ARGUMENT 76 Luxess 对改善皮肤是否有显著效果

　　TOPIC: ARGUMENT76 - The following appeared as part of an article in a health and beauty magazine. "A group of volunteers participated in a study of consumer responses to the new Luxess face cream. Every morning for a month, they washed their faces with mild soap and then applied Luxess. At the end of that month, most volunteers reported a marked improvement in the way their skin looked and felt. Thus it appears that Luxess is truly effective in improving the condition of facial skin." WORDS: 365 TIME: 00:27:33 DATE: 2011-4-10 23:13:30 In this argument, the author concludes from the experiments that it appears that Luxess is truly effective in improving the condition of facial skin. At first glance, this argument seems to be convincing, but further reflection reveals that these evidences neither constitute a logical statement in support of its conclusion nor providing compelling support making this argument sound and invulnerable. The threshold problem with this argument is that the author assumes that the study has credibility. Although this entirely possible, the argument lacks evidence to confirm this assumption. In fact the study was problematic because the number of volunteers and their facial skin condition is unknown. The study was held by Luxess itself, which makes the results open to doubt. Until the author provides further evidence to exclude all these concerns, it is unfounded to reach the conclusion involved in the argument. The second flaw that weakens the logic of this argument is that the author assumes that the improvement has been observed by scientific measurement rather by subjective perception. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that it is necessarily case and it is quite possible that the improvement felt by the volunteers just came from their psychological hints and was not real. In short, without better evidence ruling out these and other alternative explanations, it is reasonable to cast considerable doubt on this assumption. The last but not the last important , even if the author can substantiate all of the foregoing assumptions, his assumption that the use of Luxess is the cause of the marked improvement in the way their skin looked and felt is still unwarranted, because no compelling evidence is provided to affirm this assumption. It is much more possible that other factors devoted to the improvement: the use of the mild soaps, the habits of clean faces every morning, health diets and so on. Under any scenario, adopting the author's proposal might harm rather than benefit. To sum up, the conclusion lacks credibility because the evidence cited in the analysis does not lend strong support to what the arguer maintains. Therefore, if the author had considered the given factors discussed above, the argument would have been more through and logically acceptable.