A friend of mine too the GRE this past saturday, and her "argumentative" essay question was pretty fascinating for us budding logicians. I'll briefly explain the argument, and go from there.
To condense the prompt, the argument is as follows:
P1. If you give students less homework, they will get better grades.
P2 The students got better grades.
Conclusion. It was because the students received less homework.
Now, that is the fallacy of affirming the consequent, which we all know is a big no-no. But, what are we to do when we come across arguments that are formally invalid? Well, I was speaking to Matt after class today, and he suggested that the next step is to allow for intellectual charity and try to help revise the argument in a way that makes sense.
I'm not sure where I was going with this post, but I found it interesting for the course!
So I suppose if in an argument containing a fallacy, if you can argue that there is no other antecedent that could lead to the consequent, then you have not created a fallacy. That would be a much larger argument than only two premises though.
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