LR Drill Set 14, Question 3
The Venetian Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio used sumptuous(24 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(14 more words not shown)
- AMost Renaissance painters(24 more words not shown)
- BIn Italian Renaissance(27 more words not shown)
- CWorks of art(22 more words not shown)
- DThe anonymous painting(21 more words not shown)
- ESince late-Renaissance paintings(18 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Most of my books could be written in English without most English-language books being mine.
That's the direction problem here. Carpaccio used sumptuous reds in most of his paintings. We learn a pattern within his work. Then we find a painting with those reds and act as though that identifies him as the likely artist. What about all the other artists who might use the same colors?
Imagine Carpaccio produced a hundred paintings with those reds, while other painters produced thousands. The reds could be typical of Carpaccio without a painting containing them being likely to be his. We aren't given those numbers; they illustrate why the first percentage doesn't establish the second probability.
What we’re looking for
For the parallel flaw, look for a group in which a feature is common, an object that has the feature, and an unsupported conclusion that the object probably belongs to that group. Keep 'probably' in the match. The conclusion needn't be certain to make this mistake.
Working the answers
- A
This uses a general tendency for Renaissance painters to stick to one medium, then uses the identified medium of a painting to infer the painter's practice. It doesn't argue that oil paintings probably belong to the Renaissance because most Renaissance paintings are in oil. The original's move from a common feature back to likely group membership is missing.
- B
This carries a pattern from Italian Renaissance painting to Western art as a whole. The larger category includes other periods and places, so the inference may overgeneralize. But that is a different error from seeing a feature and assigning a particular painting to the group where that feature is common.
- C
This starts with a Renaissance work and predicts that it shares a feature common among Renaissance works: being commissioned by a patron. It moves from known group membership toward the usual feature. The original goes the other way, from a feature to supposed group membership.
- DCorrect
Rearrange the sentences if their order makes the pattern hard to see: most early Florentine paintings were in tempera; St. Sebastian is in tempera; therefore it is probably early Florentine.
Early Florentine paintings play the role of Carpaccio's paintings. Tempera plays the role of sumptuous reds. The anonymous painting has the common feature, but that doesn't show that most paintings with the feature belong to the specified group. Plenty of other paintings could be in tempera, just as other artists could use those reds. The same unsupported direction appears even though the conclusion comes first.
- E
Arnoldi is already identified as a late-Renaissance painter. The argument uses the prevalence of oil in that period to predict what material he used. It doesn't identify a known oil painting and infer that it came from the late Renaissance. Again, the direction doesn't match the original mistake.
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