September 2016 LSAT Section 1 Question 20

Sociologist: Television, telephones, and other electronic media encourage imprecise, uncritical thinking. Yet critica...

Jazzy on September 19, 2023

Common Sense

Hi: I ended up ruling out D because I was thinking: "critical thinking is the only thing that..., but maybe 'an orderly system of government' can bring about critical thinking too." As I saw the stimulus asked what COULD be true except, it should be possible that "an orderly system of government" could do the job as well, as it is not inherently incompatible with critical thinking right? Maybe I made a lot of assumptions, but how much common sense are we allowed to use for this type of questions?

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Emil-Kunkin on September 21, 2023

We are absolutely allowed to use our common sense- and we kinda have to use common sense.

Just a quick note but I find this much easier to approach be reframing it as a must be false question: so we are looking for what must be false.

Well here the passage does disprove the idea that good government guarantees protection from political demagoguery, since the passage tells us that there is another thing that leaves people vulnerable to demagoguery: lack of critical thinking.

From what you wrote it sounds like you may have gotten yourself confused with the sheer number of double negatives here and I think that reframing this as must be false eliminates a few of those logical contortions.