FACTORES MOTIVACIONALES

Ten years after the introduction of no-win no-fee agreements the UK Compensation Recovery Unit reported that the number of cases registered to the unit had remained relatively stable. In 2000/1 there were 735,931. The number in 2007/8 was 732,750.

For example, clinical negligence cases notified to the unit fell from 10,890 in 2000/1 to 8872 in 2007/8. Accidents at work cases fell from 97,675 in 2000/1 to 68,497 in 2007/8. Only motor accident claims have risen rapidly, rocketing from 403,892 cases in 2004/5 to 551,899 cases in 2007/8.

In its 2006 report on the ‘compensation culture’, the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee heard evidence that personal injury claims had gone up from about 250,000 in the early 1970s to the current level, but that the introduction of no-win no-fee had coincided with this levelling off.

Lawyers dispute the claim that no-win no-fee inevitably leads to more frivolous claims and more cases generally. They say the solicitor acts as a filter, knowing that every case that doesn’t make it to court or a settlement is a financial loss to the firm.

BBC News Magazine DOC 4

However, Doc 4 also reveals that the small reduction in claims generally contrasts with a massive increase in motor accident claims in particular. If that rise is the result of an increase in false and exaggerated claims, then the public perception could be justified. A good answer to the question will therefore recognise that the evidence is inconclusive, with some of the facts pointing in one

direction, some in another. This need not stop you drawing a conclusion, but it should not be too strong or overstated. If you inferred that the majority were clearly correct in their opinions, or completely wrong, without acknowledging the room for doubts, your conclusion would be unsafe.

Summary

• When presented with a source of information, whether in text form or numerical or graphical, we often draw conclusions / make inferences.

• A ‘safe’ (reliable, sound) inference is one that has strong support from some or all of the available data, and is not obviously contradicted by other data.

• To be ‘safe’ an inference or conclusion must be more than just plausible or reasonable. It must follow from the data.

4 Can it reliably be concluded from the information in the three charts and Doc 4 that public perceptions about false or exaggerated compensation claims are seriously mistaken?

Activity

Commentary

This is a more open question than the others, and consequently there is more than one direction that your discussion could have taken, and more than one decision you could have reached. What matters most is not which answer you gave, but why you gave it; how you interpreted the evidence. You could, for example, have noted that there is something of a contradiction between what the majority think (Chart 1) and the official figures (Doc 4, paragraphs 1 and 2). Those figures reveal that the number of claims overall has ‘remained relatively stable’, or even fallen slightly over the period in question, with examples of medical claims and work-accident claims both being down. If the total number of claims has fallen, it seems groundless to infer that the number of false claims has risen. You might also have added the point, already made in the comments after Activity 3, that Chart 3 casts some doubt on the belief that false claims are soaring. Your answer could therefore have been that the public perception is simply false.

photograph was conclusive evidence that a crime was being committed. On the other hand there is enough detail in the picture to raise suspicions. Assuming that this was a genuine action-shot, and not posed, consider these four possible accounts of what is happening in the photograph:

A The person on the left of the picture is snatching a bag from the shoulder of the other, and is about to run off with it.

B The person on the left is attempting to take something out of the bag.

C The person on the left has

accidentally made contact with the person on the right.

D The two people in the picture are friends walking together by a lake or river.

Then either decide which of the above explanations can most safely be inferred, or if you think none of the above is a safe inference, suggest one that is.

Write a short justification for your conclusion, based on clues you can find in the picture. (For convenience call the person on the left of the picture ‘L’, and the one on the right ‘R’.)

3 ‘It is believed in many countries around the world, including the UK, that there is a damaging “compensation culture”.’

How much support is there for this belief in Docs 2–4? Your response should take the form of a short written essay.

Answers and comments are on page 323.

1 Based on the discussions you have had and the commentaries you have read, write a short answer to each of the following questions. (These are good preparation for some of the questions in Cambridge Thinking Skills Papers 2 and 4.)

a Does advertising, especially on daytime television, encourage people to make dishonest claims for personal injury?

b Does the statistical information in Doc 4 on page 134 contradict the view that claims for personal injury are on the increase?

2 How much can be inferred, reliably, from a photograph such as the one here?

Without some background information it would be unsafe to say that this

End-of-chapter assignments

Explanation

4.2

In this chapter we return to an important concept that was introduced in Chapter 2.8, namely explanation. Explanation, like argument, involves giving reasons. But explanatory reasons do not lead to conclusions, as reasons do in arguments.

Examine the following short passages.

[1a] Seawater is salty. This is because the river water that drains into the oceans flows over rocks and soil. Some of the minerals in the rocks, including salt, dissolve in the water and are carried down to the sea.

[1b] The river water that drains into the oceans flows over rocks and soil. Some of the minerals in the rocks, including salt, dissolve in the water and are carried down to the sea. Consequently seawater is salty.

These are both explanations. To be more precise they are the same explanation, with slightly different wording. Typically,

explanations tell us why something is as it is, or how it has come about. The explanation here consists of two reasons: (a) that rivers flow over rocks and soil; and (b) that the rocks and soil contain minerals that dissolve in the water. These two reasons, between them, explain a fact, the saltiness of seawater. But the saltiness of seawater is not a conclusion or inference drawn from [1a] and [1b]. Most of us don’t need any argument to convince or persuade us that seawater is salty. We have the evidence of our senses. We can taste it, which is a good enough reason to take it as fact.

This is the key difference between an argument and an explanation. Arguments are meant to give us reasons to believe something which we did not know, or were less sure of,

before hearing the argument. That is what we call a ‘conclusion’. Explanations work in the opposite direction: they take something that we know or just assume to be true, and help us to understand it. Explanation plays a very important role in science; and it is easy to see why. One of the main goals of science – if not the main goal – is to discover how and why things are as they are: what causes them, what makes them happen. Once we can fully explain something, such as the saltiness of seawater, we can go on to predict or infer all sorts of other related facts or phenomena.