June 2000 LSAT Section 3 Question 18

It is impossible to do science without measuring. It is impossible to measure without having first selected units of...

Isaiah-Klassen on December 5, 2019

Help understanding what I am missing

So I understand, why, when diagrammed answer choice A is correct. However, when I think through the reasoning myself I find that performing difficult music and what is necessary to perform difficult music are different. Just because I must do a lot of tedious practice in order to become proficient in difficult music, doesn't mean that later I cannot effortlessly perform difficult music. In other words, just because I need to have gone through tedious practice in order to perform difficult music, doesn't mean performing difficult music is tedious... it seems like they made a jump in the conclusion. On the other hand the stimulus relies on the concept of "arbitrary" which doesn't seem the same... As I can make the argument fairly easily that everything is ultimately arbitrary/relative, which is different. Which is one of the reasons I was leaning towards D, which has subjective, although it does make a jump in logic when talking about resentment. Anyhow, some greater explanation would be great. As I ruled out A quickly because I saw it as a flawed argument.

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BenMingov on December 5, 2019

Hi Isaiah, thanks for the question!

What I often recommend to my students when it comes to conditional reasoning in LR is to diagram all Must Be True, Error in Reasoning, and Parallel questions that revolve around conditional language. This saves us a lot of effort in terms of being able to clearly see the structure of the argument and understand on a fundamental level exactly which inferences we can draw, which conditional errors were made, and which answer choice has the same line of reasoning.

The stimulus here can be broken down as follows:

Science - > Measuring - > Select Unit of Measurement - > Arbitrary

The argument then concludes: Science - > Arbitrary

In essence, this is A - > B - > C - > D, and the argument concludes A - > D.

Answer choice A can be boiled down to the following:

Perform difficult music - > Develop musical skill - > Long hours of practice - > Tedious

The argument then concludes: PDM - > T

This is exactly the same structure as the argument: (Set of facts: A - > B - > C - > D, conclusion: A - > D).

In both arguments, every single conditional premise provided was clearly stated and not based on any assumptions. We do not care whether or not the statements they are making are true. We should only be concerned with whether the statements they are making are logically valid or not.

I believe your reservation with answer choice A is that while the argument says that performing difficult music is tedious because of the long hours of practice required, eventually you would improve to the point of it becoming easy and not tedious. This is an unnecessary level of trying to pick apart the argument because for these questions we are solely concerned about the conditional diagramming element.

But to play to your point, if you do get good enough where playing this is no longer difficult, then it would no longer trigger the sufficient condition of performing difficult music, and you would be right that it doesn't have to be tedious then. The argument does not disagree with you on that.

I hope this helped. Please let me know if you have any questions or want me to elaborate on D. I just noticed that you pointed out the flaw with D yourself, in that it makes a jump to what people resent, when the entire time the argument was focussed on what triggers from being a manager.

Isaiah-Klassen on December 6, 2019

Thanks for the reply! I am going to take your advice for diagramming out the conditional logic for those problems. The more I think through the conditional logic, the answer does make sense, although I find it frustrating, probably because it is not really a true statement. I am hoping the more problems I do, the easier I will be able to see this.