The passage provides the strongest support for inferring that Lessing holds which one of the following views?
JohnSummerson April 16 at 09:48PM
I don't understand how there is a jump to the conclusion on question 8.
It is supposed to be flawed reasoning, but I do not agree that it is necessarily flawed. It is very easy to assume when it says that all the PLANTS in the garden are tulips and all tulips are tall that the tulips are tall plants. There is no specification on what qualifies as tall except for the fact that they were labeled as tall in the passage. It explicitly states in the premise that there are only tulips in the garden so, if they are all tall, then the only plants in the garden would be tall plants. Can someone please explain further why this is not something you can assume on this question? On many other questions you are told to simply use common sense to answer the problem and common sense tells you that if a tulip is a plant and it is tall then it is a tall plant.
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The flaw here is that the argument wrongly takes the label tall from the tulips and applies it to plants. While sometimes it's fair that if one thing has an attribute, then it is also true to apply that attribute to a broader description of that thing. For example, if we said the tulips were red it would be fair to say all plants there are red.
This is because red is a objective, non comparative thing. Something is either red or it isn't.
The same isn't true of tall, short, or other concepts that are pretty much entirely relational. By analogy, we could say that Rudy Gobert is the shortest player in the NBA, and that gobert is French. However we can't say that he is a short Frenchman. By changing our frame of reference, the argument here becomes invalid. Perhaps as an exact replica of the argument, we could say that all the first graders in class X are tall, therefore all the kids in class X are tall elementary school kids. The problem here is that a tall first grader is still a short elementary school kid.
