- UID
- 463355
- 在线时间
- 小时
- 注册时间
- 2009-8-10
- 最后登录
- 1970-1-1
- 主题
- 帖子
- 性别
- 保密
|
题目
2,The following appeared in a memorandum from the business department of the Apogee Company:
“When the Apogee Company had all its operations in one location, it was more profitable than it is today. Therefore, the Apogee Company should close down its field offices and conduct all its operations from a single location. Such centralization would improve profitability by cutting costs and helping the company maintain better supervision of all employees.”
Discuss how well reasoned . . . etc.
正文：
In this argument, the author claims that the Apogee Company can use centralization to improve profitability through cutting costs and maintaining better supervision. To support the conclusion, the author rested on such reasons as centralization used to help improve the profit.Under futher analyse, however, the conclusion is not as persuasive as it sounds. Throughout the argument, three serious logical fallacies can be easily found as follows.
Firstly, with a careful reexamination, it can be deduced that the author commits a post hoc fallacy. In this argument, the author argues that, since the centralization happened before the high profitability, the former caused the later. This reasoning, however, does not have any supportng details. There may also exist some other factors that lead to the high profitability. For example, the newly developed technology or the low costs of the materials may also resulted in the increased profits. Thus it is extremely perfunctory to form the cause-and-effect relationship between the cetralization and the high profit without excluding the probable factors.
Secondly, committing the fallacy of all things are equal, the author alleged that, without any convincing evidence, the whole situation of the Apogee Company will stay unchanged over the next decades. As a matter of fact, this statement is seriously flawed. Perhaps, as time pass by, the market conditions or the coorperation works of Apogee Company will change significantly and it will be favourable for a company to have field offices seperately located. The methods drawn from the current situations can not be applied to the future in such an unwarranted way. Consequently, the author can not reach the conclusion that the profitability will still increases after moving all the field offices together unless ruling out the possibilities of changing situations.
Finally, without any supportive details, the author reached the conclusion that the Apogee Company can increase the profit by cutting costs and maintaining better supervision with the help of cetralization. However, this conclusion would be judged highly suspicious. The author fails to consider this issue from all-round respects. Although centralization may has its benefits, the drawbacks can not be ignored. For instance, the cetralization will increase the transportation fees of the Apogee Company and will take much longer to have the products delivered than before when the field offices are scattered. The service quality of the company may decline. Therefore, under the help of a thorough consideration, the conclusion would be more unassailiable than ever before.
To sum up, the author fails to offer adequate evidence in support of the argument. To substantiate the reasoning, a consideraton of ruling out possibilities and likely results would be desirable.
|
|
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号
发表于 2010-2-19 19:29:35
收藏
收藏
楼主
