About this video
A logical reasoning walkthrough for a flaw question. The argument concludes that graduate students should not unionize because most of them obviously disapprove, but the video shows that most students are simply unaware of the effort. The flaw is treating unawareness as disapproval, and the video explains how to predict that flaw before reading the answer choices.
You'll be able to
- separate an argument's conclusion from its support.
- predict a flaw before reading the answer choices.
- explain why treating unawareness as disapproval is a reasoning error.
Key words
- Conclusion
- The main claim an argument is trying to prove.
- Premise
- A piece of evidence used to support the conclusion.
- Flaw question
- A question asking which flaw makes an argument unsound.
- Prediction
- A strong guess about the flaw formed before reading the answer choices.
- Distractor
- A wrong answer choice that sounds plausible but does not match the passage.
Transcript
- [Instructor] This question starts out The reasoning in the argument is the most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that the argument. We can really finish the question with the words does what or commits what flaw. So, we're looking at a task of identifying the flaw.
The great thing about a flaw question is that you already know that the argument is bad. Once you identify the question as a flaw question, you're armed with that knowledge up front. So, you can read with a really skeptical eye and know that, even though the arguer thinks the argument is good, you know that it's not.
In flaw questions, the answer will describe why the argument isn't sound. The four wrong choices will usually be a description of a flaw, but just not the flaw that's happening in this passage. Pause your video now if you'd like to try this question on your own.
Otherwise, we'll move on to the explanation. Okay, let's read the stimulus together, and for flaw questions it's a really good idea to break the argument down into it's conclusion and support and really separate the conclusion from its support. Because we're looking for the gap between the two pieces and that gap is gonna be too big in flawed arguments.
The passage reads: Despite the efforts of a small minority of graduate students at one university to unionize, the majority of graduate students there remain unaware of the attempt. Most of those who are aware believe that a union would not represent their interests, or that, if it did, it would not effectively pursue them.
Thus, the graduate students at the university should not unionize, since the majority of them obviously disapprove of the attempt. Alright, where is our main conclusion? It's gonna be here, starting with thus, but ending right here. We can't include the last part, because we see the evidence word since.
So, very simply, the main conclusion is that the graduate students at the university should not unionize. Everything else in the passage serves to support that recommendation. Now, let's look at that claim starting with since. That should be our main evidence, right?
The arguer thinks the grad students shouldn't unionize because the majority of them obviously disapprove of the attempt. Well, wait a minute. That sounds like it needs to be supported as well. How do we know that the majority of the grad students obviously disapprove of the attempt?
Because, earlier in the passage, we're told that the majority of grad students are unaware of the attempt to unionize, and most of those who are aware don't agree with unionizing. It's picture time. Here is a representation of all of the grad students at this university.
Here is the majority of them, who are unaware of the attempt to unionize. Now, of the other side, who are aware, most of them are against unionizing. Can we say, then, that the majority of grad students obviously disapprove of the attempt? No, this arguer is mistaking the majority who don't know about the attempt to unionize as a majority who disapproves of the attempt to unionize.
And that's not okay. What if these students who don't know about it found out about it and then approved of it? We just don't know, so this argument doesn't work. It's generally easier and faster for flaw questions if you have a strong prediction in mind before going into the choices.
That way you can just play the matching game. Here, we're saying that the flaw is that the arguer is mixing up the majority of students who don't know about something as the majority who disapproves of that something. That's such a good prediction that, on test day, you could just scan to find the match for that prediction.
But let's go through each choice one at a time, for completeness' sake. A reads tries to establish a conclusion simply on the premise that the conclusion agrees with a long-standing practice. So, this isn't relevant. We were never told anything about a long-standing practice.
So we can quickly eliminate this choice. B tells us that the argument fails to exclude alternative explanations for why some graduate students disapprove of unionizing. This doesn't match our prediction. Plus, it doesn't describe a flaw in the argument. Because what if the argument did exclude alternative explanations for why some grad students disapprove of unionizing?
That makes no difference to the argument. It certainly doesn't fix the argument. Because we don't care why anyone disapproves or approves of unionizing. We're only interested in whether the majority of these students actually do disapprove. C, presumes that simply because a majority of a population is unaware of something, it must not be a good idea.
This might have been tempting without a prediction, but let's break it down. The arguer isn't saying that unawareness means something isn't a good idea. Even though unawareness is mentioned early on in the passage, what the arguer is saying is that obvious disapproval from a majority means that something isn't a good idea.
So this choice isn't accurately describing what's happening. D, ignores the possibility that although a union might not effectively pursue graduate student interests, there are other reasons for unionizing. What if the arguer didn't ignore this possibility? That still wouldn't help the argument and make it more sound.
We don't care about the specific reasons for unionizing. We need to know whether a majority of the grad students actually do disapprove. And we're suspicious, considering that a majority of them don't even know about the attempt to unionize. Finally, E, blurs the distinction between active disapproval and mere lack of approval.
That is a match for what we identified as a problem in this argument. The arguer confuses people actually disapproving of something with people not even knowing about that thing. If you don't know about something, then, sure, you have a lack of approval for it.
But that doesn't mean that you disapprove of it. And this is our answer. To recap, for flaw questions, prepare yourself for an unsound argument from the start. Identify the arguer's main point and phrase the support for it in a simple but accurate way. There will be a problem with the journey from evidence to conclusion, or in the gap between evidence and conclusion.
And it's a good idea to understand what that problem is before you evaluate the choices. That's because the wrong choices for flaw questions can sound really fancy and distracting, and it's time consuming to think about each choice carefully, instead of finding the one that matches your prediction.
Finally, there are some common flaws that you can look for, which we cover elsewhere in your practice materials, and those can also help you hone in on a familiar pattern when you see one.
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