Sufficient & Necessary Questions - - Question 9

If a society encourages freedom of thought and expression, then, during the time when it does so, creativity will flo...

Kostey80 September 26, 2019

Can get the logic of the Text

I got the idea of how you found th correct answer, but I am struggling with the logic in a text why I can not do this way? EFTE>CF CF>18c EFTE>18c The sentence: "In the United States creativity flourished during the eighteenth century." Making me confused, what am I missing?

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SamA September 26, 2019

Hello @Kostey80,

The author of the passage makes the classic mistake of confusing the sufficient and necessary conditions.

EFTE - - - - - - - - - - -> CF

From this, we cannot conclude that:

CF - - - - - - - - - -> EFTE

We cannot simply reverse the sufficient and necessary conditions. Just because creativity flourished, it does not mean freedom of thought and expression was encouraged. There could have been other ways for creativity to flourish.

The question wants us to identify the answer choice that does not make this same error. In other words, the four wrong answers will make the same mistake as the author. A-D all make this same mistake.

Answer choice E is different. If a country is democratic (D), then the opinion of each citizen must have a meaningful effect on government (MEG).

D - - - - - - - - - -> MEG

None of the Western countries are democratic, because none of their citizens' opinions have this effect.

not MEG - - - - - - - - - - > not D

This is not an error in reasoning. This is a valid contrapositive. Negating the necessary condition (MEG) causes the sufficient condition (D) to fail as well.

Kostey80 September 26, 2019

I understood why the answer is correct, I can not understand why we are ignoring "In the United States creativity flourished during the eighteenth century."? Well at least it was ignored in explanation