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, 2019

Diagraming this question

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

Shunhe on January 2, 2020

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!