PrepTest 118, Section 1, Question 20
Reviewer: Many historians claim, in their own treatment(46 more words not shown)
The reviewer's reasoning is most(8 more words not shown)
- Atakes for granted(15 more words not shown)
- Boffers evidence that(8 more words not shown)
- Cfails to recognize(14 more words not shown)
- Dtakes for granted(16 more words not shown)
- Efails to recognize(9 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Those might be different historians. Finding biased historical work doesn't automatically expose the people who claim to be objective. The reviewer points to false explanations shaped by their authors' prejudices. Let's accept that such work exists. The people who wrote it might openly acknowledge their biases, while the historians making the particular claims of objectivity might be someone else entirely. In that case, the examples wouldn't show what's wrong with these historians' claims.
What we’re looking for
We don't have to decide whether perfect objectivity is possible. The flaw question concerns this reviewer's reason for rejecting these claims. To use the biased work against the historians who profess objectivity, the reviewer needs a connection between the two groups. That is the missing piece I'd look for.
Working the answers
- A
The reviewer doesn't argue that historians ought to follow the natural sciences' standard. The historians themselves invoke that comparison in their claims. The reviewer then questions whether the claims are credible. Describing and challenging what people profess doesn't require endorsing that standard as something every field should adopt.
- B
The biased work doesn't undermine the reviewer's conclusion by showing these historians to be objective. It simply hasn't been connected to the historians whose claims the reviewer rejects. Evidence that fails to establish a conclusion isn't necessarily evidence for its opposite.
- C
Historians might try to detect and correct their own prejudices. But trying doesn't establish success, and the argument's immediate problem remains: whose biased work are we looking at? The existence of corrective methods doesn't identify the missing connection between those works and the people claiming objectivity.
- DCorrect
Some of the prejudiced work must come from historians who claim to be objective for those examples to challenge those claims. Otherwise, the reviewer could be using one group's failings to discredit a different group. D supplies the overlap the argument takes for granted.
- E
A biased explanation could happen to be true. That doesn't establish that its author is free from prejudice, which is the issue behind these claims of objectivity. Moreover, the reviewer points specifically to false explanations, not to a rule that every ideologically influenced explanation must be false. E doesn't address the unsupported group connection.
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