Unit quiz: Evidence, borderline cases, and reconstructing an argument fairly

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Question 1

A manager forms the settled belief that a job candidate is dishonest after hearing a single unverified remark, and rejects the application. A colleague argues that since the candidate might in fact have been dishonest, no wrong was done. Assess the colleague's reasoning.The reasoning is mistaken because the wrong Clifford identifies is located in forming the belief without adequate inquiry, so a lucky outcome does not remove it, and the manager had a check availableThe reasoning is mistaken because the wrong lies entirely in the harm the rejection caused the candidate, and the remark was too weak to justify any decision

Question 2

A regulator is told that because a term in a statute admits borderline cases, the statute is ambiguous and cannot be applied at all. Diagnose the reasoning with the level's distinctions.It correctly identifies that a term with borderline cases has no meaning, so the statute must be rewritten before any decision is madeIt conflates vagueness with ambiguity: a vague term admits borderline cases that resist further inquiry, while an ambiguous term has separable meanings, so the remedy is to specify a convention for the borderline region rather than to abandon the rule

Question 3

An article reports that employees who take more sick leave have lower productivity, and concludes that reducing sick leave would raise productivity. A reader objects that the people taking leave are already the sick ones. What is the reader's objection and how should it be classified?The objection identifies a common cause of both the leave and the low productivity, which is health status, so the association is insufficient for the causal conclusion and the intervention reasoning would not be licensedThe objection identifies a mediator between leave and productivity, showing that the association reverses when the pathway is blocked

Question 4

A software team reports that its model predicts insolvency six months in advance with high accuracy, and concludes that the team understands what causes insolvency. Evaluate the inference.The inference is sound because the six-month lead time shows the model is tracking the causal process rather than any contemporaneous correlationPredictive accuracy does not establish explanatory understanding, and the assessment turns on whether the features used are upstream of insolvency and whether intervening on them would change the outcome

Question 5

A debater summarises an opponent's position as the claim that no border should be enforced at all, and then shows that this claim is absurd. The opponent in fact proposed a specific change to asylum processing. What has gone wrong, and what should the debater do instead?The debater has substituted a stronger claim, which is a straw man and a misattribution, and should reconstruct the actual proposal with the premises its proponent accepts before identifying the weakest linkThe debater has committed the fallacy fallacy by rejecting a conclusion on the basis of a defective argument for it

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