172 Unit 4 Applied critical thinking
4 Are there any assumptions that are not
stated in the passage but that the author
appears to be making in connection with
the claims made in paragraph 2?Activity
Commentary
Yes, there are. The most significant assumption
is that it is not possible for the police officer to
catch the thieves without driving too fast for
safety. The author claims that if the policy is
adhered to, the thieves will get away; and if it
isn’t, accidents will result. In so doing she
overlooks a third possibility: that some police
drivers may be sufficiently skilled to remain
within safety limits and to keep up with some
of the thieves. She paints it as a so-called
‘no-win situation’, but is it? Without some
statistical evidence it is hard to know what
grounds the author has for predicting that the
policy will inevitably fail one way or the other.
There is another assumption, too, although
it is a lot less obvious. It is that if the stolen car
were not being pursued, its driver would not
drive unsafely anyway. The author wants to
persuade the reader that there is no overall
benefit to the public from chasing car thieves,
only increased danger. That implies that the
danger to the public comes only, or mainly,
when car thieves are pursued. If they were left
to drive around the streets unpursued, can we
be sure there would not be just as many
accidents – or even more, if would-be thieves
get the idea they won’t be chased and arrested?
Again, the author is making a prediction on
the basis of no hard evidence. Her prediction
may be right – the policy of pursuing cars may
prove ineffective – but it doesn’t follow from
the reasons she gives unless she makes these
two major, and questionable, assumptions.3 What grounds does the author have for
saying that the police policy ‘emphasises
the stupidity’ of car chases?
What two explanations does the passage
offer as to why the policy is ‘ineffective’?Activity
Commentary
The author uses quite an ingenious piece of
reasoning to criticise the policy. She considers
the possible outcomes. Firstly, she considers
what will happen if the policy is observed
(‘adhered to’) by the police. Then she
considers what will happen if it is ignored. If it
is observed, says the author, the thieves will
get away, presumably because the police will
have to give up before the thieves do. If it is
ignored, then accidents will continue to
happen, just as they have happened in the
past. And since they have happened in the
past, it is obvious that the policy does not
work as it is claimed to.
The question also asked you to identify the
explanations that are offered for the policy’s
failure to work. There are two of these. The
first is that police officers find the chase
exciting, and that this affects their judgement
about safety. The second is that whereas the
police driver is likely to be competent to drive
safely at high speed, the pursued driver has
little driving experience, so that the officer
will overestimate what is a safe speed for the
car thief. The author concludes that not only
is the policy ineffective, but that it is ‘easy to
understand why’.
How successful is this reasoning? (This was
not part of the question you were asked, but
it is part of the next one.) Like all arguments,
its success depends not just on what is stated
but also on what is assumed, and whether the
assumptions that the argument rests on are
warranted assumptions.