June 2006 LSAT Section 2 Question 23

Commentator: Human behavior cannot be fully understood without inquiring into nonphysical aspects of persons. As evi...

JosephRocco on May 3 at 10:05PM

Can someone please explain to me where the circular reasoning is happening here?

Ok, I just didn't see where circular reasoning was happening here. Yes, they do state that "physical aspects of some particular human actions - neurological, physiological, and environmental..." but can't some of these be non-physical too? My anticipation was this: "fails to consider that some of what the commentator cites might also have non-physical aspects which we don't fully comprehend." I also don't see many circular reasoning flaws so maybe this was a reason why I missed this one. But if someone could help me identify circular reasoning better, I'd appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

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Emil-Kunkin on May 17 at 02:28PM

Circular reasoning is indeed pretty rare, but I think a good rule of thumb to see it is that if the conclusion just restates a premise (or in this case the only premise) we have circularity.

We have that here:

The conclusion is that human behavior cannot only be understood through the physical.

The only premise supporting that is the assertion that if we understood the physical, we would still not understand human behavior. The author explicitly says that the elements she references are physical. This just restates the conclusion, that understanding the physical is not sufficient.