June 2006 LSAT Section 2 Question 17

Human beings can exhibit complex, goal–oriented behavior without conscious awareness of what they are doing. Thus, me...

AndrewArabie on May 16, 2023

I need help with this exact sort of necessary assumption

PT 82 Sec.4 Q13 is a necessary assumption question that follows: "Computer voice-recognition technology currently cannot distinguish between homophones such as "their" and "there." As a consequence, until voice-recognition technology is improved to recognize and utilize grammatical and semantic relations among words, voice-recognition programs will not accurately translate a computer user's spoken words into written text." In this question the author is conflating distinguishing between homophones with recognizing grammatical and semantic relations which I recognize. But in the course of doing this question I realized I have no idea which order to put the two in for the right answer. The correct answer for the question above is "DH --> RGSR." I really don't understand why its in this order and not the other. Likewise, this question, equates intelligence with complex, goal-oriented behavior and I have no idea why the correct answer is in the order its in. I need someone to walk me through exactly what to do when a necessary assumption conflates to ideas to prove a third idea that is related to a concept in the first premise (Consciousness vs conscious awareness & Accurate translation vs can't distinguish homophones) and why exactly the answer choice is in the order that its in.

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Emil-Kunkin on May 20, 2023

Good question, this is actually a pretty hard thing to articulate. Starting with this question let's take a look.

The premises establish that it is possible to have CGBO without consciousness, and the author uses this to support the idea that intelligence does not equal consciousness. We know we need to equate intelligence with GCBO here, but do we want "if CGBO then intel" or "If intel then CGBO?"

This comes back to the passage. If we have if CGBO then intel, we could rephrase the first sentence as "you can have CGBO without intel" which would indeed fix the argument. We also can try this with If intel then CGBO," which I think would not fully fix the argument. We needed to prove that intelligence doesn't guarantee consciousness, but all this would prove is that intelligence guarantees something that doesn't guarantee consciousness. There may still be other aspects of intelligence.

We could also diagram:
Cgbo not equal C
If CGBO then Intel
So, Intel not equal C.

Looking at the example you mentioned, we need to do the same thing: equate DH and RGSR. We can use the same logic here, we need to replace the one in the premises with the one in the conclusion, which we can do if we say that if DH then RGSR.

Aaaand now after typing all that out, I think I realized a way more succinct way to put it. When we need to equate two things, the sufficient condition is the thing in the premise (which we need to replace with the thing in the conclusion) and the necessary condition is the thing in the conclusion.

Let me know if this makes any sense, because this is as I said a tough tough aspect of the test.

AndrewArabie on May 22, 2023

That makes perfect sense thank you Emil for such an thorough explanation