#16 - It is not reasonable to search out "organic" foods

[heartofsunshine]

Hi I had a question about #16..

I was stuck between A and E and ultimately went with E. I chose E because it said "reinterprets evidence." I was thinking the evidence for organic was that "chemical not applied." meaning if it's not organic then "chemicals were applied". Then the author reinterprets the evidence that chemicals applied are actually natural.

I didn't go with A because I didn't think it directly redefined organic. This question is hard in general to see the difference I guess between "redefine a term" and "reinterpret evidence." Thanks!

[Zach Foreman]

Heart of Sunshine,
It's great that you narrowed it down to two. The argument's conclusion is that natural foods can include plants grown with synthetic chemicals. Our job is to describe how the argument attempts to prove this. The key is that last sentence. It says that anything made by plants is natural even if they used chemical fertilizer. How would we react or argue against this? Well, we would argue against this as a novel definition. We might say that natural should take into account the inputs, not merely the outputs of the plant. So, clearly we are talking about definitions. That's A.

[lolaSur]

Answer A, E, and D appeared very attractive to me. I understand answer A to be correct because in my own words:

1)The stimulus states that is not reasonable to search for "organic" foods as the only natural foods and as defined as foods grown without the application of synthetic chemicals.
2) plants take in chemicals and other and convert these into natural compounds
3) all compounds made by plants are part of nature, so all are equally natural

Underlying assumption: These equally compounds made by plants are also organic even if the plants converted them from chemicals.

Is this analysis correct?

I don't understand why E and D are wrong.

Thank you!

For my reference (PT14, 1995, LR2, q16)

[James Finch]

Hi Lola,

It looks like you used solid reasoning to get to the correct answer (A), as it accurately reflects the way that the word "natural" is being redefined in the stimulus. (D) and (E) are both initially attractive, but ultimately fail for different reasons. (D) mischaracterizes the conditional relationship given in the first sentence, which diagrammed out looks like:

Natural Food Organic

So being organic is actually the necessary condition in the conditional statement that the stimulus is arguing against. As there's no given necessary conditions for being organic, the stimulus can't actually argue that the necessary conditions aren't fulfilled.

As for (E), it's similar to (D) in that it describes something that simply isn't present in the stimulus; no supporting evidence for the conditional statement is ever given, so how could the stimulus being arguing against this phantom supporting evidence. It isn't, it's taking a different tack entirely.

Hope this clears things up!

[lolaSur]

Thank you so much for your reply!
Is it correct that the author redefines "natural food" and not the term "organic"?

We diagram like this: Natural food Organic because we know that if a food is natural then it must be organic. So the author redefines the chemical compounds processed by plants to mean natural foods so that these too (like nonchemical compounds) are considered natural foods and therefore must also be considered organic.

Thank you in advance!

For my reference (pt14, feb1995, LR2, q16)

[Jeremy Press]

Hi Lola,

Yes, it's correct that the author spends the argument redefining the term "natural" as applied to food. I think you've got this, but I want to make it clear that the author is actually arguing against the conditional relationship you and James identified. Some people think that if you're going to call a food "natural," then it must be organic (i.e. grown without the application of synthetic chemicals). The author says no, for the reasons you identified: the plant takes the molecules from a synthetic chemical, and makes them into compounds, and in the process makes something that is a part of nature, and therefore "natural."

I hope this helps!

Jeremy