Thank you for your question. Lucien asserts that the only possible cause of homelessness is people's inability or unwillingness to work to pay rent. Maria responds by pointing to data that shows that may homeless people actually hold regular jobs, so they are neither unable or unwilling to work. That is why (B) is the correct answer.
Answer choice (D) is incorrect because the evidence that Lucien offers--that there are available housing units--is not used by Maria to support her conclusion. Maria does not discuss housing availability at all. She only responds to Lucien's claims re: whether the homeless are able and willing to work.
Hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any additional questions.
djayasingheDecember 29, 2018
How this addressing a presupposition?
"Homelessness can, therefore, only be caused by people's inability or unwillingness to work to pay the rent" -- Doesn't Maria answer to this part of Lucien's statement.. but it is not a presupposition. Maybe I am misunderstanding the definition of the word "presupposition."
RaviDecember 29, 2018
@djayasinghe,
Happy to help. The dictionary definition of "presupposition" is a thing tacitly assumed beforehand at the beginning of a line of argument or course of action. In short, to presuppose is to assume.
In the argument, Lucien states that many apartments in his own building remain unrented and his professional colleagues report similar vacancies where they live. He then says since apartments clearly are available, homelessness is not a housing problem. Then, he concludes that homelessness can only be caused by people's inability or unwillingness to work to pay the rent. He uses this to support his overall conclusion that the public housing advocates' claim that the many homeless people in this city are proof that there is insufficient housing available to them and therefore more low-income apartments are needed is absurd.
Lucien's makes a big assumption when he goes from discussing "unrented" apartments in his building to "homelessness can, therefore, only be caused by people's inability or unwillingness to work to pay the rent" in that he presupposes that the homeless people of this city are not working. In order for his conclusion to follow from his premises, he must be assuming that they're not earning income through work.
Maria responds to Lucien by stating that all recent studies show that a significant percentage of this city's homeless people hold regular jobs. She then concludes that the homeless are people who lack neither will nor ability. In stating this, Maria is directly attacking Lucien's assumption that the homeless people aren't working by providing evidence that falsifies that claim.
This is why B is correct, and this is why Maria is showing that a presupposition of his argument is false.
Does this make sense? Let us know if you have any more questions!
Max-ChermanAugust 15, 2019
This is very helpful. I was initially confused because I interpreted "presupposition" as "premise," which is obviously incorrect since the presupposition in this case is an unstated assumption that is not explicit in Lucien's argument. Are there words that question stems use or do not use to signal a reference to an argument's explicit premises versus other unstated assumptions, context, etc. that may accompany an argument?
