coco.wu1993 Wrote:I did this question wrong because I take "those who regularly use papercrete are familiar with the properties of the material" as a premise instead of an intermediary conclusion. I don't think this statement is supported by any information in the stimulus. Any thought?
coco.wu1993, I have to agree with you. There's no subsidiary conclusion being made in this stimulus.
Additionally, while
austindyoung's diagramming analysis is very creative, I'm afraid it is a fundamentally incorrect way to attack this question. These are
not conditional statements, and as such can't be linked or contraposed in that way.
Hats off, though, to
yhcho! That breakdown above is stellar!
Now, let's do a solid core breakdown here, just to make sure we're all on the same page. Let's lay out all the pieces, then we can try to simplify it a bit.
PREMISES:
1) most builders are anti-papercrete
2) small group (regular users) of builders are pro-papercrete
3) regular users are familiar with the properties
CONCLUSION
Papercrete is promising!
So, basically we have two groups: the larger groups, which is anti-papercrete, and the smaller group, which is pro-papercrete AND we know they are familiar with papercrete's properties.
Imagine that you surveyed a group of children asking whether they liked Spiderman. All the boys said YES, and all the girls said NO. Then I say "well, the boys all saw the Spiderman movie, so their opinion is more likely to be right." Even accepting the idea that seeing the movie makes your opinion more valid (which is a little odd) - we don't know anything about whether the girls also saw the movie!
The same fundamental things is happening here. We can simplify this core a bit:
PREMISES:
1) most builders are anti-papercrete
2) small group (who are familiar) are pro-papercrete
CONCLUSION
Papercrete is promising!
We're making a few assumptions here: 1) We're assuming that familiarity matters. 2) We're assuming that the small group is MORE familiar than the anti-papercrete group!
The wording of
(E) is a bit more specific than we actually need it to be, and that may have caused some of the confusion. All we need is an answer choice that says that the argument fails to consider [that most builders might be familiar with the properties of papercrete]. The specific scenario mentioned in
(E) does the job, but we probably didn't predict that exact wording. And that's okay!
Interesting discussion everyone!