Bunuel wrote:
Byrne: One of our club’s bylaws specifies that any officer who fails to appear on time for any one of the quarterly board meetings, or who misses two of our monthly general meetings, must be suspended. Thibodeaux, an officer, was recently suspended. But Thibodeaux has never missed a monthly general meeting. Therefore, Thibodeaux must have failed to appear on time for a quarterly board meeting.
The reasoning in Byrne’s argument is flawed in that the argument
(A) fails to consider the possibility that Thibodeaux has arrived late for two or more monthly general meetings
(B) presumes, without providing justification, that if certain events each produce a particular result, then no other event is sufficient to produce that result
(C) takes for granted that an assumption required to establish the argument’s conclusion is sufficient to establish that conclusion
(D) fails to specify at what point someone arriving at a club meeting is officially deemed late
(E) does not specify how long Thibodeaux has been an officer
EXPLANATION FROM Fox LSAT
There’s a sufficient vs. necessary flaw here. Basically, the argument goes like this: Diving headfirst into an industrial sausage grinder will kill you. Stepping in front of a San Francisco Muni train will also kill you. Jimbo recently died. But Jimbo didn’t step in front of a Muni train, therefore Jimbo must have dived headfirst into an industrial sausage grinder.
That doesn’t make sense, does it? It shouldn’t. Your objection should be something like, “Uh… how do you know cancer didn’t get Jimbo? Heart attack? What about the million other mundane ways you can bite it?”
Same thing with Thibodeaux’s suspension. Being late, or missing meetings, are specified as ways you can get suspended. But maybe there are a million other ways to get suspended. Who knows? Like maybe Thibodeaux banged one of the other club member’s wives, or farted explosively in the club’s formal dining room. “Pull my finger!”
We’re asked to find the flaw. The flaw is, “Just because two things will get you suspended doesn’t mean that those are the
only two things that will get you suspended.”
A) Nah. Being
late to general meetings wasn’t mentioned as something you could get suspended for.
B) Yep. This is one way of describing the sufficient-necessary flaw. “Just because two things will produce the result of you dying doesn’t mean nothing else is sufficient to kill you.” Exactly.
C) Well, this would be a flaw, but it’s not the flaw in this argument. This would be the answer if the logic had gone like this: “Every Pixar movie is awesome, and this movie is awesome, therefore this movie is Pixar.” That’s also a sufficient-necessary flaw, but B does a better job of describing
exactly the way the flaw was played out, including the “if one thing didn’t do it, the other thing must have done it” part.
D) Huh? Nah. These details are just not important.
E) This is totally irrelevant.
Our answer is B