June 2010 LSAT Section 5 Question 9

Which one of the following statements most accurately characterizes a difference between the two passages?

adamwchase on February 25, 2019

"Boy Named Sue" question

First of all, I love the Johnny Cash reference, Mehran. However, if we are supposed to assume premises are true, then I do not understand the "Boy Named Sue" question at all...

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Ravi on February 27, 2019

@adamwchase,

Great question. Mehran uses the 'Girl named Sue' reference to
illustrate one way that an argument can be attacked (attacking the
premises by claiming or showing one or more of them to be false).
However, as Mehran notes, if we assumed the premises in that example
to be true, it's a valid argument. The argument only becomes invalid
when we find that one of the premises is false.

For the purposes of the LSAT you always want to assume the premises
are true. The way you're attacking the arguments in the LSAT is to
show why, even if we assume the premises to be true, the conclusion
doesn't necessarily follow.

Does this make sense? Let us know if you have any more questions!