The author believes that the criticism of Joshua Smith's new novel is unwarranted. The criticism is that the novel is implausible. The author, however, points out that this is not a valid criticism since "each one of the incidents in which Smith's hero gets involved is the kind of incident that could very well have happened to someone or other."
But, just because each ONE of the incidents is plausible does not mean that taking the story as a whole would also be plausible. In other words, just because each individual part of the novel is plausible does not mean that the novel as a whole is plausible.
For instance, there are many individual happy scenes in Romeo and Juliet, but the play as whole is considered to be a tragedy.
So the error in this argument is that the author is accepting that the novel as a whole has the same characteristics as its individual parts, when there is no evidence to support such a belief, i.e. answer choice (D): "It takes for granted that a whole story will have a given characteristic if each of its parts has that characteristic."
Hope that helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
AmarisPMay 20, 2015
I was torn between answer choice A and D. Would answer choice A be true, but not the flaw of the argument?
NazMay 20, 2015
The flaw of the argument is that just because each part of the novel is believable, does not mean that when the novel is taken as a whole it will also be believable (see the explanation for answer choice (D) in the above thread). It is a part to whole flaw.
Answer choice (A) does not display this type of flaw. Answer choice (A) says that the argument is depending on the assumption that a criticism can be validly dismissed as unwarranted if it is offered by someone who has previously shown questionable judgment.
We know that Joshua Smith's novel was criticized by the book editor of the Daily Standard as implausible, and that this criticism, like others made from the same editor in the past are unwarranted. But, the argument never tells us that they are unwarranted because the editor of the Daily Standard has previously displayed questionable judgment. So we cannot assume that the argument relies on this unstated assumptions in answer choice (A).
Thus, answer choice (A) is neither true, nor is it the correct answer.
Hope that clears things up! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
