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Difficulty: HardIdentifying Logical Flaws and Reasoning Vulnerabilities

A corporate strategy consultant presented the following argument to executive leadership: 'Over the past two years, every department within our software development division that adopted flexible core working hours recorded a 25 percent increase in annual project delivery rate. By contrast, departments in the same division that maintained rigid, fixed-office schedules demonstrated no increase in delivery rate. Therefore, mandating flexible core working hours across our risk management division will guarantee a similar increase in productivity.'

Statement: The consultant's reasoning is vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it assumes a policy correlated with productivity gains in one specialized operational environment will automatically produce identical results in a fundamentally different operational setting.

Answer: Answer

Answer

True. The argument commits a flaw of unwarranted extrapolation across different operational contexts.
The statement accurately pinpoints the argument's flaw. The author takes evidence from software development and applies it directly to risk management without establishing that the two divisions function similarly enough for the policy to have the same effect.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Deconstruct the argument premises and conclusion.
Premise: Flexible hours correlated with +25% delivery rate in software development. Conclusion: Mandating flexible hours in risk management will guarantee a similar increase.
Understanding the gap between the evidence domain and the target domain is essential for identifying reasoning vulnerabilities.
2
Analyze the logical leap between premise and conclusion.
The author assumes that because flexible hours worked in software development, they are sufficient to produce the same result in risk management.
Extrapolating results from one group or setting to a non-equivalent group without justification constitutes a scope shift flaw.
3
Evaluate the statement against the identified flaw.
The statement asserts that the argument relies on the unwarranted assumption that a policy successful in one specialized environment will yield identical results in a different setting, which matches the core flaw.
Determining whether the description of the flaw is accurate.

Key Concept

Extrapolation and Scope Shift Flaws
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Topics

Identifying Logical Flaws and Reasoning Vulnerabilities

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