#14 - The economy is doing badly. First, the real estate

[TIFFANY_L]

Hello, I've read the explanations in this thread that premise 3 (sentence 3, with the word "consistent" cannot be diagrammed as a conditional statement) and I did arrive at the correct answer D by taking the contra positive of P1:

RS and CS --> bad econ
contrapositive: bad econ (aka healthy econ - referring to P3) --> RS or CS

However, I have two questions that remain:

1) If P3 were diagrammable, would it be logical with the entire argument or would it not be?

"Of course, had either one or the other phenomenon failed to occur, this would be consistent with the economy as a whole being healthy."

RS --> good econ . . . contrapositive: good econ (so bad econ) -->RS ... so wouldn't this be a mistaken negation of the P1's contrapositive, which is: bad econ -->S]RS[/S] ?
CS --> good econ . . . contrapositive: good econ (so bad econ) --> CS... wouldn't this also be a MN of P1's contrapositive, which is: bad econ -->CS ?

2) In general then, is it ever possible for a stimulus to present two or more conditional statements that do not match in logic? (From my diagram above (assuming it is correct), it seems that P3 would NOT be a logical part of the argument)

If it is possible, then would you simply take the statements that do match in logic (and their contrapositives) and the ones that do lead to the conclusion and ignore the ones that don't?

Thank you in advance!

Tiffany

[KelseyWoods]

Hi Tiffany!

The reason that premise 3 is not diagrammable is because it does not contain conditional logic. Conditional diagrams just map out the conditional logic of the statements. Statements that don't have conditional logic cannot be diagrammed because there is no conditional logic to map. So saying "if premise 3 was diagrammable" is equivalent to saying "if premise 3 said something else entirely." Premise 3 does not have conditional logic so it is not diagrammable. Premise 3 is not an absolute conditional statement so you cannot take the contrapositive of it.

Premise 3 is consistent with the conditional logic of the argument, however. The author's argument is:

Real estate slump + Car sales low Bad economy

Premise 3 says that if we just had a real estate slump but not low car sales, we could have still had a good economy. Or if we just had low car sales but not a real estate slump, we could have still had a good economy. Again, it's just saying that a good economy would have been possible in these scenarios, which is totally consistent with the conditional logic. The logic tells us that with a real estate slump and low car sales we must have a bad economy. But it doesn't tell us what must happen if we have a real estate slump and we don't have low car sales or what happens if we have low car sales but no real estate slump. There's no rule that says we can't have a good economy in those situations so there's no reason why a good economy would not still be possible if we did not have either a real estate slump or low car sales.

In general, in a Must Be True question, you won't have conditional premises that directly contradict one another. They can't give you two premises but have one of the premises be something that cannot be true if the other premise is true. In an argument, we focus on the premises that lead to the conclusion, but we do not just ignore premises that contradict the conclusion--they can be important to understanding reasoning flaws.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey

[TIFFANY_L]

It does, thank you!

[gwlsathelp]

I've read through the pages before the present one, and something is not clicking still and remains unexplained.
Isn't "either... or..." conditional? What really gets me is this bad economy = healthy economy. Are we to assume the polar opposite of the variable or does this stimulus set up mutual exclusivity in the third premise?

My diagram is:
Conclusion: bad economy
Premise 1 & 2: real estate slump + car sales low
*Premise 3: healthy economy real estate slump OR car sales low
Premise 4: real estate slump + car sales low conclusion correct/bad economy

Answer D: if you have a healthy economy, it is unlikely you'll have both a real estate and car sales slump because that's literally impossible with the above logic.

*PREMISE 3 EXPLANATION: after some digging around, I found an answer that made it all click: "when it says 'this would be consistent with the economy as a whole being healthy,' that means, this fits the attributes of a healthy economy. It doesn't guarantee a healthy economy," but a healthy economy guarantees either one failing to occur or both (link to source).

[Robert Carroll]

gwlsathelp,

"Either...or..." is not conditional, although it could be translated into a conditional.

The mutual exclusivity of "bad economy" and "healthy economy" is just common sense. They might not be logical opposites, because maybe some economies are neither bad nor healthy, but certainly they are exclusive by definition.

The 4th sentence really has no role in the argument, and perhaps you confused yourself by trying to make it fit. The argument is basically saying that either factor alone is not enough to conclude the economy is bad, but together, those two factors are strong evidence of a bad economy.

Robert Carroll

[pwfquestions]

Yes, I found a different conditional statement as in the above post and chose E. I find this question differs from the conditional indicators and I do not understand how to get the conditional statement presented in the explanation.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi pwf,

As I mentioned in another post to you, we don't need any particular terms to have a conditional relationship. Conditionality is all about the relationship between two terms. If A requires B that's conditional. It doesn't matter if a conditional term is not used. As long as that relationship is present, it's conditional.

Here, the author is saying the that the real estate slump and the low car sales are enough (sufficient) to show that the economy is doing badly. Their conclusion is that the economy is doing badly. That's what's the author is trying to show is required. The author tells us that the two indicators of real estate and car sales are enough to show that the economy is bad. It's all about that relationship of something being sufficient to show something else. That's where the conditionality comes in here.

Hope that helps.

[rlouis1993]

There are not sufficient/necessary indicators in the passage to help guide the set up of the conditional logic. Without the indicators, we could easily set up the logical condition in the opposite direction:

Bad Economy ---> RE Slump + Low Car Sales

Would setting up the logical condition this way be wrong?

[Luke Haqq]

Hi rlouis1993!

That diagram seems to be reversed. Instead, RE Slump and Low Car Sales should be sufficient conditions, on the left side of the arrow:

RE Slump & Low Car Sales Bad Economy

If one were told a given economy is doing badly, there's nothing in the stimulus that tells us that such an economy must have a real estate slump and low car sales. That is, if one has a bad economy, it's not necessarily the case that it has a real estate slump and low car sales (maybe there is some other reason, such as low sales of consumer goods in general). But the stimulus does indicate that a real estate slump and low car sales is sufficient to make an economy bad/unhealthy.