Many of you noted that the Lilliputians are probably still able to tell the difference between water and ice, even thought their language doesn't have different words for them and even though experiments have shown they have difficulty distinguishing them. The integrity of the experiments is not in question, however. Even if the experiments are reliable, the conclusion is still invalid because it makes claims about their biology. The 'illegitimate claim' amounts to saying that Lilliputians are born without the ability to distinguish water from ice, which is a very strong claim. In fact, since which language(s) you speak is entirely a product of your environment, we would be wrong to claim that because their language appears to affect their brain (their ability to distinguish water and ice) the speakers of this language are genetically incapable of learning this distinction. (Another way to think about it: The 'illegitimate claim' entails that if Lilliputians grew up speaking English, which has different words for water and ice, they still wouldn't be able to tell them apart. We can immediately sense that this claim is dubious. At the very least, the experiments reported haven't even tested this claim.)
We talked about this question in discussion last Friday, and Chris went through a similar example in lecture. The question asked you to determine what category fundraising is in the sentence Ida admires fundraising, using the data given in (4) and the category tests from handout 5 of the Unit 2 Coursepacket. When we give you data like that in (4) with the grammaticality judgements already marked, we expect you to use this information to help you figure out the answer to the question. In this case, (4a) tells you that fundraising can appear after the, which is a determiner. (4b) tells you that it can also appear after successful, which is an adjective. And (4c) tells you that it cannot appear after successfully, which is an adverb. Furthermore, from lecture we know that determiners can precede nouns; and from handout 5, we know that adjectives can modify nouns, and adverbs modify adjectives (and verbs). Given that (4a) and (4b) are grammatical, it seems like the evidence of the determiner and adjective suggest that fundraising is a noun. (4c) provides additional evidence because its ungrammaticality confirms that adverbs cannot modify fundraising, which is consistent with fundraising being a noun.