Logical reasoning PrepTest 102 · Section 3 · Question 14

Flawed

Errors in Reasoning Questions

Herbalist: My juices help physical coordination Doctors: The ingredients are harmful! Herbalist: They just want to be the only ones providing medicine, so there’s no reason not to try my juice.

This question has two viewpoints, and there’s a bit of a back-and-forth, so we broke that progression down in our Summary. With that noted, let’s start with the Herbalist’s main point - there’s no reason not to try his herbed juice. Well, was there any suggestion that there was a reason to avoid it? Yep - the doctors claim that the herbs are potentially harmful. So how does the Herbalist rebut this claim? By stating that the doctors have an interest in maintaining a monopoly on medical therapies. So the Herbalist calls the motive of the Doctors’ into question in order to undermine their conclusion. That’s an Attacking the Person flaw, and so we should look for that in the answer choices. However, there’s another flaw here that would be easy to miss! It doesn’t end up mattering because the Attacking the Person flaw ends up being the correct answer, but it could just as easily have been the other flaw. Here, let’s suppose for a second that the Herbalist’s attack does successfully show that the Doctors’ criticism is invalid. That would mean that she’s shown one reason to avoid her juices doesn’t apply. There could be others, however! This is a variation on the Absence of Evidence flaw - when showing a flaw in an argument is treated as showing that the conclusion is false instead of just unproven.