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keats
Joined: 28 Nov 2014
Last visit: 08 Jun 2019
Posts: 727
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Concentration: Strategy
Schools: Fisher '19 (M$)
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16 Oct 2016, 11:44
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VeritasPrepKarishma
Please if you can elaborate on D. I am not sure why D cannot be the answer. If the musicologist is not aware of ALL of Sugg's music, isn't the conclusion weakened. How can musicologist comment that the work is typical of Sugg's when he himself is not aware of ALL of Sugg's music? May be he makes a comment of what part of Sugg's music he knows about, thereby weakening the force behind the conclusion.
VeritasPrepKarishma please help. I don't get this at all.
Thank you.
17 Oct 2016, 10:15
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Keats
Option D implies that the musicologist is not aware of certain works of Suggs that may or may not match with the song in question. It actually does not matter whether that unknown part of Suggs' work matches with the song - the fact that the musicologist already found similarity with the part of Suggs' work that he knows is not weakened by the dissimilarity (if at all there is) of the unknown part, given that such a song is atypical of other composers.
20 Nov 2017, 18:21
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The discussion above about harmony doesn't seem to capture the logical reason answer C is not correct. It's not the case that harmony is 'irrelevant' here. Harmony could be very relevant, if harmony gave us some reason to think Suggs did not write the song. But that's not what we get from answer C. We have this argument, paraphrasing:
- the melodies in the song are similar to Suggs' melodies, but are not similar to other contemporaneous writers' melodies
- therefore Suggs probably wrote the song
We want to weaken this argument.
Answer C says, paraphrasing: 'the harmonies in the song are similar to Suggs' harmonies (and are similar to other writers' harmonies too)'
How could that possibly weaken the argument? We learn that the harmonies could very well have been written by Suggs. The information is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis that Suggs wrote the song. At worst, this information is neutral (I'd say it slightly strengthens the argument). If you wanted to weaken the argument, you'd instead want a statement like this:
'the harmonies in the song are different from any harmonies Suggs used in other songs'
Then you'd have a reason to think Suggs did not write the song - this would be a clear weakener, and would be the right answer choice if it were there.
Note that you don't even need to know what harmony is to see that C is wrong. The logical point is that you never weaken a hypothesis by finding information perfectly consistent with that hypothesis.
- the melodies in the song are similar to Suggs' melodies, but are not similar to other contemporaneous writers' melodies
- therefore Suggs probably wrote the song
We want to weaken this argument.
Answer C says, paraphrasing: 'the harmonies in the song are similar to Suggs' harmonies (and are similar to other writers' harmonies too)'
How could that possibly weaken the argument? We learn that the harmonies could very well have been written by Suggs. The information is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis that Suggs wrote the song. At worst, this information is neutral (I'd say it slightly strengthens the argument). If you wanted to weaken the argument, you'd instead want a statement like this:
'the harmonies in the song are different from any harmonies Suggs used in other songs'
Then you'd have a reason to think Suggs did not write the song - this would be a clear weakener, and would be the right answer choice if it were there.
Note that you don't even need to know what harmony is to see that C is wrong. The logical point is that you never weaken a hypothesis by finding information perfectly consistent with that hypothesis.
