Q24 - Folklorist: Oral traditions are often

[Shiggins]

Here the Folklorist concludes oral tradition is often more preferable than written. Why?

Your goal is to find a principle that helps establish this.

Evidence:
Oral helps improve memory.
Written can lead populations to become sluggish
Written can lead to confusion between reader and writer
Oral helps get rid of useless and irrelevant info.

A- Just tells us the positive features of oral tradition. How that compares to written is not indicated.
B- Is more of an inference. Written tradition can lead to people running to written resources. So there is some effort. But we are looking for a principle here.
C-Which tradition is he talking about written or oral. Accumulation of knowledge he must be assuming is written tradition but this still does not make sense and seems very broad.
E- This is the one that I found tempting. This choice refers to the confusion between reader and writer. But it is too strong. Written tradition does not always lead to confusion. Instances where it does not how can you prefer oral over written.

D- Is a good choice bc the last sentence ties it in. Oral tradition eradicates what is useless and irrelevant. If something does eradicate the latter then it is not oral tradition. In which case it has info that is superfluous. Choice D says that. You take the important (Oral tradition) over the excessive (written) The one question I have about this choice is, if my reasoning is correct I assumed if you do not have Oral tradition then you must have written.

If anyone can clarify my reasoning, amend, or correct, much appreciated. Thank you.

[noah]

Great start! I'll put in some other ideas to augment, but use a lot of your ideas, and then discuss some things I notice in your explanation:

The Folklorist concludes oral tradition is often more preferable than written. Why?

Because with oral traditions the extra information (that which is useless and irrelevant) is eradicated. There's a lot of premises leading to that, but we can expect the principle to address the gap between the conclusion and the final premise (perhaps intermediate conclusion).

What's the gap? Who says eradicating all that stuff is worthwhile? Perhaps it's better to say more! So, the argument is assuming it's not better to say more, but instead we should be just saying what matters.

Your goal is to find a principle that helps establish this.

(D) addresses the gap: we should choose a system that allows us to be economical.Oral tradition eradicates what is useless and irrelevant.

(A) is about communication in general -- too broad!

(B) is tempting! But, just because literate populations need to make some efforts towards efficient communication doesn't help this argument. We don't know if oral communication is more efficient - we know that it forces people to forget useless information, but that's different. Perhaps written communication is more efficient, though we end up efficiently communicating more. Plus, we don't want a principle that only applies to literate populations - we want something that is more broadly applicable.

(C) is out of scope. Which tradition is he talking about written or oral? Perhaps the author is assuming that the accumulation of knowledge is written tradition - but couldn't it also be applied to oral traditions?

(E) is out of scope - there's no discussion of clear discussion. For all we know, with both oral and written communication we can discuss topics clearly. The issue in the argument is which topics will we discuss!

As for your question, I don't think that the argument establishes that oral tradition is the only way to eradicate the useless and irrelevant. It's simply one way. And, we have no reason to assume that without an oral tradition we'd have a written one. Perhaps there's a culture that communicates through dance or through paintings. Regardless of our ability to come up with a third option, there's no indication that oral and written cover it all.

I think you should think a bit more about how principle questions are simply assumption questions - and how assumptions will address a gap. Also, keep an eye on granting equal importance to all the premises - more often than not, there's one important one.

I hope that helps! Thanks for writing out your thoughts - it makes for a more interesting discussion.

[Shiggins]

It is funny bc after I had written it I was going to bed and thought it over. I realized that through the structure it can allow a third option, like dance or something else like you had mentioned. I had mistakenly assumed only having one tradition or the other.

Just bc ~eradicate-> ~oral trad, leaves open dance or some other form of tradition.

Thank you Noah.

[WaltGrace1983]

I'd like to add to the discussion with an analysis of the premises. When doing this problem, and even after reviewing it a second time, I had the core like this:

Oral tradition improves memory
+
Useless and irrelevant is eradicated in oral tradition
→
Oral traditions are often preferable to written ones

However, I now think that I have a flawed understanding of the argument as I read Noah's review. Here is what the argument says again, "Oral traditions are often preferable...Exclusive dependence on speech...literate populations..." Whoa! I over-inferred here. The argument starts with the conclusion and says something about exclusive dependence on speech without justify that this is actually just referring to "oral traditions." For all we know, the part starting with "exclusive dependence" is just nonsense! Completely irrelevant!

Now we analyze "literate populations." Are populations without oral traditions illiterate? We don't know! This may also be considered completely irrelevant information! So I guess what I am trying to say is, the whole second sentence is useless.

(A), (B), (C), and (E) can all be eliminated basically because they don't answer the question, "Are oral traditions to be preferred over written ones?" The only one that speaks to this question is (D).

[a8l367]

Didn't get it
Argument: in oral there are less useless and irrelevent
d) economy is preferred (we are not talking about economy but about clarity)
e) only clear ideas should be communicated (since written ideas consist sometimes are "useless and irrelevent" and therefore will not be communicated, oral will win)

please help