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113. The following appeared in a memorandum written by the assistant manager of a store that sells gourmet food items from various countries.
“A local wine store made an interesting discovery last month: it sold more French than Italian wine on days when it played recordings of French music, but it sold more Italian than French wine on days when Italian songs were played. Therefore, I recommend that we put food specialties from one particular country on sale for a week at a time and play only music from that country while the sale is going on. By this means we will increase our profits in the same way that the wine store did, and we will be able to predict more precisely what items we should stock at any given time.”
Discuss how well reasoned . . . et
In this argument, the author asserts that the gourmet food store will be able to increase the profits and even predict to stock the items just simply by playing the only music from the country which the food comes while the sale is going on. To support his conclusion, the author cites that A local wine store made an interesting discovery last month: it sold more French than Italian wine on days when it played recordings of French music, but it sold more Italian than French wine on days when Italian songs were played. At first glance, the recommendation seems reasonable. But further reflection shows that the argument suffers several serious fallacies.
In the first place, the evidence the author cites is insufficient because only one store's example in only a short week can't support that all stores have the same prossibility of increasing sales by that way at any time. In addition, the author fails to distinguish the wine store from the gourmet food store. From the common sense, we know that one successful model of a particular business may not be able to use in another kind of business.
In the second place, the causal relation between music and sale increasing is doubtful in that the author doesn't rule out the probability of other factors that may affects the sales when a particular music is on. And we are not sure whether the event is coincident or not. i.e the thing might happen randomly and can't be drawn as a constant rule.
In sum, the proposal that the author made is unconvincing due to insufficient evidence and dubious causal relation. To strengthen the argument the author should show us a long term report from a large number of food stores which rules out other probabilities that might affect the result.
[此贴子已经被作者于2005-7-14 19:45:53编辑过] | 
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发表于 2005-7-10 22:12:00
