June 2010 LSAT Section 3 Question 19

Team captain: Winning requires the willingness to cooperate, which in turn requires motivation. So you will not win ...

Ava on December 24 at 05:24PM

Diagraming this question

Can someone demonstrate how you would diagram the stimulus and then match it to the correct answer choice? Thanks in advance.

1 Reply

Shunhe on January 2 at 10:55PM

Hi @shafieiava,

First, I'll begin with diagramming the stimulus.

Premise 1: Winning - > Willingness to cooperate
Premise 2: Willingness to cooperate - > Motivation

Conclusion: ~Motivated - > ~Win

Why? Take the contrapositive of the two premises:

Premise 1: ~Willingness to cooperate - > ~Winning
Premise 2: ~Motivation - > ~Willingness to cooperate

And we can link those together to get

~Motivation - >~Willingness to cooperate - > ~Winning

Which get us ~Motivation - > ~Win, the diagram of the stimulus. To make the structure of the argument a bit more abstract, we can write:

A - >B
B - >C
Conclusion: ~C - >~A

As for the correct answer choice, we can see that when we diagram (C), we have:

Premise 1: Retain status - > Raises more money
Premise 2: Raises more money - > Increased campaigning

Conclusion: ~Increased campaigning - > ~Retain status

And we can see that this matches the structure above, if A = retain status, B = raises more money, and C = increased campaigning. Keep in mind that we can diagram "X unless Y" as ~Y - >X, and we diagram "X only if Y" as X - >Y. "X requires Y" is diagrammed as X - >Y. Hope this helps!