Question:
The following editorial appeared in the Elm City paper.
`The construction last year of a shopping mall in downtown Oak City was a mistake. Since the mall has opened, a number of local businesses have closed, and the downtown area suffers from an acute parking shortage, and arrests for crime and vagrancy have increased in the nearby Oak City Park. Elm City should pay attention to the example of the Oak City mall and deny the application to build a shopping mall in Elm City.~
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.
********************
Your Answer:
The author's conclusion is that Elm City should deny the application to build a shopping mall in the city. To substantiate the conclusion, the author points out that accompany with the parking shortage in the downtown area, a number of local businesses have closed since the shopping mall has opened in downtown Oak City. Also, the author points out that the arrests for crime and vagrancy have increased in the nearby Oak City Park. Close scrutiny, however, reveals several logical flaws of this argument.
To begin with, the author fails to establish the causal relationship between the shopping mall's opening and the closing of local businesses. The sequence of these events, in itself, does not suffice to prove that the former caused the later one. It is entirely possible that the Oak City suffers a depression in economy ever since the mall opened, and also, that the technique of local businesses had been out of date. No additional evidence linking the two events is offered in the argument, thus, leaving the possibility that the two events are merely coincident rather than causally related.
