Q12 - Sahira: To make a living

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Analyze Argument Structure (Procedure)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: (implicitly) Your argument for government subsidization of the arts was unjustified.
Evidence: Your argument depended on the idea that an artist's best work wouldn't be the same as something that would gain widespread popular acclaim. But why should we assume that?

Answer Anticipation:
Describing Rahima's argument is a bit of a challenge. Essentially, he is just saying that Sahira seems to assume that "best work" ≠ "popular work". And he is saying it's possible that an artist's best work WOULD gain widespread acclaim, thereby allowing the artist to make a living. Rahima pushes back at one of Sahira's assumptions.

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Yes! Sahira assumed that "if you're making popular work, you're not making your best work". Rahima disputes this claim and says "it could be true that gaining widespread popular acclaim involves producing one's best work".

(B) Rahima isn't supporting the argument.

(C) We have no idea whether Rahima would accept the conclusion, but the gist of this argument is pushing back against Sahira's thinking, so if anything we would assume that Rahima does NOT accept Sahira's conclusion.

(D) Rahima doesn't use Sahira's premise to reach a new conclusion. Rahima just points out that Sahira's premise depends on the assumption that "best work" ≠ "popular work", and Rahima isn't willing to accept that idea.

(E) "Self-contradiction" is a very extreme (and almost never correct) accusation. Sahira didn't contradict herself. She just made an assumption that Rahima thinks may be dubious.

Takeaway/Pattern: For any Describe task, "if it matches, it's right". The real challenge is the abstract vocabulary. If we knew that Rahima's response felt antagonistic / disagreeing, then (B), (C), and (D) shouldn't have looked very tempting.

#officialexplanation

[mitchliao]

Can someone explain why Sahira's assumption is implicit and not explicit?

I feel that Sahira explicitly states that to gain widespread popular acclaim, artists must produce something other than their best work.

Thanks

[bbirdwell]

Close. What she says:

In order to make a living, artists must make cheetos instead of chips.

What's the implicit assumption? That cheetos are not chips.

Definition of assumption: something unstated that must be true in order for argument to logically function.

Rahima disputes this by saying "it's not necessarily true that cheetos are not chips."

See what I mean?

[jimmy902o]

great analogy this definitely clears it up, thanks brian!

[ganbayou]

I got confused...how does the analogy relate to this stimulus?
I thought the conclusion is "That is why government..." and premise is the first sentence, and the assumption is Popular work=>Subsidize.
Is Rahima attacking this assumption?
Thank you

[rinagoldfield]

Hi Ganbayou,

Brian’s analogy relates to the “artists would have to produce popular work rather than their best work” part of Sahira’s argument. Sahira assumes that an artist's popular work cannot be his or her best work, an assumption Rahima takes issue with.

Best,
Rina

[bobjon1259]

Can an expert please explain to me how (A) does not attack Sahira's premise, "artists of great potential would have to produce work that would gain widespread popular acclaim, instead of their best work." Aren't we supposed to take Sahira's claim at face value -- that works of popular acclaim and artists' best works are mutually exclusive ideas? It seems to me by pointing out that there could be overlap between the foregoing two ideas, (A) is attacking a key premise.

My understanding per the Manhattan LR book is that we aren't supposed to be attacking premises when solving LR questions. I understand what this concept means, but find that it's really hard to apply to LR questions because I feel like a surprising amount of credited responses do this very thing.

[ohthatpatrick]

Correct, R is definitely rejecting a component of what S's premise was.

But the advice you're remembering about "Don't attack a premise" is referring to the Assumption Family, where our job is to evaluate someone's argument.

(Assumption Family = Flaw, Strengthen, Weaken, Necessary Assumption, Sufficient Assumption, Evaluate, and Principle-Support)

As you see, there are many question types where we evaluate the author's reasoning, and to evaluate reasoning, you're accepting the premises but judging why they don't get you all the way to the conclusion.

But we're not in the Assumption Family. This is a Describe task. If it's true, it's right. If it's not, it's wrong.

So if Rahima attacked a premise, fine. We're allowed to accurately say, "That's what happened".

They are saying that Rahima attacked an assumption, because the real idea that Rahima is pushing back against is the the invisible claim that "An artist's best work would not gain widespread acclaim".

------------------------

(Note: As we said, for this type of problem, your only job is to describe what happened, so "turn off" the advice you're remembering about 'don't attack a premise' and "turn on" the mindset of 'did this happen'?

When you're doing Assumption Family questions, you'll almost never see a correct answer that works by attacking the truth of a premise, but there are about 5 examples I know of where this does occur, over the course of 164 LR sections with 25 Q's each.

So it's not truly a "NEVER", but it's 99.9% true as a universal)

[bobjon1259]

Correct, R is definitely rejecting a component of what S's premise was.

But the advice you're remembering about "Don't attack a premise" is referring to the Assumption Family, where our job is to evaluate someone's argument.

(Assumption Family = Flaw, Strengthen, Weaken, Necessary Assumption, Sufficient Assumption, Evaluate, and Principle-Support)

As you see, there are many question types where we evaluate the author's reasoning, and to evaluate reasoning, you're accepting the premises but judging why they don't get you all the way to the conclusion.

But we're not in the Assumption Family. This is a Describe task. If it's true, it's right. If it's not, it's wrong.

So if Rahima attacked a premise, fine. We're allowed to accurately say, "That's what happened".

They are saying that Rahima attacked an assumption, because the real idea that Rahima is pushing back against is the the invisible claim that "An artist's best work would not gain widespread acclaim".

------------------------

(Note: As we said, for this type of problem, your only job is to describe what happened, so "turn off" the advice you're remembering about 'don't attack a premise' and "turn on" the mindset of 'did this happen'?

When you're doing Assumption Family questions, you'll almost never see a correct answer that works by attacking the truth of a premise, but there are about 5 examples I know of where this does occur, over the course of 164 LR sections with 25 Q's each.

So it's not truly a "NEVER", but it's 99.9% true as a universal)

Thank you, Patrick. That cleared it up for me.

With regards to those 5 examples that do attack the truth of the premise, are they from recent exams? Is there something unique about them such that attacking the premise is actually permissible in those questions? Would you be able to tell me which questions these are so I may study them?

Thanks again!

[ohthatpatrick]

No, I couldn't tell you without doing more legwork than I'm ready to do.

I technically only remember 2, one of them from forever ago (like first 10 PT's) and one of them from something in the last 10 PT's.

I fudged the number as "like 5 ever" to allow for the fact that I might be forgetting a couple. There's nothing different about the question stem or anything. It was just a Flaw question and a Weaken question, respectively.

What they have in common is the fact that the premise we end up disagreeing with is an obvious opinion / supposition / prediction, not something that resembles an empirical fact. We're always allowed to pick on Intermediate conclusions, so these are more or less just cases where the author is giving us an Intermediate conclusion en route to his main conclusion and the correct answer is picking on the intermediate (although they are really just unsupported opinions).