June 2010 LSAT Section 5 Question 9

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

ahbuch on April 1, 2020

Order of Premises

Does the order of Premises matter in declaring an argument valid or invalid. For example, If X is a carrot came before All Carrots are Vegetables on page 6 would the argument still be valid?

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shunhe on April 2, 2020

Hi @ahbuch,

Thanks for the question! The short answer is no, the order of premises does not matter in determining the validity or invalidity of an argument. For example, consider the following three stimuli:

Fred is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, Fred is mortal.

All men are mortal. Fred is a man. Therefore, Fred is mortal.

Fred is mortal. This is because all men are mortal, and Fred is a man.

We can see that the order of the premises themselves don’t matter, and often on the LSAT, the order of the premises and the location of the conclusion will be mixed up. We would diagram all of these sentences the same way; we can always reorder premises.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.