Conclusion: There is no reason why the work of scientists has to be officially confirmed before being published.
Why? There is a system in place for the confirmation or disconfirmation of scientific findings, which is the replication of results by other scientists. Any poor work by scientists will be exposed and rendered harmless when other scientists conduct the experiments and obtain disconfirmatory results.
We are looking for an answer choice that weakens the argument.
Answer choice (C) does nothing to the argument. The fact that a majority of scientists are under pressure to make their work accessible to the scrutiny of replication has no bearing on our argument. We are told that this system is already in place, i.e. the replication of results by other scientists is occurring and this process helps expose and render harmless poor work by scientists. Whether a majority or minority of scientists are under pressure for this system does not mean the system is not in place.
Answer choice (A) weakens the argument because it identifies a flaw in this system, which is used as evidence that there is no reason why the work of scientists have to officially be confirmed before being published. If scientific experiments have the possibility of going unchallenged for many years before they are replicated, then many years could potentially pass before we expose poor scientific work by obtaining disconfirmatory results. Thus, answer choice (A) gives us a reason why the work of scientists has to be officially confirmed before being published, i.e. erroneous work could be published and remain unexposed for long periods of time.
Hope that helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
kdehoyosAugust 1, 2018
I chose answer choice A. However, I was stuck between answer choice A and E. Could you please explain why answer choice E is incorrect.
AnitaAugust 2, 2018
@kdehoyos Here, an experiment may have been done by one scientist or many scientists and still render the same result: that there's a flawed experiment. What the prompt suggests is that any of these type experiments will be disproven and therefore rendered harmless. It's much more important that they actually may not be disproven in enough time to be rendered harmless than that it was a few people who made the mistake. Does that make sense?
kdehoyosAugust 2, 2018
Yes, makes sense! Thank you!
Ashley-Tien-2May 7, 2021
So does this mean if the poor scientific work isn't disconfirmed it may potentially be harmful? Is there a causal relationship going on here?
