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PT55 LR2(Section 3) Q25
Stim goes like this:

Dean: The mathematics department at our university said they should teach Stats in Social Sciences --> the fact that a course has math doesn't mean it needs to be taught by a math teacher --> their claim is unjustified
Q: Find the flaw.

So the credited answer is (B), the author tries to reject a claim by giving one possible reason for that view is insufficient.

What kind of flaw is this? This threw me off a little because I think I've dealt with many LR arguments that give only one reason to form a conclusion and I was supposed to treat them as logically legit. In fact, I don't remember seeing this type of flaw anywhere in the old PTs. Off the top of my head I can think of the one where the author shoots down an argument without considering pros/cons, but I'm not sure if this belongs to the same category as the one we are dealing with here.

Can somebody care to explain? Thanks.


FYI, I was down to (B) and (D), picked the latter.

Flaws are always clear if you break down the argument into what it's doing, how it does that, and what's wrong with those two things.

In this case, we have a claim, which the argument refutes. It denies this claim by establishing some nonsense about the presence of math in relation to the need of a math professor. What you can see here though, is that this claim, the one which the argument denies, is pretty broad: We, the math department should teach statistics. The argument counters by introducing a premise which suggests one reason they do not need to teach statistics. But based on that one reason alone, the argument concludes the math department should not teach the statistics class.

Do you see the gap here? We're given only one reason, which says the math department doesn't need to teach it, to establish that the math department shouldn't teach it.

jad0re wrote:What kind of flaw is this?

I don't really put labels on flaws anymore, I just describe them how they function in the argument. So I can't really help you here.

Honestly, don't worry about the labels. If you got the credited response you're fine. There's about 12-14 flaws you'll see all the time, and being familiar with them is helpful, but this is just a generically flawed argument, his evidence isn't strong enough to justify his strong conclusion.