A lack of trust in one's neighbors leads to their lack of respect for the law. A new study provides compelling eviden...

Jacob-R on December 13, 2018

I am happy to explain the difference between A and E. Let’s understand it with examples of what each flawed argument looks like:

A: Treats something that is sufficient to produce a result as if it were necessary to produce that result.

If I eat cake, I become happy.

(Eating cake is the sufficient condition to becoming happy.)

It would be a flawed argument to then conclude that if I am happy, it must because I ate cake! That is treating the sufficient as necessary, when in fact there are a lot of other things that make me happy — like explaining LSAT questions clearly.

E: Treats what could be the effect of something as if it were the cause of that things.

The famous version of this flawed argument is: the rooster crows, and the sun rises. Therefore the rooster’s crow must cause the sun to rise.

Silly, right? It is treating the effect of the sun rising (the rooster wakes up and crows!) as if it is the cause of the sun rising.

Do those different examples help explain the difference between the flaws? Let us know if not!

jasminekbond96@gmail.com on March 24, 2020

I seem to like choice A. But I'm still trying to make the connections properly because it seems as if there's a flaw in the conditional logic. Would you be able to break down the connection?

Thanks!

Emil-Kunkin on May 12 at 05:06PM

This isn't really a conditional argument, the author is arguing about causation. They think that lack of trust leads to lack of respect, and to support this they cite an example that shows both things are low in certain cases. However, this example tells us nothing about the direction of causality. Perhaps people are untrusting because of high crime rather than what the author thinks, that there is high crime because of low respect.