Traditional "talk" therapy, in which a patient with a psychological disorder discusses it with a trained therapist, p...

shunhe on October 2, 2020

Hi @faithwood21,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at what this argument is telling us. We’re told that traditional talk therapy is when a patient with a psychological disorder talks about it with a trained therapist. And this produces chemical changes in the brain. And these changes seem to correspond to improvements in the patient’s behavior. Thus, the argument concludes, physicians will eventually be able to treat such patients as effectively through pharmacological intervention (so basically using drugs, like prescription drugs) in the brain’s neurochemistry as talk methods. So they’re saying, talk methods works, and they have these chemical changes. So we can use pills to just skip the talk method part and just go directly to the chemical changes, and that’ll be as effective!

So now we’re asked for an assumption on which the argument depends. In other words, this is a strengthen with necessary premise question, and we can use the negation test to see what answer choices are wrong or right.

For (A), let’s say that some neurochemical changes don’t produce corresponding psychological changes. Does that weaken the argument? No, it’s perfectly consistent with the argument, so (A) isn’t something the argument relies upon.

For (B), let’s say that improvements in a patient’s behavior don’t occur only through chemical changes in the brain’s neurochemistry; there’s some other sources of the improvements. Does that weaken the argument? Yes! If that’s true, then to get the improvements, we can’t just change the neurochemistry, we need the other stuff too. And since negating (B) weakens the argument, it’s a necessary assumption, and thus the correct answer.
?For (C), if talk therapy has been effective at bringing about psychological change, that doesn’t weaken the argument, throw it out.

For (D), does the argument have to conclude something about psychology and neuroscience eventually being indistinguishable? No, throw it out.

For (E), do we care about the costs? No, not really, throw it out.

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

Kweb1016 on December 7, 2020

So this is essentially a correlation/causation flaw, right?