Political scientist: All governments worthy of respect allow their citizens to dissent from governmental policies. N...

Brett-Lindsay July 12, 2020

Resolve the cliffhanger

I'm just wondering what the "some relationship" is that is mentioned in the explanation. I couldn't figure it out. It's mentioned in the "answer anticipation" section: Answer Anticipation: The stimulus presents us with two conditional premises that share the same sufficient condition. The conclusion then erroneously treats these premises as being able to be chained together to form a new conditional statement. While there is a valid conclusion to be drawn (see if you can find it—it's a "some" relationship!), a new conditional can't be created by chaining together two that share a sufficient condition. It'll probably be easier once I've done the quantifiers lesson, but I am curious about it now. Thanks,

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Victoria July 28, 2020

Hi @Brett-Lindsay,

"All" statements can be reversed if you use "some."

From A --> B, we can conclude two things:

(1) Not B --> Not A
(2) B - some - A

Here, we can reverse the first sentence to conclude that "some governments that allow their citizens to dissent from governmental policies are governments worthy of respect."

GWR --> CDGP
Not GWR --> Not CDGP

CDGP - some - GWR

Hope this helps! You'll learn all about this in the quantifiers lesson. Keep up the good work and please let us know if you have any further questions.

Brett-Lindsay July 28, 2020

Thanks @Victoria.

I appreciate the reply. You're right! After the Quantifiers lessons, the relationship does seem rather obvious.

For everybody else's benefit, if you're struggling with S/N, just keep at it, no matter how long it takes. It's critical for the later lessons. It took me about 10 days to get through the lessons and questions. Slow, but worth it.

Also, this course is very well structured - the lessons flow logically from one to another. I'm amazed how much help these early lessons are having on the LG section.

Victoria August 4, 2020

Thanks @Brett-Lindsay,

Glad to hear the course is working well for you! Keep up the awesome work!