June 2011 LSAT Section 1 Question 14

Waller: If there were really such a thing as extrasensory perception, it would generally be accepted by the public s...

JoshG on July 6, 2020

D Versus E?

I narrowed it down to these two alternatives and ultimately chose the correct answer, but I'm still struggling to see why E is incorrect. Is it incorrect to equate public opinion with general public belief? Thanks a lot.

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shunhe on July 6, 2020

Hi @JoshG,

Thanks for the question! I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to say public opinion and general public belief are about the same. But it seems like both Waller and Chin would agree on (E), or at the very least, we don’t have enough information to say so. After all, (E) says that the general public believes that ESP is real. I think both of these people would disagree with this statement (and so they would “agree on” it by both disagreeing with it). Waller says that if ESP were real, then it’d be accepted by the public, kind of implying that it’s not real and not accepted by the public as real. Chin says that the popular media reports and public opinion will be biased in favor of skeptics, also implying that the general public doesn’t believe that ESP is real. And so since they agree

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

JoshG on July 7, 2020

Awesome, thanks a lot!

shunhe on July 7, 2020

Yup, glad I helped!