Flaw Questions Slump

possiblydunzo

Hey everyone, I'm scoring around low 160s and having a lot of trouble with Flaw/Descriptive Weakening questions. Even after reviewing the core lessons, I'm having trouble identifying an approach beyond this test: "1) descriptively accurate 2) describing the flaw." I feel like this approach is vague, and it rarely singles out an answer for me. Anyone have some tricks they can share for approaching those 4/5 star Flaw questions? Thanks.

wealthycrawfish

The biggest help for me with 4/5 star questions in general is to flip mindsets when I've narrowed down to 2 or 3 ACs, from the initial "explain why the single correct AC is correct" to "explain why the other ACs are incorrect." I personally go into Flaw questions trying to think what jumps out at me as the argument's predominant flaw at a fairly general level then look through the ACs for something that matches, so trying to disprove ACs that hinge on more specific points that I didn't think of when making my initial guess helps me be more confident in my choice.

natemanwell1

yeah that approach doesn't make any sense. saying "the approach to solving flaw questions is to find a flaw" is an exact restatement of the phrase "find the flaw." there are two ways to solve this type of question. the first is to find the intuitive flaw in the argument then attach it to a list of flaws you have in your head. for example, if an argument says "the senator proposes lowering taxes only because doing so will increase the profits of the companies," the intuitive flaw would be "saying the senator cannot have any motivations outside of self-benefit," and the memorized flaw would be "ad hominem." the other way is to treat the question as a weakener in order to identify the flaw. what you want to do in a weakener question is to [expand the gap most on net, preferably from both ends, if not from both ends, from the stronger end, if not from either of those ends then from the weaker end]. specifically, in order of most to least helpful, you want to [eliminate a necessary condition, provide an alternative explanation, provide an obstacle, show expected correlation does not hold, eliminate sufficient condition]

possiblydunzo

@wealthycrawfish said:
The biggest help for me with 4/5 star questions in general is to flip mindsets when I've narrowed down to 2 or 3 ACs, from the initial "explain why the single correct AC is correct" to "explain why the other ACs are incorrect." I personally go into Flaw questions trying to think what jumps out at me as the argument's predominant flaw at a fairly general level then look through the ACs for something that matches, so trying to disprove ACs that hinge on more specific points that I didn't think of when making my initial guess helps me be more confident in my choice.

Ok got it, that sounds like a better approach. One question here: what do you do if the correct answer choice is something that didn't jump out at you intitially? Sometimes, one of the AC's will have a flaw that is really tough to identify from just reading the stim but ends up being right -- how do you make sure you're not accidentally eliminating that one?

wealthycrawfish

@possiblydunzo said:

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@wealthycrawfish said:
The biggest help for me with 4/5 star questions in general is to flip mindsets when I've narrowed down to 2 or 3 ACs, from the initial "explain why the single correct AC is correct" to "explain why the other ACs are incorrect." I personally go into Flaw questions trying to think what jumps out at me as the argument's predominant flaw at a fairly general level then look through the ACs for something that matches, so trying to disprove ACs that hinge on more specific points that I didn't think of when making my initial guess helps me be more confident in my choice.

Ok got it, that sounds like a better approach. One question here: what do you do if the correct answer choice is something that didn't jump out at you intitially? Sometimes, one of the AC's will have a flaw that is really tough to identify from just reading the stim but ends up being right -- how do you make sure you're not accidentally eliminating that one?

This definitely happens to me as well! I won’t spend ages on the stim trying to think up flaws if at least one isn’t immediately apparent; if my mind is blank about what a single possible flaw could be, I move on to the ACs and start granting their truth one at a time. I’ll imagine someone else telling the speaker, “actually, X is the case here” then imagine what the effects of it being true on the argument are. It’s true in my opinion that “finding a flaw” initially doesn’t seem to have a lot of room for building up as a skill outside of repetition and remembering some common routes of attack (@natemanwell1) but absent any of those, fundamentals like distinguishing premises from conclusions, and establishing necessary assumptions can help get the argument’s precise structure and bounds down, and from there I find that it’s just an intuitive process that I have to drill to improve.

I think this is overall why weakening and flaw questions are consistently some of toughest questions for me too- I don’t think there’s many “tricks” or common shortcuts you can take to shorten the process on really difficult questions like there are with PAI or Parallel, nor is there is a particularly high burden of proof to meet like with MBT, MBF or SA- you just have to understand the argument and find the choice that weakens it, if even a tiny, tiny amount, and the test writers can be real jerks about it sometimes lmao