Self-study
LR Answer Choice
8 LR Answer Choice tags
Alternate explanation
Causal mechanism
Directionally wrong
Failed alternate explanation
Fighting the hypothetical
Illusory inconsistency
Irrelevant corroboration
Plausibility
Alternate explanation
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Weaken: Introduce or suggest an alternate explanation for the target phenomenon.
Strengthen: Helps to eliminate an alternate explanation for the target phenomenon.
Key tactics
- A hypothesis is always threatened by the possibility of alternative hypotheses. The more likely it is that an alternative hypothesis is true, the less likely it is that our original hypothesis is the true explanation.
Answer choice tips
- Unlike other question types (like MSS and MBT most notably), correct answer choices in WSE questions are allowed to bring in previously-unmentioned subjects. It is often your job to evaluate the novel information and ask "if this were true, would it contribute to (or weigh against) an alternate explanation to the phenomenon we're discussing?"
Causal mechanism
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Answers that strengthen by shedding light on the "how?" of the cause and effect relationship. For example, high altitude training causes better aerobic performance. How? The causal mechanism could be that the thin air at high altitudes cause physiological changes that support better oxygenation.
Key tactics
- In almost any phenomenon-hypothesis situation, it pays to ask "But how?!?" Understanding the implied (or sometimes explicit) causal mechanism being proposed will help you anticipate evidence that would support or undermine it.
- Support for causal mechanisms often appear in the form of causal chains. For example, if the conclusion is "A causes C," the premises could say "A causes B" and "B causes C." Evidence like this supports the conclusion by telling the story of how the world moves from A to C.
Directionally wrong
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Answers that, if they have any effect, do the opposite of what we want (weaken when we're trying to strengthen, or strengthen when we're trying to weaken).
Key tactics
- Weaken question often feature one or more answer choices that Strengthen, and vice versa.
Failed alternate explanation
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Weaken Qs: Answers that try to introduce an alternate explanation, but fall short, or try to explain a different phenomenon.
Strengthen Qs: Answers that try to eliminate an alternate explanation, but fall short, or try to eliminate an explanation for a different phenomenon.
Key tactics
- One of the most common reasons supposed alternate explanations fail is by targeting the wrong phenomenon. For example, if the conclusion is that a fatty diet causes heart disease, a wrong answer might read "Japanese people, who eat disproportionately fatty diets, are more likely to recover from heart disease than people from other countries."
- The above answer choice starts out as though it will suggest something other than fat must be responsible for heart disease, but veers into irrelevance when it discusses recovery rates rather than disease rates.
Fighting the hypothetical
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Answers that aren't relevant because they ignore a hypothetical condition that we're supposed to treat as true.
Key tactics
- For example, if the conclusion says "If John is hungry, he'll order pizza" then an answer that says, "John isn't hungry" would be fighting the hypothetical and therefore wrong.
Illusory inconsistency
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Answer is attractive because it seems to (but doesn't actually) contradict the premises or conclusion.
Key tactics
- Illusory inconsistency is when an answer choice feints an attack on the premises or conclusion, not actually landing a blow because it's actually entirely consistent with the claim. If correlation is present, the answer choice is often merely an outlier datapoint, which is actually entirely consistent with the correlation.
- For example, when presented with the idea that daily smokers suffer higher rates of lung cancer, the single data point "my grandfather was a daily smoker and he never got cancer" may seem to undermine the claim, but in fact all general claims about trends in data sets include occasional outliers. One person having a lucky grandpa does not undermine the broader correlation.
Irrelevant corroboration
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Answers that provide additional support for a claim that the argument doesn't need more support for.
Key tactics
- Answer choices that present evidence that corroborate the truth of the premises are not relevant because we already accept the truth of the premises.
Plausibility
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Presenting evidence that corroborates (in Strengthen) or conflicts (in Weaken) with the author's hypothesized explanation or the predictions that follow from that explanation.
Key tactics
- For Weaken questions, this means the answer choice calls into question the plausibility of an assumption of the argument or of an expectation or prediction that would follow from the conclusion.
- Common forms include cause-effect disconnects: either effect without presumed cause, or cause without putative effect
- For Strengthen questions, this means the answer choice affirms the plausibility of an assumption of the argument or of an expectation or prediction that would follow from the conclusion.
- Common forms include cause-effect alignment: show instances where the putative cause and effect both occur or are both absent.