#24 - All unemployed artists are sympathetic to social

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Must Be True—SN. The correct answer choice is (A)

This short stimulus contains two facts that we can combine together to gain an additive inference. The first fact is that if you are an unemployed artist, then you are sympathetic to social justice. To avoid the double negative that would result from negating “unemployed,” we will use the term “employed artist,” but negate it:

• Sufficient Necessary
  
  employed artist sympathetic to social justice

Next, we are told that if you are an employed artist, then you are not interested in the prospect of great personal fame:

• Employed artist interested in great personal fame

We can combine these terms by means of a contrapositive. So, if we take the contrapositive of the first rule,

• Sympathetic to social justice employed artist

and combine it with the second rule across the common term of “employed artist,” we can get the additive inference that if you are not sympathetic to social justice, then you are not interested in the prospect of great personal fame:

• Sympathetic to social justice employed artist interested in great personal fame

and the contrapositive of that inference:

• interested in great personal fame employed artist sympathetic to social justice

This is a Must Be True question. Our prephrase is that the correct answer choice will test us on the inference diagrammed above.

Answer choice (A): This is the correct answer choice, because it properly describes the contrapositive to the additive inference described above:

• interested in great personal fame sympathetic to social justice.

Answer choice (B): This answer choice improperly treats being uninterested in great personal fame (interested in great personal fame) as a sufficient condition, when that term was only ever used as a necessary condition.

Answer choice (C): Here, the answer choice gives the Mistaken Negation of the second rule.

Answer choice (D): In this case, the answer choice is the Mistaken Reversal of the first rule.

Answer choice (E): This answer choice is incorrect because the second rule told us that employed artists are not interested in the prospect of great personal fame. In order for this answer choice to be correct, the second fact must have said that employed artists are interested in great personal fame.

[oli_oops]

Hello,

This explanation is really helpful. But how is this a conditional reasoning instead of formal logic question?

Thank you!
oli

[Brook Miscoski]

oli,

Conditional reasoning is part of formal logic.