are temporally consumed---but D is saying maybe paintings aren't at all the type of thing that should be temporally viewed!"

And then I just selected D because I lost the forest for the trees. I saw an answer choice that described something that could be true about the argument, but it wasn't at all the flaw to the premise-->conclusion that we were looking for. D only describes a flawed line of reasoning if you were trying to address a totally different conclusion/argument that had instead said "viewing a painting does have a temporal dimension"

@haena Thx, this helps, after rereading my question I don't know why I was trying to negate the language without changing it first.

@ConnerKline Nice, this was the most helpful explanation I found for why the negation test for A doesn't work. It reminded me of the actual conclusion of the arg, which is that one should / generally does desire to determine HOW their estate is distributed.

I think people who fell for A like me had misconstrued the conclusion to be something like "one should have a will so as to avoid the estate falling into a distant relative/someone they've never met." The distant relative bit is just support to the conclusion, not part of the conclusion itself. And it's closer to just one example (presumably, of many) of what one would want to avoid happening if they didn't have a will.

Can somebody help me negate the wording of C? Part of the reason why I second-guessed myself and didn't select C was that I wasn't sure that the wording of it was what I thought it meant. Plainly, I now realize it was supposed to mean "there will always be complaints" --- negating that statement is very easy, and I can easily see the Negation Test there.

But I just couldn't for the life of me do the Negation Test on the actual wording of C. What is the correct negation of this while preserving the verbiage of the answer choice?

"... a bureacracy will sometimes be permanently without complaints..."? That doesn't sound right because it's nonsense for there to be something permanent that is only there sometimes. What's the actual negation of this?

@ZThomas Yes! I missed this on the first read, so when I read B, I carried B's assumption into my reading of the text and thought, "oh, these must be personal stories of one's past that are being remembered." It's a reasonable assumption if you don't read the text carefully on its own, which I didn't --- on second read, it's clear that Kingston never indicated that the stories are personal narratives. They're probably more like folklore and fables.

@PhoebeHopp That is a brutally small distinction to catch! I hadn't caught onto the distinction between meteorite craters vs. craters.

@hannahhuynh This is super helpful

@Al_foroodian@sfu.ca Love that. C recalls fRMI subtraction theory but is really asking us not to hone in on the theory itself but the latter part of this sentence: "The fMRI is usually interpreted as a map of the rate of oxygen use in different parts of the brain, which stands as a measure of metabolic activity"

Factually speaking, rate of oxygen use measures metabolic activity

Wondering if anyone else got thrown off by "substantively" in D? The paragraph emphasizes that the change in grasping relations only "appears" to be so, and the topic sentence reminds us that this is all about explaining why the noninferential view is "illusory." "Substantive" I thought meant literally of substance, or actual/non-illusory. I feel like a better word would have been "significantly" but I was maybe just getting my head in loops