The following arguments each contain a distinctive flaw in reasoning. Match each argument on the left with the abstract description on the right that most accurately identifies its primary logical vulnerability.
- Hospital Administrator: The clinic must either immediately adopt a fully automated robotic medication-dispensing system or patient prescription error rates will remain dangerously high. Because the clinic has declined to purchase the automated system due to budgetary constraints, patient safety will inevitably remain compromised.Treats two possible courses of action or outcomes as exhaustive while overlooking other viable intermediate alternatives.
- Archaeologist: Detailed excavation records from the ancient coastal settlement of Port Varen demonstrate that commercial maritime shipping routes were completely disrupted whenever regional surface sea temperatures rose significantly during the third century BCE. Therefore, current rising sea temperatures will unquestionably paralyze contemporary shipping channels in that same geographic basin.Takes for granted that conditions that produced a specific outcome under historical circumstances will yield the exact same outcome in modern settings.
- Corporate Strategist: Every individual software engineer on the core infrastructure team achieves their highest personal output when working in complete isolation without attending collaborative coordination meetings. It follows that the entire engineering division will maximize its overall quarterly output if all team meetings across the division are permanently eliminated.Infers that a property true of each individual member of a collective group considered separately must also be true of the entire group functioning as a whole.
Answer
The hospital administrator's argument matches the description of treating two possible courses of action as exhaustive; the archaeologist's argument matches the description of assuming historical conditions will produce identical modern outcomes; and the corporate strategist's argument matches the description of inferring that a property of individual components must hold for the group as a whole.
Each pair correctly matches an argumentative stimulus with its precise formal error: the administrator's argument commits a false dichotomy by ignoring intermediate measures; the archaeologist's argument commits a temporal fallacy by assuming ancient shipping constraints apply unchanged to modern maritime transport; and the corporate strategist's argument commits a composition fallacy by assuming individual productivity traits directly aggregate to collective organizational performance.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Identifying Characteristic Logical Fallacies and Abstract Flaw Descriptions
Estimated Time:1m 30s