#7 - Attorney: I ask you to find Mr. Smith guilty of assault

[Kdup]

Hi Powerscore,

So, I got this question incorrect. Flaw questions can be a little tricky for me. But,I want to walk you all through what I did and maybe you can offer some help in my thought process. So, I recognized this was a flaw question. I then attempted to isolate the conclusion that the attorney made. "Mr. Smith was guilty"... This was based on the grounds that there were no eyewitness to the crime and that Mr. Smith allegedly has a violent character. So, I paraphrased and my mind a few possibilities. 1). You cannot say that just because someone has a violent character that they are in fact guilty of this particular crimes.Going back to the LR books... This argument is attacking the person's character and not whether or not they did in fact commit the assault. 2). There were no eyewitnesses... Just because there was no eyewitness does not mean that you can convict Mr. Smith strictly based off of hearsay. I easily eliminated answer choice A, C, and D. I selected answer choice B. I'm trying to understand where exactly I went wrong.

[Francis O'Rourke]

Let's start by breaking down the argument. The first sentence gives us the conclusion. There is no usual indicator here, but there is an obvious one when you step back and consider it: "I ask you to..." In general, we can think of the conclusion as what the speaker is trying to convince us of, so in this case, the attorney's 'conclusion' is what follows: Mr. Smith is guilty of assaulting Mr. Jackson.

The following statement that there were no witnesses to the crime acts as a concession. The attorney does not use it as support for her argument, but does include it to acknowledge a lack of decisive evidence.

The following statement about Mr. Smith's character is a premise that the attorney believes will help convince us of My. Smith's guilt: he has a violent character. If the argument ended here, the only flaw would be that the attorney merely proved Mr. Smith's general behavior and did nothing to address the specific crime.

Ms. Lopez's testimony is another premise. That Mr. Smith threatened her is evidence that Mr. Smith is violent in general, not that he assaulted Mr. Jackson.

The final sentence tells us that Mr. Smith never refuted Ms. Lopez's testimony. This is a curious statement to include, so you need to ask yourself what role the attorney is using it in. The only possible way that this statement can function in the argument is as evidence that Mr. Smith did in fact threaten Ms. Lopez.

At this point your mind should go to a common error in reasoning: failing to give evidence against a claim is not evidence for a claim. The attorney however is using this omission in this way. Answer choice (C) describes this flaw perfectly.

One thing that helps me out a lot with flaw questions is remembering that they are in the first family of questions. This means that the correct answer has to accurately describe what the speaker said. Answer choice (B) says that the attorney claimed that Smith's testimony is unreliable because of his behavior. Did the attorney ever make this claim? For all we know Smith never testified! We never heard anything about Mr. Smith's testimony, if he ever gave one. Answer choice (B) can't be the right answer, because it describes something that we have no evidence for.

Answer choice (E) is an odd one. Did the attorney reason that violent character does not necessarily correlate with violent crimes? That is the exact opposite of the inference that the attorney wants us to believe. The attorney's reasoning was that Smith is guilty of a particular assault because he has a violent character, so this answer choice describes the exact opposite of what the attorney stated.

[Kdup]

Thank you this makes sense. I think I got caught up in the argument. I see now that B is easily incorrect. It's so important to read carefully.