June 2010 LSAT Section 5 Question 18

Based on the passage, it can be concluded that the author and Broyles-González hold essentially the same attitude toward

blake_hogan7 on September 12, 2023

Question 1 - argument or set of facts

I believed I understood how to distinguish an argument from a set of facts, but I was wrong. Question one is a set of facts, but I don't understand why? It has the conclusion indicator "However," but it is a set of facts? Is the author not trying to convince me that pompous cats are invariably irritating?

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Emil-Kunkin on September 15, 2023

The author is not trying to convince you of that, because there's nothing that could conceivably by considered evidence that pompous cats are irritating. The first question is a set of facts because we don't have a conclusion, we only really have loosely related statements that lack an authors' attempt to convince us of something.

The term however can be used to indicate a conclusion, but it doesn't have to be. I think the only terms that are pretty much always indicative of a conclusion are thus and therefore.

I would add that my personal take (and I think others will disagree) is that distinguishing sets of facts from arguments is an overrated skill at first.I think it's something that's an outgrowth of understanding what you've read, and that focusing on distinguishing isn't necessarily a great use of your time. My main reason for this is that the question stem will tell you if you need to approach a passage as an argument or as a set of facts. A must be true, must be false, and a paradox question will always be something we should treat as sets of facts. Pretty much all the others are going to be arguments.

blake_hogan7 on September 16, 2023

Your personal take is really good advice. I feel as if there should be some time in this course dedicated to the idea that question stems can assist in understanding if a passage is a set of facts or an argument. Perhaps there is and I have not made it to that lesson yet? Or perhaps it has already been briefly highlighted and I am simply not remembering.

Emil-Kunkin on September 18, 2023

I think that's generally implicit in the lessons about specific question types, although this isn't really the case beyond recognizing what our job is. We know that for say, parallel reasoning questions we need to read for structure, but unfortunately that doesn't go much beyond telling us that we need to look for the structure of the argument.