June 2010 LSAT
Section 5
Question 22
The passage states which one of the following?
Replies
allisonfarley on October 16, 2020
Hi, I hope I can offer some clarity! To anyone who may read this, if I have not explained this correctly, please let me know!!I see where the confusion lies.
The "no rule" you're referring to has to do with something that can't be both X or Y at the same time. Like the logic of being in both LA and NYC at the same time. Physically, thats impossible. So thats when you employ the logic of selecting one and making it sufficient, and then negating the other and making it necessary: LA-->notNYC (NYC-->notLA)
This stimulus, however, isn't saying that laws and crimes are mutually exclusive. Laws and crimes are two different variables that are a part of society, and they aren't mutually exclusive in the sense that laws and crimes can't be a part of society at the same time. They absolutely are. What it's saying is, that by principle, if a society has no laws then there would be no crimes to commit because laws would never have been put in place to be considered broken. So the sentence: "A society that has no laws has no crimes, because no law can be broken" becomes: not L --> not C (C --> L) and you see in the contrapositive, neither crimes nor laws are negated, which means they can occur together in society. The S->N conditions are "no laws" and "no crimes" or contrapositively "laws" and "crimes" but the "no" in this sentence is not the same as the "no" you're referring to.
Had the sentence read "No society that has no laws has no crimes", then a lightbulb would have gone off to apply the logical conditional diagram of "no" that we've learned! But thats not a logical sentence...I was just adding the "no" you thought was in the stimulus to visualize it.
So to apply it to another example: being a mammal and being cold blooded are mutually exclusive, you can't be both.
"NO mammals are cold blooded": M--> not CB (BC-->notM) aka, If you're a mammal you're not cold blooded OR contrapositive-if you're cold blooded you're not a mammal.
So to sum:
With the stimulus it reads, "A society that no laws, has no crimes...": not L --> not C (C-->L). aka, If your society has no laws then it has no crimes OR contrapositive-if your society has crimes then it has laws.
It doesn't read: "NO society that has no laws has no crimes".
If that did not help, I'm so sorry! And I hope a staff member can provide a better explanation!!
Best,
Ally
allisonfarley on October 16, 2020
(CB-->notM)** in my mammal cold blooded contrapositive.My apologies I switched cold blooded, to blooded cold haha