Causation ,condition, premise and conclusion

JS

After going through all the courses in 7sage, I found myself still confused about causation and conditional logical, especially how to know the relationship in stimulus is causation, condition, or premise and conclusion. Anyone can help me clarify it?

CJ Shin

I am not sure exactly what you are confused about, but here is my own recap of the lessons that you've learned so far.

LR stimulus can be roughly divided into two main types: hard logic, soft logic.

Hard logic stimulus can be identified by conditional logic indicators such as ANY, ALWAYS, NEVER, UNLESS etc. These questions primarily rely on your understanding and usage of conditional logic (combinations, contrapositives, false negations etc..) These should be freebies because they are pretty much like mathematical equations.

Soft logic stimulus have different variations and the major types are correlation-causation, and phenomenon-hypothesis (although I think correlation-causation types fall under phenomenon-hypothesis framework). These primarily rely on your intuition, however, LSAT repeats heavily on the way it tests your understanding of what is means to correlate, and what it means to cause.

For example, when you see something like "X increases, and Y increases," your mind should immediately look for whether or not it concludes with "therefore, X cause Y."

First of all, the assumption that is being made here is that the author assumes the just because X and Y are correlated (co-incidental), X is the cause of Y. And with this assumption, LSAT will ask you to strengthen, weaken, identify the flaw.

Here are some examples on how to do these:
1. Strengthen: X was removed, and Y also faded.
2. Weaken: X was removed, but Y remained.
3. Flaw: the author assumes that an incident related to another must be the cause of the latter.

Generally speaking, premises are EVIDENCE that give support to whatever you want to say on the basis of it.