Match each flawed argumentative excerpt on the left with the description on the right that most accurately identifies its primary reasoning vulnerability.
- Ecological Manager: The regional council resolved to preserve all 'viable' stands of old-growth timber in the valley. Because every timber stand surveyed can theoretically be harvested and sold on the commercial lumber market without incurring an operating deficit, every stand in the valley is financially viable and therefore protected under the council's preservation resolution.Trades on an ambiguity in a key term by shifting from one meaning of that term in the premise to a different meaning in the conclusion.
- Transit Planner: Every municipality that successfully lowered its downtown vehicular congestion by more than twenty percent over the past decade implemented an automated congestion-pricing cordon. Therefore, if our municipality implements an automated congestion-pricing cordon around the central business district, we are guaranteed to reduce downtown vehicular congestion by more than twenty percent.Treats a condition that is necessary for achieving a specific outcome as though it were sufficient to guarantee that outcome.
- Sports Biomechanist: A five-year longitudinal survey demonstrated that elite marathon runners who regularly perform high-velocity plyometric jump training report significantly fewer patellar tendon injuries than those who do not. Hence, incorporating high-velocity plyometric training into an endurance runner's weekly regimen directly prevents patellar tendon tissue degradation.Infers a direct causal relationship between two phenomena solely from evidence showing that they are statistically correlated.
- Marine Meteorologist: Each individual sensor component integrated into the newly deployed atmospheric monitoring buoy has an operational failure rate of less than one-tenth of one percent during severe oceanic storms. Consequently, the atmospheric monitoring buoy as an integrated system will almost certainly operate without any system failure during severe oceanic storms.Presumes that a complex integrated entity possesses a particular characteristic merely because each of its constituent parts possesses that characteristic.
Answer
The ecological manager excerpt matches the description of equivocation/shifting term meaning; the transit planner excerpt matches the confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions; the sports biomechanist excerpt matches the illicit leap from correlation to causation; and the marine meteorologist excerpt matches the composition error of attributing part-level reliability to the whole system.
Each pair correctly matches an argumentative excerpt to its primary abstract flaw: the ecological manager equivocates on the word 'viable'; the transit planner commits an illegal conditional reversal by treating a necessary prerequisite as a guarantee; the biomechanist confuses statistical correlation with direct causation; and the meteorologist commits the fallacy of composition by assuming system-level durability from individual component durability.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Identifying Formal, Semantic, Causal, and Compositional Flaws in Logical Reasoning Arguments
Estimated Time:2m 30s