No one who lacks knowledge of a subject is competent to pass judgment on that subject. Since political know–how is a ...

shunhe on January 3, 2021

Hi @Rosibeth23,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take this sentence by sentence. First, we’re told that “no one who lacks knowledge of a subject is competent to pass judgment on that subject.” That we can diagram

Lack knowledge of a subject —> ~Competent to pass judgment on that subject

Then we’re told that only seasoned politicians are competent to judge whether a particular political policy is fair to all. “Only” introduces the necessary condition, so this is diagrammed

Competent to judge whether a policy is fair to all —> seasoned politician

So now we’re looking for a weakness of the argument. Note that the terms in these two premises aren’t really the same. One talks about “political know-how” whereas the other talks about being competent enough to pass judgment on a subject. Those aren’t necessarily the same thing, even though the argument assumes they are, and that’s the biggest flaw with this argument. That is bets spelled out by (D).

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

on December 3, 2021

thanks for the expln