[Mike Kim]

Hey Manchas – here you go —

Real Time Thoughts —

Conclusion: Claim that authors who write in order to give readers pleasure cannot impact truth is false.

Support: If conclusion were true, the “truth” in a book would be inversely proportional to popularity (since if a book is popular we can assume it gives people pleasure), and we would be able to say popular books must have untruth.

(what’s unspoken in the author’s reasoning is that since we “obviously” cannot say popular books certainly have untruth, the original claim must be false.)

What’s Wrong? The big thing that jumps out right away is that the conclusion is about the intentions of authors (regarding pleasure), while the support is about the actual experience (of readers getting pleasure) — these are two different things, and we need to bridge this gap.

Eliminate –

(A) doesn’t address our gap (longer answer: whether people “realize” they are having pleasure or not has nothing to do with reasoning in argument)
(B) is slightly tempting, but it’s about goals not working out, rather than goals matching up with actual consequences. So (B) can’t help this argument and we can cut it.
(C) Whether readers are “concerned” about truth or not doesn’t matter to us – cut it.
(D) is the type of answer I expected, per the given gap in reasoning (between intention and actual occurrence) — I’ll leave it.
(E) made me think for a second, but we don’t need to know that books can be popular for other reasons (other than just being pleasant) in order for the argument to work. (classic tempting answer b/c it matches something you might be thinking about the argument, rather than what the argument needs) –so, anyway, I cut it.

Confirm –

If (D) is true than we can connect author intentions with actual consequences.

If (D) were not true, what it would mean is that a book can give readers pleasure even if the author didn’t intend that, and this destroys the connection the author assumes between author intention and actual consequence.

HTH — let me know if you have any follow-up — MK

[manchas2]

Thanks Mike!