PT30.S4.Q25 - The judgment that an artist is great

Logic Gainz

Can anyone help me out with this one? Is it safe to say that this stimulus is flawed because it's calling a good line of reasoning bad? #help

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-30-section-4-question-25/
Admin note: edited URL and title formatting

BinghamtonDave

Hello, @"Logic Gainz" hope you are well.
I think a helpful, but maybe not entirely analogous line of reasoning would be something like this:
In the NBA, the only indicator of a particular team's greatness is number of NBA championships. Therefore to say that a team is great is to say that they have a certain number of championships. And that greatness gives us nothing to go on for future predictions of the team's greatness.

That is a pretty strong conclusion. Taking a step back, is it really fair to say to a team like the Warriors, that their past greatness: 2015, 2017 almost in 2016 provides no basis for a future prediction i.e. this year's finals? Saying we can infer nothing from the past is almost as bad as saying we can infer everything from the past. Remember, the thing we are inferring future from past here is not a random event like a coin flip or a randomized digit selection, it something based on tangible qualities.

If an artist has a history of great works, say a writer like Cormac McCarthy: a history of these incredible novels: Blood Meridian, Suttree, Child of God, The Road etc, does it make any intuitive sense whatsoever to say we can infer nothing from those works about the man's forthcoming novel?

The takeaway here is the scope of the conclusion.

David

Logic Gainz

I see. In other words, although we can't definitively conclude things from past performances, that doesn't mean we can't make some predictions based on them. The conclusion states that the premises are completely useless in forming an opinion on future greatness, but that's not the case.