"if the Association wants a mayor who will attract more businesses to the town, Cooper is the only candidate it could support."
P1: AMB ==> C not C ==> not AMB
"the Association is supporting Cooper,"
P2: C
"it must have a goal of attracting more businesses to the town."
C: AMB
Here we are using "C," which is a necessary condition, to help us infer "AMB," which is a sufficient condition. However, we know that we can never use a necessary condition to infer anything else. A necessary condition does not give us any more information. Here we are mistaking a necessary condition for a sufficient condition.
Remember that we can always take the necessary condition of a principle rule and its contrapositive as a viable scenario. So, in this case, we could have "C" and "not AMB" at the same time. Meaning, that the Association could support Cooper but no have a goal of attracting more businesses to the town. There could be some other reason as to why they are supporting Cooper, i.e. answer choice (B).
Answer choice (E) is not relevant to the argument at hand. We do not care whether a mayoral candidate ha the goal of attracting businesses to a town. We are discussing whether the Association has this goal or not.
Hope that clears things up! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
ScottPalmerMarch 15, 2019
For the sentence "But if the association wants a mayor who will attract more business to the town, Cooper is the only candidate it could support."
If & the only both introduce sufficient conditions.
So if "if" comes before "the only" in a statement should we just treat "the only" as a necessary condition?
