October 1996 LSAT Section 4 Question 8

The symptoms of mental disorders are behavioral, cognitive, or emotional problems. Some patients with mental disorder...

BritneyS on August 20, 2023

negation of answer

When negating A, what words do you change to negate? Would you: (1) change the word can to cannot, (2) Get rid of the word no before effective, or (3) change can to cannot AND get rid of the word no before the word effective. How do you negate an answer when it has many terms like cannot and can? Do you pick one in the answer and change it or do you change the answer wherever you can such as option three?

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Emil-Kunkin on August 24, 2023

I would probably get rid of the word no, and change the can to a could. In general, when negating complex answer choices like a, I would start by just stating "it is not the case that ..." and trying to come up with the weakest way that could be true. For A, the weakest way that it is not the case that therapy can't fix chemical imbalance is to say that therapy can in some cases treat chemical imbalances.

This is far more of an art than a science, which is why I like to treat necessary assumptions as must be trues rather than rely too much on the negation test. Ultimately they are asking us what the author needs for their argument to work, so we can treat them more or less like a must be true.