PT5.S1.Q11 - No one who lacks knowledge of a subject...

claremont

Can someone help me out here. This question and the way it's worded is giving me a great deal of difficulty.

From what I can gather the argument has two premises – a principle and a fact:

P1 - if competent to pass judgement on a subject → don't lack knowledge of the subject
P2 - Political "know-how" is a type of knowledge learned through apprenticeship and experience.

C - Therefore, if competent to judge whether a particular policy is fair to all → seasoned politician

In my estimation, this argument needs two things: First, it has to show that a "seasoned politician" doesn't lack knowledge of a subject. It does this by making the assumption that "if you have political know-how → you're a seasoned politician;" Second, it must then assume that "political know-how" and "[not lacking] knowledge of a subject" are the same thing. Reason being: Just because you have a type of knowledge, i.e. political know-how, doesn't mean you don't lack knowledge of politics. I feel like AC D then would best encapsulate this flaw.

Does this reasoning check out?

Also, if this question made sense to you intuitively would you mind explaining your thought process when reading the stimulus and identifying the flaw?

Many thanks.

Chris Nguyen

Hey there! I think you're definitely on point.

Here's a little bit on my thought process:

When reading the first sentence, I had to translate it into a clear "if..then" statement before moving on (the word "no" is a group 4 conditional indicator). Once I parsed out the hard grammar, reading the beginning of the second sentence triggered something for me.

"Wait... does having political know how mean that you have enough knowledge in politics? I'm not sure. Maybe that's a flaw." I'm connected back to the conditional statement I've read previously.

Then going onto the conclusion, something else triggered:

"Okay, so why is it that ONLY seasoned politicians have political know how? I guess we're assuming that no one else has that capability. Interesting. Most likely another flaw"

This is my way the "intuition" happened, if that makes sense.

In the ACs, they decided to describe the first flaw I mentioned above. Of course, they could've very well chose to describe the second one, and it would still be the correct answer choice. I usually keep an open mind in when I go into the answer choices because of how tricky they sometimes can be.

I hope this helps!

claremont

@"Chris Nguyen", thank you for taking the time to write such a clear and thoughtful explanation of your thought process! It was super helpful and exactly the sort of explanation I needed.