Advertisement: Our oat bran cereal is the only one that has printed right on its package all of its claimed health benefits. And really health-conscious consumers have demonstrated that these health claims are true by buying our cereal since they would not have bought our cereal unless the claims were true. How do we know these consumers are really health-conscious? No really health-conscious consumer would buy food in a package that did not have accurate information about the food’s health benefits printed on it.
Question: Which one of the following employs a flawed argumentative strategy that is most closely parallel to the flawed argumentative strategy in the advertisement above?
Options:
A. Greeting one’s coworkers must be a polite thing to do, because people who are considered polite always greet their coworkers. The proof that these people really are polite is that they are consistently polite in their daily lives.
B. This card game must be intellectually challenging, because it is played by highly intelligent people, who play only intellectually challenging card games. In fact, these players’ intelligence is demonstrated by the fact that they play this game.
C. When coffee is being chosen, Brand Z is the coffee chosen by people with highly developed taste in coffee. These people showed their highly developed taste in coffee by correctly distinguishing eight brands of coffee from each other in a taste test.
D. That jacket must have been made for a very short person, because only very short people were able to fit into it. We know that they were very short because we saw them before they tried on the jacket.
E. This painting is a poor imitation, because only people with poor eyesight mistook it for the original. That these people have poor eyesight is demonstrated by the fact that they also mistook a vase of flowers in the painting for a peacock.
Answer: B