Q13 - Science cannot adequately explain emotional phenomena

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Sufficient Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Human emotions must not be physical phenomena.
Evidence: Science (physics, chem, neuro) can't adequately explain emotions.

Answer Anticipation:
The missing bridge idea would be "If Science can't adequately explain it, then it's not a physical phenomena". Watch out for the contrapositive, which also works: "All physical phenomena can be explained by science".

The NEW GUY in the conclusion is "not physical". We have not been given a law that lets us derive "not physical", so the correct answer has to provide a rule that says "If such and such is true, then NOT PHYSICAL".

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Illegal negation/reversal. "If not physical, can't be explained by science" is what this says, whereas "If can't be explained by science, then not physical" is what we wanted.

(B) Useless, since it's not a rule that addresses whether or not something is "physical".

(C) Useless, since it's not a rule that addresses whether or not something is "physical".

(D) "If not physical …" is useless. We need a rule that lets us say " if _____ , THEN not physical".

(E) YES! "If it can't be explained by Phys/Chem/Neuro, then it's not physical." That trigger applies to what we know about Human Emotions and lets us derive the conclusion, that Human Emotions are not physical.

Takeaway/Pattern: As long as we know how to handle Sufficient Assumption (watch out for negations/reversals … insist on the NEW GUY in the conclusion), this one should go very smoothly.

B and C weren't worth reading once we scanned and saw they aren't a rule that proves "physical/not physical". A and D were wrong once we saw they were erroneously putting "If not physical" on the left side.

#officialexplanation

[ElissaG364]

#help#help Can someone please give an example of Mistaken Reversal And Mistaken Negation? Thank you! #help#help

[NanaN402]

@ElissaG364

Here is my take on explaining Mistaken Reversals and Mistaken Negations:

When a mistaken reversal is committed, this will literally reverse the sufficient and necessary conditions. The problem is we know this is illegal in formal logic world.

Using the premises from this question as the example, if our conditional gives us " If something CANNOT be explained by science --> then it IS NOT physical phenomenon. " A mistaken reversal would say " If something IS NOT physical phenomenon--> then it CANNOT be explained by science. Our original sufficient condition has become the necessary condition and our original necessary condition is now the sufficient condition. These two statements are not considered logically equivalent.

Now for a mistaken negation, this does not reverse the necessary/sufficient conditions, it only negates them. So from our original condition, a mistaken negation would say " If something CAN be explained by science--> then it IS physical phenomenon. This too is not logically equivalent. We only know about what happens when something CANNOT be explained by science so learning about what happens when something CAN be explained does not help our case.

The only legitimate logical equivalent would be the contrapositive which must both reverse and negate sufficient/necessary conditions so we should expect " If something IS a physical phenomenon --> then it CAN be explained by science.