Lindsey: Several people claim that our company was unfair when it failed to give bonuses to the staff. Perhaps they r...

Ellison-Hersch January 3, 2022

Hi, I'm not an instructor, but I diagrammed this as:

Increased profits over last year's -> Staff get bonus
Conclusion: not increase profits over last year's -> not staff get bonus

So basically it's an illegal negation. The only correct thing we can conclude based on the set up is that if the staff did not get bonuses, then the company did not increase its profit over last year's.

Increasing profits over last year's is only one sufficient condition for the Staff to get bonuses, it is not the necessary condition in this setup. There could be other sufficient conditions for the staff to get bonuses that were possibly met. Answer choice B get's at this flaw by pointing out that just because one sufficient condition was not met (increasing over last year's profits), doesn't mean there weren't others that were met to trigger the necessary (staff getting bonuses).

Jay-Etter January 14, 2022

Hi, just chiming in as an instructor to confirm that Ellison's explanation here is perfect. Good work!