PrepTest 122, Section 2, Question 18
New Age philosopher: Nature evolves organically and nonlinearly.(57 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the New(14 more words not shown)
- Atakes for granted(26 more words not shown)
- Boverlooks the possibility(24 more words not shown)
- Cfails to distinguish(20 more words not shown)
- Dtakes for granted(12 more words not shown)
- Etakes for granted(23 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Nature and our reasoning about nature are different things.
The philosopher describes nature as organic, nonlinear, and interconnected. Those descriptions may sound abstract, but we can follow the next step: because nature has those features, the best way to understand it must involve reasoning with those same features.
Why? A method could work well without resembling what it studies. Even if nature changes in complicated, uneven ways, a careful sequence of experiments might still help us understand those changes. We'd need to compare how well the methods work, rather than choose one because its description sounds like the description of nature.
The repeated word “nonlinear” especially makes me pause. Describing how nature evolves isn't the same as describing how we reason. Reusing the word doesn't establish that the two must match.
What we’re looking for
For the flaw, I'd look for that unsupported move from the properties of the subject to the properties our best reasoning must have. We don't have to prove that traditional science is best. We need to see why the philosopher hasn't ruled it out.
Working the answers
- A
This describes treating a required condition as though it were enough to establish a conclusion. That isn't the move here. The philosopher transfers descriptions of nature to a recommendation about the method of understanding it. A doesn't identify that unsupported transfer.
- B
This is close enough to read carefully: it distinguishes a phenomenon from reasoning about it. But it concerns whether their structures are always identical in the reasoning people actually do. The philosopher needn't believe that. People could use all kinds of reasoning that fails to match nature, and the philosopher could simply consider those methods inferior.
The conclusion is about what is required for the best possible understanding. E keeps that crucial claim about the best method; B's broader observation about actual reasoning doesn't directly challenge it.
- C
The author doesn't simply transfer a property of the whole to each part, or a property of a part to the whole. The conclusion makes a claim about reasoning. To describe the mistake, we need to connect nature with the method used to understand it, not just nature's parts with nature as a whole.
- D
The philosopher can admit that scientists think of interconnected things separately. In fact, the passage describes scientists deliberately isolating parts of nature. The claim is that doing this won't produce the best understanding, not that separating them in thought is impossible. D changes a claim about quality into a claim about possibility.
- ECorrect
This preserves both sides of the jump: nature is best understood as having certain properties, so the reasoning needed for the best understanding must share those properties. The philosopher assumes that matching description makes for the best method. A different kind of reasoning might still explain an interconnected, nonlinear subject very well. Nothing in the premises rules that out.
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