PrepTest 10 - February 1994 LSAT Section 1 Q21 Forum

[nonameee]

I don't understand why (A) is wrong. Can someone please explain what's wrong with this reasoning:

Confuses matters of objective fact = "lines and syllable count"
with
matters of subjective feelings = "call a poem with a haiku feel"

Thanks

[suspicious android]

The argument discusses matters of objective fact, and it discusses matters of subjective feeling. But it doesn't confuse one for the other. For this to be the correct answer, you'd have to find something in the argument like "this poem is thought to be very sad by many readers, so the subject matter is verifiably sad".

Make sure you're not just matching terms in the answer choice to terms in the stimulus. This is a helpful thing to do sometimes, but you've got to really ask yourself "Is this an accurate description of what went wrong in this argument"? In this argument, the problem is the author takes one small idea that maybe, possibly could indicate something bad about English poets, and draws this enormously broad conclusion about them. It's not at all a problem about confusing subjective versus objective ideas.

Make sense?

[nonameee]

suspicious android,

Thanks a lot for your reply.

This part is clear:

In this argument, the problem is the author takes one small idea that maybe, possibly could indicate something bad about English poets, and draws this enormously broad conclusion about them. It's not at all a problem about confusing subjective versus objective ideas.

This one too:

For this to be the correct answer, you'd have to find something in the argument like "this poem is thought to be very sad by many readers, so the subject matter is verifiably sad".

And I am not questioning the validity of the OA.

In the argument the author says that haiku is defined by a syllable count (precise mathematical definition). Later in the argument he says that English poets call haiku not based on a syllable count but based on some feeling. Now, they might do that not because they don't know this syllable rule or because they disrespect foreign traditions, but because they just feel that a haiku term would be appropriate for these kind of poems.

So what I'm still not sure about is that the author of the argument defines haiku in one way (a mathematical one) and then compares (or rather switches from) this definition to the haiku feel (which has nothing to do with "math counting", so to speak). Or in other words, on the one hand we have a mathematical definition of haiku, and later on we are talking about feelings, and it's obvious that these two cannot be compared or paralleled.

Please explain.