Ecological terms like "invasive species" invoke human cultural standards like belonging, citizenship, fair play, and ...

shunhe on August 7, 2020

Hi @ruchitaj,

Thanks for the question! So let’s walk through the stimulus real quick. We’re told that ecological terms like “invasive species” bring in implied meanings from other areas of life, which can influence ecologists’ opinions of organisms based on those terms, even before they collect any data on them. And so to prevent this, the argument concludes, the ecologists shouldn’t use those terms.

Now we’re asked for a situation that most closely conforms to the principle above. First things first, we have to figure that out. And a very rough picture is basically that “we shouldn’t use words/do things that’ll bias us about things before we give them a fair chance.”

So now let’s take a look at (A), which tells us that the situation is about how police shouldn’t use terms like “thief” when talking to suspects no matter how strong the evidence of their guilt, since suspects are officially innocent until convicted by a court. But notice that in the original stimulus, we’re told about how the opinions of organisms happens “before any data is gathered.” Whereas the police in this scenario might already have very strong evidence of guilt. So the fact that this says they shouldn’t use the terms “no matter how strong the evidence of their guilt” makes it wrong, since having a lot of evidence for one conclusion and not having any evidence are two very different situations.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.