Quoth jeffc :
"David Gale" wrote:
Ok, now you have me curious. You said, "I did get my Master's and my
brother did get his PhD and both of us earned our way in, and we got
better scores than Bush. I had better scores than Bush, but I
couldn't get into an Ivy League school." So, how is Rob wrong to
say that you got a Master's, that you haven't disclosed your
discipline or university, and that you couldn't get into Yale?
(Granted, for the last one, you merely said 'an Ivy', rather than
Yale specifically, but Yale is one of the eight Ivies...

Which part of his statement is wrong, and shows a failure to draw
logicial conclusions, since I can't see the failure (and did happen
to graduate from an Ivy, though only undergrad rather than grad)?

I said I tried to get into an Ivy League school. He said I couldn't
get into Harvard. I said wrong school. Then he said it must have
been Yale. He seems to be under the impression those are the only 2
Ivy League schools, or for some odd reason I tried to get into one of
those 2 schools just because that's where Bush went. That's called a
non sequitur (look it up) and this newsgroup is just full of them.
It's also the reason the American people can't figure out who to vote
for - they keep making non sequiturs. By the way, the school I
couldn't get into was Cornell. (There are 8 schools in the Ivy
League.)

Ah. I think the problem here is not one of a failure to draw logical
conclusions, then, but rather an issue of unclear syntax.

The statement, "I couldn't get into an Ivy League school." can mean two
different things--a) I couldn't get into one specific Ivy; or b) I couldn't
get into any Ivies at all. Now, most people would read the statement in its
original context as the general version (b), since no specific Ivies were
mentioned. Perhaps a better way to phrase your statement would've been "I
couldn't get into the Ivy I applied to." This would avoid the problems
encountered here, since it is very clear that it is to be read as a specific
statement, rather than the general.

Of course, the general interpretation of your statement would be the
stronger interpretation of your original argument; that is, "I couldn't get
into any Ivies, including the one Bush got accepted into, because I wasn't
qualified, even though my scores were better than Bush" is a much solider
argument than "I couldn't get into a school which happens to be in the same
group as the one Bush got into, even though I was more qualified than he
was". The first claims that even Bush's school would've rejected you, and
so should've rejected Bush, while the second indicates that perhaps you
should've applied to a different Ivy, since it may have had lower acceptance
standards than the one you applied to, considering that it was willing to
take someone who was less qualified than yourself.

Reading your original post, I believed you to be making this first argument;
however, your subsequent attacks on Rob S.'s interpretation, as well as your
answer to my question, have made it clear that you were actually going for
the second. Personally, I think it would've been better for your case to
stick to the first, general approach, rather than jumping on Rob's naming
the wrong school, which has brought your original point to the second,
specific, case.