Self-study
Hi there, I have a couple questions about PT104.S2.P2 on medieval guilds. Many thanks in advance for your help!
Question 2: According to the passage, which one of the following statements about law courts in medieval England is true?
I initially leaned toward A: Some English lawyers who practiced in civil courts also practiced in church courts, but others served exclusively in one court or the other.
However, I doubted it because I thought that, on the LSAT, “some” can be inclusive of all. The portion of the passage that would support this answer choices states:
The alternative inference, namely, that ecclesiastical advocates were less prone to ethical lapses than their counterparts in the civil courts, seems inherently weak, especially since there was some overlap of personnel between the civil bar and the ecclesiastical bar.
By stating there was “some overlap of personnel,” I assumed that it could mean anything from one person to every person who overlapped. Therefore, I did not feel confident selecting: “Some English lawyers who practiced in civil courts also practiced in church courts, but others served exclusively in one court or the other” because I didn’t feel I could support conclusively the claim that others served exclusively in one court or the other. Am I missing something?
Question 7: The passage suggests that which one of the following is most likely to have been true of medieval guilds?
I chose D: Medieval guilds found it difficult to enforce discipline among their members.
The explanation states: Anti-supported. We know that “other guilds” (besides canon lawyer associations) “often did [play a role in enforcing standards of conduct].
However, I am a bit confused because in the first paragraph of the passage, the author states: Advocates' professional organizations showed little fervor for disciplining their erring members. Some even attempted to hobble efforts at enforcement. The Florentine guild of lawyers, for example, forbade its members to play any role in disciplinary proceedings against other guild members.
By referencing the Florentine guild of lawyers, I thought they were providing an example of those professional associations that, as described in paragraph two, “were so inefficient that most delinquents escaped detection and punishment.” The author then goes on to argue that this hypothesis/characterization is more likely correct than the alternative posed.
Perhaps I’m just mixing up guilds versus professional associations?
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About questions 2: Notice that this question stem begins with "According to the Passage." The current LSAT tends to use this phrase exclusively to mean that we are looking for something that the passage explicitly says, and not for something that we can infer from what the passage explicitly says. However, this is from PT 104, which is a quite old LSAT, and back in those days, the LSAT used the phrase "According to the passage" more liberally than it does now. This is one of the reasons that it is best to practice with more recent PTs if possible. Anyway, this is an inference questions in disguise.
So, you are right that the relevant part of the passage cannot be taken to literally mean that there was some overlap and there was some non-overlap between the memberships of the civil bar and the ecclesiastic bar; still it is heavily implied that there was some non-overlap simply because the author says "some" instead of "all." This is what is known as a conversational implicature, which means that the sentence does not logically imply answer choice (A), but it does conversationally imply (A) because it would just be weird for the author to say "some" when "all" would have been more informative.
About questions 7: Consider the sentence before the bit that you quoted: "One might expect that the professional associations would play a prominent role in enforcing these standards of conduct, as other guilds often did, and as modern professional associations do, but that seems not to have happened" [emphasis added]. This shows that answer choice (D) is wrong because it turns out that there certainly were other guilds that were apparently not finding it all that difficult to enforce discipline. I think you were taking "Advocates' guilds" as representative of all guilds.
I hope this helps.
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