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Avery on January 7, 2023

Answering Weaken Questions

Hi! I have gotten to a point in my LSAT prep where I am mainly targeting my weakest areas, and I had a thought about weaken questions that I wanted confirmed! When looking at the answer choices, would you say a good technique would be to rule out answer choices that could in turn be countered by a strengthen? This may have been mentioned somewhere, but I can't remember. I feel like I know the basics to understanding how to weaken questions, and really beginning to attach flaws to help answering. I just thought this could possibly be a technique if one happened to be stuck between two. I know there is only one right answer, but on those harder weaken questions it can get tricky. An example of this could be for answers stating what could be true: (I was watching an office hours, and this is the stimulus that we were using that led me to this thought) Paul: I do not like pizza. Therefore, I do not like Sarah's favorite food. Here, at least for me, the obvious correct answer was something that said "Sarah's favorite food is ____ /isn't pizza" When we were discussing common wrong answers, one was the could be true: "There might be foods both Paul and Sarah like" or "Both Paul and Sarah dislike ravioli" Now, I don't think this would be one to trip me up, but if you saw one of these sentences added in the next question and were asked to strengthen, you could easily say something like: "Even though there might be foods both Paul and Sarah like, Sarah's favorite food is pizza" I'm not too positive on the legitimacy of that response, but wanted to give an example of how I thought about it. Basically, can we eliminate answers that can be immediately turned around and strengthened? Sorry if I explained this in a confusing way, but please let me know if this is something I should be doing!

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Emil-Kunkin on January 8, 2023

Hi, I think this is an interesting approach, and I would endorse it with caution. On the whole, I like it, since one of the best ways to strengthen an argument is to attack a weakener. In this respect, I think that your approach is a great way to confirm that a weakener does weaken. However, I could see one downside being that one could strengthen an argument without necessarily attacking a weakener, and there are weakeners that I could imagine are hard to counter with a strengthener. I think this is a useful tool, but the most important thing for a weakener is to be able to tell yourself a convincing story as to why the new fact weakens the authors argument.