I have been doing the CC and have stumbled a bit on the strengthen portion of things. Once I hit the 3 star questions, I was getting about 60 percent correct, which is not at all where I want to be. I realize that much of my problem stems from the inability to find that assumption to bridge the gap between premise and conclusion. Is there anything you guys do that helps in establishing this bridge? I know that you will never necessarily find the bridge perfectly, but I would at least like to get better at it to have a greater chance.
Thank you.
Comments
It's somewhat a two part process. You have to find possible assumptions, yes, but you also have to ensure those assumptions cannot be made by blocking them with an answer choice and hence strengthening the relationship between premise and conclusion.
If you mean sufficient assumptions alone, they generally look like:
A
___
B
To bridge them, you simply have to show that A (fill it in with existing premise) can lead to B (fill it in with existing conclusion). Quite literally A ->B. Pay attention to any mismatch between terms in premise and conclusion - they are sometimes filled in by a sufficient assumption.
I hope I answered your question? Please let me know if I misunderstood it.
I got tripped up by the part of the strengthen section where we had to try and form an assumption.
Weaken was a lot easier for me than strengthen for some reason. I need some more practice on it.
A
a-b
___________
b
works extremely well for SA and PSA as most of you know. Now, we can also use it on strengthening questions when conditional statements are involved. I have found that just writing out the A
____
B
forms makes the entire game easier for me as a whole. Do any of you guys use this technique on strengthen/ weaken or should I get used to doing things without since it is time consuming? I feel like it drags the premise/ conclusion in my head and keeps them relevant. Especially for the difficult questions.