Argument76【0706G－CRUSADE小组】第6次作业

rose_07UID：2276843

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: 476          TIME: 0:30:00          DATE: 2007-2-28

The argument is based on a dubious result of an experiment, which makes the conclusion beg the questions. As the lack of detailed information, the experiment suffers from several critical flaws, whose result becomes too suspicious to rely on.

To begin with, there is no evidence that the length of the experiment is long enough for evaluating the effect of a face cream. As is known to all, any improvement of facial skin needs a long time, which leads to the doubt whether  a month is adequate for a face cream to improve the skin condition or not. If not, the marvelous result of the experiment might be caused by other factors, such as other face creams used long before the Luxess one. Since the author fails to prove that facial skin can improve a lot after a month's face cream, the time is unacceptable for us.

Even if the time is enough for detecting the effect of a face cream, the author fails to rule out other possible causes of the improved skin condition, such as the use of mild soap, and what the volunteers might use every night. Therefore, it is unwise to attribute the marked improvement of the facial skin all to the application of Luxess. It is entirely possible that Luxess has nothing to do with such improvement, while the mild soap improves the facial skin. We will not accept the Luxess as the only reason for the one-month improvement, unless the author provides further evidence how it takes impact on the facial skin.

Furthermore, the information of all the volunteers is so vague that we can hardly get any conclusion safely from the result of the experiment. The condition of facial skin is always be influenced by many factors such as ages, races, sexes, occupations. If all the volunteers are teenagers, whose facial skin might improve by itself even without any face cream, we can not ascribe the improvement simply to the use of Luxess. Meanwhile, it is the common sense that the conditions of skin might be different from one race to another, even of the same age. Moreover, the skin condition is largely determined by occupations, considering that a female worker's skin is likely worse than that of professors. Therefore, the information in the experiment is so limited that its result becomes not so credible.

In sum, the author draws conclusion that Luxess is effective in improving the skin condition based on a dubious experiment. To substantiate his conclusion, he must provide more evidence that the length of the experiment is long enough to get the result, that how Luxess improves the conditions and that the volunteers are representative for all the consumers of Luxess. Unless the author proves that it is a credible experiment, whose result we can rely on, we will not arbitrarily accept his conclusion.