PrepTest 130, Section 3, Question 2
All works of art are beautiful and have(23 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the argument(5 more words not shown)
- Auses the inherently(11 more words not shown)
- Battempts to establish(12 more words not shown)
- Cconcludes, simply because(22 more words not shown)
- Dpresumes, without providing(9 more words not shown)
- Efails to consider(21 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Let's accept that all works of art are beautiful and instructive. Does that mean anything beautiful and instructive must be art? That is the step I don't accept.
Think about squares and rectangles. Every square is a rectangle, but a rectangle need not be a square. A long, narrow rectangle has the property shared by all squares without belonging to that more specific group. Knowing one property of every square doesn't tell us that only squares have it.
What we’re looking for
The same problem remains when the argument gives us two properties. Perhaps the natural world is beautiful and teaches us things, yet isn't a work of art. Nothing in the premise says that art is the only source of beauty and instruction. We know what follows from something's being art; we haven't been given a rule for identifying everything that counts as art. That unsupported identification is what the flaw answer should describe.
Working the answers
- A
Defining beauty more precisely wouldn't fix the inference. Even with a perfectly clear definition, something outside the category of art could possess beauty and have something to teach us. The problem is how the properties are used, not simply that one term is vague.
- B
The premises aren't solely about factual matters in the sense this answer requires: calling all art beautiful already makes an evaluation. More importantly, the argument's problem is not that it draws an evaluative conclusion at all. It incorrectly treats the properties of every work of art as a test that guarantees something is art.
- CCorrect
The two qualities are beauty and instructiveness. Every work of art possesses them, and the natural world possesses them too. But sharing those qualities doesn't establish that the natural world is a work of art. As with the rectangle that isn't a square, something could have properties shared by all members of a group without itself belonging to that group.
- D
This says that anything instructive must also be beautiful. The premise only says that works of art have both qualities; it doesn't connect those qualities across all objects. The argument doesn't need to assume that instruction is restricted to beautiful things in order to make its mistaken classification of nature.
- E
Beautiful, instructive things outside the natural world wouldn't settle whether the natural world is art. There could be many such things, whether they were art or not. The relevant overlooked possibility is that something can be beautiful and instructive without being art, not that it can be outside nature.
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