PT57.S3.Q15 - medical ethicist: assuming there is

LAGM2011

I do not understand why, "'it is never acceptable to offer experimental treatments to patients who experience no extreme symptoms of the the relevant disease" is translated as no extreme symptoms (NES) -----> not acceptable to offer exp. treatment (/AOET).
If we negate the necessary - wouldn't that be 'it is sometimes acceptable to offer ex. trmt'. I do not grasp how just repeating what the sentence says is negating the necessary in this case? I'm having trouble in general with these 'not, never, double-negative type statements, and invariably getting them wrong. please help.
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-57-section-3-question-15/

JustDoIt

Hi!

So you are right in the effect of the negate necessary. But the problem is that is not what we have here. If we boil it down to its bare essentials, we have A --> B; therefore /A --> /B. If we negate necessary like you say, we would have B --> A and that is not the premise that we have here.

One of our main indicators here is “for.” Though it is subtle, a lot of the argument hinges on this word. It is acceptable to offer experimental treatments FOR extreme symptoms. So by this statement we know that OET (offer experimental treatments) --> ES (extreme symptoms). Based off this statement, we know that if you it is acceptable to offer experimental treatments, then there are extreme symptoms. What can we conclude from this? If there are no extreme symptoms (/ES) then we can’t offer experimental treatments (/OET). This is what you were alluding to. But the issue is the argument doesn’t conclude this. It concludes /OET --> /ES. This is a sufficiency necessity flaw. The argument is negating the sufficient and producing the same effect that would occur if you negate the necessary. But we already know that this can’t be the case.

You might be confusing negation with finding the logical opposite. The logical opposite of OET --> ES would be OET some /ES. In English, we can offer experimental treatments and still not have extreme symptoms. This is a direct contradiction of the conditional premise, which we take to be true.

If you are having trouble with not and never, go back and review group four indicators. I still go back over indicators and grammar when I have trouble and have found doing so to be incredibly helpful for me. I have posted some links below for your convenience.

Hope this helps!

https://7sage.com/lesson/basic-translation-group-4/

https://7sage.com/lesson/neither-nor/

https://7sage.com/lesson/group-3-group-4/