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 David Boyle
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#29810
15veries wrote:Hi Emily, Thanks for your reply

Could you clarify which part of the author's argument relies on it?
"unless" part? :-?
I'm still not sure why it's the error discussed in A...

Hello 15veries,

"unless there are independent reasons to deem the president's speech inflammatory, it is not true that her speech was inappropriate" can be diagrammed something like

inappropriate :arrow: inflammatory

, at least in a simplified version. Thus, inflammatoriness is a requirement for inappropriateness. So the author is assuming that if there wasn't inflammatoriness, there couldn't be inappropriateness.
However, all that "Professor Riley characterized the university president's speech as inflammatory and argued that it was therefore inappropriate." seems to tell us is that inflammatoriness is sufficient for inappropriateness, not necessary. Thus, the author is wrong to think there couldn't be some other reason which could cause inappropriateness, and wrong to think that inflammatoriness is an absolute necessity for inappropriateness.

Hope this helps,
David
 chance123
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#84169
Hi, Powerscore,
I chose this one incorrectly because I am searching for some Character Mistakes in the answer choice, however, I didn't find one. Upon reviewing I understand why A is correct but I just want to be sure there are also some character mistakes occurring in the stimulus, is that correct?

The author tries to convince the reader not to rely on Professor Reliey's opinion simply because of the long-standing feud btw the president and him, i.e. the motivation behind Professor Reliey.
So there are two flaws happening in this stimulus?
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 KelseyWoods
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#84245
Hi chance123!

It's good to be on the lookout for those ad hominem arguments! In this case, the argument is made to look like it contains an ad hominem argument, but it actually doesn't.

The stimulus states: "Riley has had a long-standing feud with the president, and so we should not conclude that her speech was inflammatory solely on the basis of Riley's testimony." That's not quite an ad hominem argument.

An actual ad hominem argument would be: "Riley has had a long-standing feud with the president, therefore her conclusion that the speech was inflammatory is false."

Do you see the difference? It's subtle, but important. In the actual ad hominem argument, the conclusion is much stronger. It says that Riley's conclusion must be false because Riley dislikes the president. The stimulus doesn't make such a strong conclusion. It just says that we need to go off of more than just Riley's word to determine if the speech was inflammatory. This is actually valid reasoning. If you have a biased source of information, it is reasonable to want to corroborate that information. That's different than the usual ad hominem argument in which the author would conclude that the information is definitely false just because it comes from a biased source.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey
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 lsat 2025
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#98086
Hi, I'm still confused. Is this a case of mistaken reversal? The stimulus states: inflammatory --> inappropriate, therefore: inappropriate --> inflammatory

Is this why the reasoning is invalid?
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 atierney
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#98097
Yes, that is correct.

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