Critical Reasoning

Most scholars agree that King Alfred (A.D 849 - 899) personally translated a number of Latin texts into Old English. One historian contends that Alfred also personally penned his own law code, arguing that the numerous differences between the language of the law code and Alfred's translation of Latin texts are overweighted by the even more numerous similarities. Linguistic similarities, however, are what one expects in texts from the same language, the same time, and the same region. Apart from Alfred's surviving trasnlation and law code, there are only two other extant works from the same dialect and milieu, so it is risky to assume here that linguistic similarities point to common authorship.

The passage above proceeds by :

(A) Providing examples that underscore another argument's conclusion.

(B) questioning the plausibility of an assumption on which another argument depends.

(c) showing that a principle if generally applied would have anomalous consequences.

(D) showing that the premises of another argument are mutually inconsistent.

(E) using argument by analogy to undermine a principle implicit in another argument.

[spoiler]OA:B[/spoiler]

joealam1 wrote:Most scholars agree that King Alfred (A.D 849 - 899) personally translated a number of Latin texts into Old English. One historian contends that Alfred also personally penned his own law code, arguing that the numerous differences between the language of the law code and Alfred's translation of Latin texts are overweighted by the even more numerous similarities. Linguistic similarities, however, are what one expects in texts from the same language, the same time, and the same region. Apart from Alfred's surviving trasnlation and law code, there are only two other extant works from the same dialect and milieu, so it is risky to assume here that linguistic similarities point to common authorship.

The passage above proceeds by :

(A) Providing examples that underscore another argument's conclusion.

(B) questioning the plausibility of an assumption on which another argument depends.

(c) showing that a principle if generally applied would have anomalous consequences.

(D) showing that the premises of another argument are mutually inconsistent.

(E) using argument by analogy to undermine a principle implicit in another argument.

[spoiler]OA:B[/spoiler]

One scholar asserts that King Alfred wrote his own law code. The scholar's assumption: if two texts have more similarities than differences, the same writer produced both.

The argument contends that this assumption is problematic. Any two written works in the same language, from the same time, etc. will have similarities.

So the argument is questioning the scholar's assumption that text similarity = same author. The answer is B