With this in mind, read the following passage (Doc 2) and make a mental note of the information that it contains. It introduces a topic which will occupy the rest of the chapter, and feature in the next two.
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warm phase, coinciding with a particular alignment of the Earth and Sun, is far from adequate to justify an out-and-out prediction that the present interglacial will also last that long. No serious scientist would go so far. The author of the Geological Society webpage from which the information is Doc 1 was sourced claims only that:
F On these grounds, even without human intervention, another 20,000 years of warmth may be expected.
Compare this with C. Although it is drawing broadly the same conclusion, it expresses it in a careful way which would permit its author to fend off objections. Another 20,000 years may be expected, on the evidence supplied. That claim does not cease to be true, at the time of making it, even if in 10,000 years’ time it turns out to have been optimistic. Nor will F be falsified if new, contrary evidence comes to light, because the author has qualified the claim by prefacing it with: ‘On these grounds . . .’ You should
remember these details of presentation when you are constructing your own arguments. They may seem like purely linguistic points; but they can make the difference between inferring something that can be substantiated, and something that cannot.
Whoever inferred D has taken the right sort of care in expressing it. It is preceded by the phrase:
‘According to the recent geological record . . .’
and draws a conclusion that the record firmly supports. Recent ice ages (geologically speaking) have lasted between 3 and 17 times longer than interglacials. So glacial conditions have been the prevailing ones during that period, and it is the Earth’s present climatic state that is unusual. D is a safe inference.
For E to be true it would mean that the standard view was correct after all, and/or that the trend of the last three glaciation cycles was continuing. It would also require global warming to be taking place; and to be capable of delaying the onset of an ice age. E is not impossible, but it would take a lot more than the claims in Doc 1 to make it true. In a word, it is unsafe.
Commentary
Although the passage has a somewhat negative tone it is not openly judgemental in what it claims. We have to be careful,
therefore, what we read into the passage and what we infer from it. If someone has a poor opinion of lawyers generally, or of ‘ambulance chasers’ in particular, it would be easy to be led by prejudice into thinking that this document supports those viewpoints. It does not.
You cannot, for example, infer from it that lawyers are bad people, even if you happen to think that they are. If you included A in your list of safe inferences, then either you weren’t taking the question seriously, or you were simply giving a view based on prejudice, or other data that is not provided here. In fact there is practically never sufficient hard evidence for any claim as strong, as sweeping, or as judgemental as A. A is not even the kind of claim that can be ordinarily inferred reliably from purely factual information.
What about B? This certainly seems a more reasonable inference, and a less opinionated one. There is, too, a widely held belief that the For each of the following statements in turn,
assess whether or not it can reliably be concluded (inferred) from the above passage.
Activity
The industry surrounding large
compensation claims following accidents and personal injury has attracted much media attention, with stories of millions of dollars being awarded in damages to successful claimants, and of
compensation being sought for every kind of injury or loss. There has also been a dramatic increase in law firms – or ‘claim management firms’ that act as
intermediaries – canvassing for accident victims by advertising on television, the internet or on the street. (The phrase
‘ambulance chasers’ is often used to describe them.) People complain of getting unsolicited calls or text messages asking:
‘Have you had an accident that wasn’t your fault? . . .’ or words to that effect.
Television – especially daytime television – has a high proportion of such ads.
At the same time it has become commonplace for lawyers to offer their services on a no-win no-fee basis, which allows people on low or moderate incomes to go to court with no risk of running up expenses they couldn’t otherwise afford.
This is also known as a ‘conditional-fee agreement’. Lawyers earn nothing for unsuccessful claims but are entitled to charge up to twice their normal costs if the claim is successful. This practice, known as ‘uplift’, can add thousands to the bill the losing side then has to pay out.
DOC 2 A Lawyers are self-serving and
unscrupulous.
B Without the no-win no-fee option there would be fewer claims for personal injury.
C Advertising by law firms and/or claim management firms encourages clients to exaggerate or invent injuries.
D A no-win no-fee arrangement benefits the lawyer much more than it does the claimant.
E As long as they win more than 50% of conditional-fee cases, a law firm need not be out of pocket.
F Claims being pursued for personal injury have increased significantly since the introduction of conditional-fee agreements.
Note that even if there were statistics showing that since lawyers started advertising, more dishonest claims have been lodged, that would not permit an inference that the advertising was the cause, or that it gave encouragement (see cause–correlation fallacy in Chapter 2.10). In Doc 2, however, there is not even a correlation.
We are not given any data on numbers of dishonest claims before or after advertising began. C is definitely not a safe conclusion.
D claims that no-win no-fee arrangements, which on the surface look quite advantageous for the client, are actually of more benefit to the lawyers. Assuming that ‘benefit’ means
financial benefit, it is clear from Doc 2 that lawyers do get some benefit from the way in which the system works. They may lose money when the case is unsuccessful, but they have bigger costs awarded when they do succeed.
Provided they win more cases than they lose, they should be better off than if they didn’t take the case at all because the client could not afford the fee. On the other hand, the client benefits too, either by winning, or by having nothing to pay if the case fails. The question is whether the lawyer benefits more than the client; and again we find the passage
uninformative. There is simply no data in Doc 2 by which to quantify the gains comparatively.
However, Doc 2 does give strong support to E. This is because the information in Doc 2 is mainly explanatory. In particular it explains how lawyers can afford to take on cases without charging a fee. When they win a case they get back around twice their normal costs, to make up for the fee they would have been paid by the client, win or lose, under the old system. It is simple mathematical fact that so long as they don’t lose more cases than they win, they are not out of pocket. If they win more cases than they lose, they make money. We cannot infer that they do better out of this arrangement than the clients, as claimed by D. But if Doc 2 is factually correct, we can quite safely infer E.
If you were really alert you might have added that E carries the implicit assumption number of claims has risen significantly since
no-win no-fee agreements were introduced, and probably because of them. Since
conditional-fee agreements give people on low or middle incomes the chance to pursue expensive legal actions at no financial risk to themselves, it is natural to think that there would be a surge in claims. But the very fact that B seems so reasonable, and happens to be widely believed, is precisely why we need to approach it critically. If you already assume that no-win no-fee arrangements have resulted in more personal injury claims, you are likely to see the passage as grounds for believing it.
But interpreted neutrally, the passage neither supports B nor disputes it. All that we are told in Doc 2 is that there are no-win no-fee arrangements on offer, and how they work. We are also told that this has prompted stories in the media, but with no comment on the truth or falsity of these, or even what they actually claim. There is no information about the effect the arrangements have had on numbers or attitudes. If we stick faithfully to what is contained in Doc 2, B must be seen as leaping to an unjustified conclusion.
C, likewise, may seem like a very believable consequence of advertising for victims, especially if the advertisements emphasise the possibility of making big money out of an accident. Obviously, the worse the harm that has come to the claimant, the more money the court is likely to award in damages. So there would be a temptation for a dishonest person to cheat by exaggerating or inventing an injury. But that is very different from saying, as C does, that the advertising by law firms and intermediaries encourages cheating.
That is a serious allegation. It is also a little hard to believe, if it is taken to mean that lawyers actively encourage dishonesty in the way they advertise. But even if we interpret C more charitably to mean that the advertising has the unintended effect of giving some people the idea of cheating, there is still no evidence of any such connection in the passage.
quite trivial car accidents. The writer Andrew Malleson wrote a book called Whiplash and Other Useful Illnesses. The content is serious, but the book’s tongue-in-cheek title tells its own story.
Here is another document, this time graphical. It consists of three bar charts. (See Chapters 3.7 and 5.4 for further questions of this type.) The data is from an official questionnaire conducted among 509 randomly selected adults living in the UK. However, it probably reflects opinion in many developed countries.
DOC 3 CHART 1
67
15 20 A lot more people receiving payments
A few more people Virtually no change Fewer people
%
Compared with ve years ago, do you think there has been a change in the number of people receiving
compensation payments for personal injuries?
* Respondents who answered ‘Don’t know’ have been excluded from chart.
CHART 2
28 50
29 A lot more people making false claims
A few more people
Virtually no change Fewer people
%
Compared with ve years ago, do you think there has been a change in the number of people making false claims?
* Respondents who answered ‘Don’t know’ have been excluded from chart.
that a lawyer’s cases all have the same value, and require the same level of input in terms of hours worked, and other costs. Arguably a lawyer could lose a small number of very complex cases and still be out of pocket because they were worth more in fees than the income generated from cases he or she won.
Strictly speaking E is safe to infer only if on average all cases cost about the same to pursue.
And so we come to F: ‘Claims being pursued for personal injury have increased significantly since the introduction of conditional-fee agreements.’ By now it should be clear that this cannot be inferred from Doc 2 either. You may have thought that F could be inferred because it seems so likely to be true, given that conditional-fee agreements allow people to make claims without having to pay anything. In that respect F is like B. But F can only be inferred if it is also assumed that there have been no other changes which might have had a reverse effect. Nor can F be inferred without assuming that lawyers now take on more cases than they did before the introduction of no-win no-fee. Doc 2 provides no information to justify either of these assumptions. In fact, the note about E in the previous paragraph suggests that lawyers may be much more selective than they were, since they have more to lose. F could, quite realistically, be false, and public opinion seriously flawed.
The clear warning to take from the discussion above is that many seemingly reasonable inferences were in fact unsafe. Some of the claims may be true, and may be found to be so after further investigation. But Doc 2, as it stands, lacks the hard data we would need for drawing conclusions such as B, C or F.