Q11 - Conservative: Socialists begin their

[ebrickm2]

stimulus was messy and hard to understand, and thus so were the questions!

clarification greatly appreciated.

[bbirdwell]

You're right. This is an awkward one! Let's begin with a deconstruction of the two arguments.

Conservative
Conclusion: In day to day progress of history, there are never such discernible trends (trends that lead inevitably to socialist future).

Premises:
1. Socialists use analysis history to derive inevitable trends
2. history occurs through accident, contingency, and struggle
3. so, inevitability only appears in retrospect

Socialist
Conclusion: Historical analysis is NOT important to socialists because of inevitability.
(somewhat tricky conclusion to identify, as it must be inferred from the construction of the first sentence -- "if THAT were true, blablabla..." essentially means "THAT is NOT true.")

Premises:
1. If they believed in inevitability, they would not work to transform.
2. in order to transform, they must understand
3. in order to understand, they must analyze history.

With this mind, the answer is clearly (E), as the big dispute is about whether the socialists use history to argue inevitability.

(A) neither side believes in inevitability.
(B) the socialist agrees, but we have no evidence regarding the conservative's opinion on this issue.
(C) the conservative would disagree, but the socialist would not agree -- the socialist does not even agree that such arguments exist, so the question of whether those arguments are "justified" is a non-issue
(D) perhaps the socialist would agree, but we've no evidence regarding the conservative's opinion about this.

[jgutella]

To the above poster, I understand what you are saying and that is clearly the issue at hand here; however, answer choice (e) states that socialists analyze history in order to support the view that socialism is inevitable.

This is not, in fact, what the Conservative says. The conservative never says that the socialists "analyze history" so to prove that socialism is inevitable. The socialists 'begin their arguments WITH an analysis of history.' This is quite different than analyzing history so to support a view.

Care to explain this gaping discrepancy? These things always throw me off because it would appear on the surface to be the right answer, but once I attempt to decode it's language and see that in fact it doesn't match up to the actual language in the stimulus, I cross it off. So very frustrating.

Edit: I finally see how it can make sense. Still, though, I feel violated by that ambiguous term usage.

[economienda]

The CONSERVATIVE is saying that socialists analyze history in order to support the view that socialism is inevitable.

The SOCIALIST responds: we (socialists) do NOT analyze history in order to support the view that socialism is inevitable.

The textual support in the CONSERVATIVE's argument is in his first sentence: "Socialists begin their arguments with an analysis of history, from which they claim to derive certain trends leading inevitably to a socialist future" [underline and bolded text added for emphasis].

What do we do when we derive something? We obtain or gather that something--usually evidence, a premise, facts--from a specified source.

To what end? For what purpose? To arrive at a conclusion; to draw a conclusion; to draw an inference; to obtain a conclusion by reasoning.

My argument that the sky is blue is derived from ten years of empirical research. [My argument is that the sky is blue and ten years of empirical research is the support for that argument.]

When the conservative says, 'they claim to derive certain trends…', he is saying that socialists base an argument (their "claim") on certain trends.

These socialists draw conclusion x, from support y. These socialists draw the conclusion that a socialist future is inevitable from the analysis of history showing that certain trends entail that, at a later time, socialism is certain to occur.

[lucia20126]

There is a very simple way to understand why E is correct, without even needing to understand the specifics of the stimulus.

The Socialist and the Conservative aren't arguing about specifics about the purpose of analyzing history for understanding the inevitability/evitability of socialism--they're arguing about why socialists analyze history.

Answer choice E is the only one of the five that mentions the purpose of analyzing history. A, B, C, and D, all focus on content, which is irrelevant for this question.