Strengthen with Necessary Premise Questions - - Question 30
J. J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics, trained many physicists,...
shafieiavaOctober 1, 2019
B v C
Can you please explain the difference between answer choices B and C? I got that the flaw in the argument had to do with creative researchers but was confused on how the negation of each impacted the argument. Can someone explain the thought process that would lead you to choose C over B?
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The argument tells us that JJ Thompson, a prominent researcher, trained many other physicists who went on to win prestigious awards. The argument then concludes that the skills needed for creative research can be taught and learned. The argument has an obvious gap concluding solely based on the evidence that all these physicists got awards/ professorship that they learned how to engage in creative research from JJ Thompson.
Let's look at (B) and (C):
(B) All the scientists trained by JJ Thompson were renowned for their creative scientific research.
(B) only provides one piece of the puzzle, it tells us that all these scientists were renowned for their creative scientific research but it falls short of supporting the argument's conclusion. The conclusion implies that these scientists have creative scientific research skills because they learned these skills from JJ Thompson. (B) fails to provide this connection between their skills and their training under JJ Thompson. If we negate (B) -"some scientists trained by JJ Thompson were not renowned for their creative research," it has no impact on the conclusion. It is possible that not every scientist trained by JJ Thompson were not renowned for their creative research - in fact, one scientist is enough - to conclude that these skills can be taught and learned.
(C) At least one of the scientists trained by JJ Thompson was not a creative researcher before coming to him.
(C) fills the gap in the argument - if at least one of scientists trained by JJ Thompson was not a creative researcher before his training, we can conclude that he learned these skills from JJ Thompson, thus creative research skills can be taught and learned. If we negate (C) - "no scientist was not a creative researcher before coming to JJ Thompson", or in other words, everyone who worked with JJ Thompson already had skills for creative research before their collaboration, then the argument falls apart because we can no longer conclude that JJ Thompson had anything to do with their creative research skills, thus we can no longer conclude that these skills can be taught or learned. We can therefore say that (C) is a necessary assumption for the argument to follow logically.
