Match each flawed argument excerpt with the description that most accurately identifies its primary reasoning flaw.
- Translator: To produce an accurate translation of an ancient text, a scholar must be fluent in the ancient dialect. Dr. Vance is completely fluent in this dialect; therefore, Dr. Vance's translation is guaranteed to be accurate.Treats a factor that is necessary for an outcome as if it were sufficient to guarantee that outcome.
- Traffic Engineer: City records indicate that intersections with newly installed reflective crosswalks experienced fewer pedestrian accidents last year than intersections without them. Installing reflective crosswalks must have caused this reduction in accidents.Infers a causal relationship between two phenomena based solely on an observed association between them.
- Historian: Several art critics have argued that this newly discovered fresco is a forgery because the pigments used were rarely seen in Renaissance workshops. However, these critics are known to harbor personal grudges against the gallery owner, so the fresco is undoubtedly authentic.Rejects an argument solely by discrediting the motives of its proponents rather than addressing the substance of their claims.
- Architect: Every individual brick used in the construction of this municipal library is rectangular and rigid. Therefore, the architectural form of the entire library building must be rectangular and rigid.Infers that an entire entity must possess a specific characteristic simply because each of its constituent parts possesses that characteristic.
Answer
The translator's argument pairs with the description of treating a necessary condition as sufficient; the traffic engineer's argument pairs with inferring causation from correlation; the historian's argument pairs with rejecting a claim by attacking proponents' motives; and the architect's argument pairs with inferring that a whole must share a property of its constituent parts.
Each argument maps directly to its textbook logical fallacy: the translation argument confuses necessary and sufficient conditions; the traffic engineer argument mistakes correlation for causation; the art history argument attacks the source rather than the claim; and the architecture argument erroneously projects part-level properties onto the whole entity.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Flaw in the Reasoning: Identifying Core Logical Fallacies