Thanks for the question! If I’m not mistaken, you’re looking at the Weaken Video questions, examples 1-4. Let me know if I’m addressing the wrong questions. I think what the claim being made here is just that it’s possible to understand these questions in terms of S&N if we want to even though they’re weaken questions, though as you can see in example 2, we certainly don’t have to go through any diagramming, and we don’t explicitly think about these questions in terms of S&N.
So the first question we’re dealing with in example 1 has to do with reviewers of patent applications denying a patent for a genetically engineered mouse specifically designed to study cancer. Why is this a S&N? Because we’re given an argument that tells us that rules governing the granting of patents specifically disallow patents for new animal varieties. In other words, we’re told that
New variety of animal —> Patent denied.
In S&N terms, the mouse’s being a new variety of animal is a sufficient condition for the denial of a patent. Similarly, we know that if we are dealing with a new variety of animal, it is necessarily true that the patent will be denied.
Moving on to the second example, which has to do with tomato soup. This is one of the ones that doesn’t lend itself as well to S&N terms, but we can still understand it in these terms of we want. There seems to be an assumption here that
Contains a certain level of vitamin C —> Provides good nutrition
The third example’s S&N part concerns the last sentence, which we can diagram as:
carpet-producing companies gain market share —> purchasing competitors
Finally, in the fourth example, we can diagram the first sentence as:
serious medical condition —> want to be told
keeping in mind that this logic only applies to “most†people. Another way of diagramming this would be to use a “most†quantifier, but using S&N is another way of thinking about it.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
the66guyon August 10, 2021
In example three why don't we include "not aggressive" in the conclusion?
