Q24 - Certain minor peculiarities of language

[farhadshekib]

I see why C is correct; however, I cannot justify why B is wrong.

Please help me, superman.

[aileenann]

No problem.

The reason that (B) is not correct is that it addresses a valid reason why there exist some poems that may not be identifiable with the test described in the stimulus but it does not explain why "any poem" cannot be conclusively proved to be of a specific author using the test - a much broader question that requires an explanation for why every poem that exists cannot be conclusively identified, rather than just any poem that doesn't have any specific identifying marks. (C) answers this broader question, but (B) simply does not.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have follow-up questions.

[farhadshekib]

No problem.

The reason that (B) is not correct is that it addresses a valid reason why there exist some poems that may not be identifiable with the test described in the stimulus but it does not explain why "any poem" cannot be conclusively proved to be of a specific author using the test - a much broader question that requires an explanation for why every poem that exists cannot be conclusively identified, rather than just any poem that doesn't have any specific identifying marks. (C) answers this broader question, but (B) simply does not.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have follow-up questions.

Thank you.

[WaltGrace1983]

Can someone check my thinking here?

(B) is incorrect because not every poem has to have this particular peculiarity, which is what (B) tells us.

Only one poem written by a known poet is necessary (though perhaps not sufficient). It certainly doesn't have to be the case that all of this poet's poetry has this peculiarity! What if 99/100 of this poet's poetry has this peculiarity? Isn't that good enough? It would seem so.

(C) is correct because it is saying that a particular peculiarity that we find can be evidence of either case that the premise brings up: a peculiarity could signal (1) a common language during the time or (2) a particular language used only by that poet. The argument just says that we can take any peculiarity independently and compare it to the author's work. It concludes that, if the peculiarity matches, it can be concluded whether or not that work is "the work of that poet." However, what if that peculiarity matches the work of many other poets, too? The argument doesn't take that into account. In order to truly prove the conclusion, we would have to compare this peculiarity to a wide (and sufficient) selection of works consisting of many authors.

[maryadkins]

Your thinking on (C) is good, and on (B), too.

As for the others:

(A) is incorrect because it makes this situation about the labor involved. That's not why the test will never work perfectly. We don't know anything about the labor involved.

(D) is also out of scope. Literary effect?

(E) misses the test altogether. The point isn't to distinguish between conscious and unconscious but between idiosyncratic and common

[BackoftheEnvelope]

Having a crystal-clear understanding of our task is the most important step in solving this question accurately and without any lingering uncertainty. Read the stem closely: why can the test "never provide conclusive proof" of authorship? This is what allows us to easily eliminate (B). Below, I've provided my real-time thoughts as I was solving the question (I left them unedited so future visitors could see where I went wrong and how I caught myself):

Task: Find flaws with the test for authorship
Test: If peculiarities appear in the work of only one poet, they are likely to be personal idiosyncrasies. Allows scholars to identify a poem as the work of a particular poet by comparing poem of unknown authorship to work of that poet.

Flaw: Takes for granted that every work of a particular poet will contain their personal idiosyncrasies (PS). Perhaps poet includes a PS in one poem, but not in another poem, and there are no other PS he uses. The test would not identify the poet as the author even though they are. [As you can see here, I predicted the substance of (B) with this flaw. Fortunately, I remembered that I had to discuss why the test could never provide CONCLUSIVE proof when I was stuck between (B) and (C).]

Elimination: (A) Irrelevant. (B) Leave it. (C) Leave it. (D) Irrelevant. (E) Irrelevant.
Confirmation: (C) is essentially saying that we could never know conclusively whether that peculiarity was unique to a particular author. This matches our task perfectly. Perhaps we discover a poem by X in the future that uses a personal idiosyncrasy we previously relied on to (incorrectly) attribute authorship of another poem to Y. Upon discovering this, we’d be compelled to revise our claims of authorship with the new evidence that X also used the personal idiosyncrasy we relied on as a distinguishing feature of Y's work. Therefore, the proof can never be conclusive.

(B) Does not match our task. It also assumes there are no other peculiarities that can distinguish the work of one poet against their other works. Perhaps, a poet writes two poems A and B using peculiarity X in A but not in B, but using peculiarity Y in both A and B. Even if we don't find peculiarity X in B, we could still attribute B to our poet because peculiarity Y is used in both A and B.

[greenapples]

I had been looking at this question for such a long time...

Here is my take on why (B) is not right. The argument for this question is that peculiarities allow us to identify whether the unknown poem belongs to the known poet that it's being compared with, or whether it's by an unknown poet after all. In short, pecularities -> identify if it's written by A or B.

(B) states that peculiarity is likely to be widely scattered in the work of a poet, so that a single poem in question might not include that peculiarity. This is totally out of scope and doesn't weaken the question at all, because the argument doesn't care what happens when there is no peculiarity. It only focus on what happens when there is a peculiarity.

Now (C) hits the weak spot because it states that peculiarity after all, could be either A or B. So this doesn't allow us to reach the effect.

Would this make sense?

Thanks in advance.

[xinw775]

I think maybe you could think in this way:
(C) Even this peculiarity is in every Poet Emma's poem, it is still possible that Anne ( grade 1 student) writes a poem using intentionally the same peculiarity .
Is Anne the same poet? No.

Hope that helps.