xw73 Wrote:Hey guys, I notice that a lot of you classify the first sentence as the conclusion, which I agree. If the first sentence is the conclusion, why D is not a better match?
D says, the argument tries to establish the validity of the first sentence "by denying the truth of the opposite of that claim". What's the opposite of that claim? I think it's that "the true scientific significance of Walcott's discovery is no more likely to be reflected in a recent classification." Does the last sentence deny this opposite claim? I think so.
Great question,
xw73!
I agree with you that the opposite of the claim could be that "the true scientific significance of W's discovery is
no more likely to be reflected in a recent classification." But I'm not sure how the last sentence denies this opposite claim. The last sentence would need to come right out and SAY the denial of the opposite claim.
I think that you may be feeling that the evidence supports the conclusion
in the exact same way that it supports the "denial of the opposite of the conclusion." For example, take the argument:
Roses are red, therefore they are tall.The author is trying to use roses' redness to support the conclusion that they are tall. You could also characterize this as the author using the roses' redness to support the idea
that they are not short. But in this situation, we are not using the 'denial of the opposite'
as support for the conclusion. For that to be the case, we'd have to use the denial in place of the evidence, as
WaltGrace1983 did above. (
Roses are not short, therefore roses are tall.)
For
(D) to work, the argument would need to say something like: "Walcott's classifications are less likely to show the true significance than is the modern classification. Therefore, the true significance is more likely to be reflected in the modern classification."
The final sentence here
does not establish that denial of the opposite. All it tells us is that Walcott's classifications would have confirmed what was already taken to be true. But this tells us
absolutely nothing about how likely it is to be the "true significance", and certainly nothing about how that likelihood compares to the likelihood of the recent classifications getting it right.
Does this clear things up a bit?