PT44.S4.Q22 - Research shows that when dogs

Logic Gainz

The question is linked below:

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-44-section-4-question-22/

I'm looking for advice because upon first read, I thought this was a mistaken reversal flaw, but now I think I misinterpreted the meaning of "protect". When I first read this stimulus, I got hooked on the causal relationship, but to relay my thought process, I figured there is more than one way for a dog to get arthritis outside of neutering. Maybe you feed your dog all the time and it gets extremely obese and his/her brittle bones can't support it's meaty body. That's a weird example, but I just figured that arthritis is just a condition that has more than one cause leading to it and eliminating one cause doesn't mean there isn't another.

That's why E looked so attractive. Properly developed bones in an obese dog could still get arthritis. However, I now have to find a reason for why that is wrong, and that reason might lie in the definition of "protect". Just because an owner protects his/her dog from something, doesn't mean that the thing being protected against won't happen. It just means you're lessening the chances of that thing happening. If that's the right way to interpret this stimulus, then I can see the conclusion not being flawed in that way. I just read "protect" to mean to completely eliminate the chances of your dog becoming arthritic.

What do you all think?

bobalicious

I thought it could be made clear by changing the conclusion to "Thus, if you want to protect your dog from arthritis you should not neuter your dog in early puppyhood."

Then it feels like the argument is no longer vulnerable to criticism. Yes, what (E) says about other ways to get arthritis is still true, but it doesn't much affect our argument.

Lucas Carter

I would interpret protect to mean lessening the chances of something. It does not mean that it will 100% not happen but rather the chances are decreased. For example a flu shot protects against the flu meaning in most cases your chances of getting the flu go down but the threat is not completely eliminated.

So in this case protecting means decreasing the likelihood of arthritis. The conclusion can be looked at conditionally: Protect----------> Not Neutering until Adulthood. Protect in this conditional statement should be interpreted to be in the context of neutering and not other preventative measures. The flaw is almost similar to a false dichotomy in that it ignores the stages between early puppy hood and adulthood. Logically the conclusion is flawed because possibly you could protect against arthritis by neutering and do so before adulthood but after early puppy hood.

Logic Gainz

@bobalicious
This is what I was thinking:

Premises:

Neuter => Arthritis

Therefore,

/Neuter => /Arthritis

I think I'm wrong in trying to import a lawgical relationship into the stimulus when one doesn't exist. Something "usually leading to" something else, doesn't yield a SC => NC relationship. Would you agree?

Logic Gainz

Alright, ignore my comment above, team. Thanks @"Lucas Carter" !

BlindReviewer

This is a hard question, and @bobalicious points out a good way to modify the conclusion to make the argument more airtight. I say it's hard, though, because even though the argument is vulnerable to the question of what would happen to a dog if you neutered later on, it just seems like a stretch to imagine that this would also lead to arthritis. But I think this is just one of those questions where you have to catch yourself and look strictly at the logic.

The conclusion says "If you want to protect your dog from arthritis, don't neuter until it's full-grown."

E is indeed tempting because it baits you to think that it's saying "Hey it doesn't matter if you neuter your dog later on because it can still get arthritis anyway." But this isn't what E is saying. E is saying, "Dogs with properly developed bones can still get arthritis." This has nothing to do with neutering, so while it does kind of weaken the argument, it has nothing to do with the reasoning structure of neutering early and concluding you should neuter later.

E is interesting because it just brings up this extra consideration that nobody really asked for. The stimulus uses non-absolute terms like "usually" and "if you want to protect" (as opposed to "if you want to make your dog absolutely immune"), so we always kind of implied that none of what we were talking about was an absolute.

Hope this helps -- though it seems like you've got it figured out writing this out did help me

Logic Gainz

Thank you @BlindReviewer ! I meant to say I thought this was a mistaken negation flaw, NOT a mistaken reversal.

I thought the flaw was stating that since neutering usually leads to improper bone development and that definitely ("in turn leads to" implies a causal result every time) leads to arthritis problems later on, then concluding that, "not neutering will solve this problem," is flawed logic, since there could be other reasons for why a dog has arthritis problems (i.e. there could be more than one sufficient condition).

However, I think you both are correct in that this stimulus is wrong on both counts: one due to my misunderstanding of "protect", and secondly, the weakness of the language doesn't make way for universal conditional statements.

bobalicious

@"Logic Gainz" that's PowerScore's terminology the "mistaken reversal" and "mistaken negation" right? Just want to be clear because I don't think 7Sage uses those names.

Given a conditional statement S: if A then B, the logically equivalent statement is if not B then not A. That's the contrapositive of (S).

The converse of (S) is if B then A. "mistaken reversal"
The inverse of (S) is if not A then not B. "mistaken negation"

But note that the converse of (S) and the inverse of (S) are contrapositives of each other, meaning they're logically equivalent statements. They each imply the other in other words. I think that therefore if an argument assumed a converse, it also assumed an inverse, and vice versa?

I guess I can see why PowerScore wants to call it a "mistake" but there's nothing inherently "mistaken" about those statements. They're fine, leave them alone. Just don't confuse if A then B with if B then A.

@"Logic Gainz" said:
I thought the flaw was stating that since neutering usually leads to improper bone development and that definitely ("in turn leads to" implies a causal result every time) leads to arthritis problems later on, then concluding that, "not neutering will solve this problem," is flawed logic, since there could be other reasons for why a dog has arthritis problems (i.e. there could be more than one sufficient condition).

Causation ("reasons") and implication ("being a sufficient condition of") are very different things, though they do share similarities. An implication is far stronger than a cause in a sense and completely orthogonal to it in some other sense. In our world, smoking does cause (is a reason for) cancer but smoking is not sufficient for (doesn't imply) cancer. One plus one implies two but one plus one does not cause two.

The stimulus contains only causal premises. It's true that there may be multiple causes for arthritis. But that's accommodated by the soft language of "protect." The conclusion is where a conditional is present but we can understand that by merely postulating a world where a dog owner wants to protect their dog from arthritis and evaluate whether in that world the causal premises support the consequent, i.e., the "necessary condition."

Logic Gainz

Thanks @bobalicious !

Understood on the contrapositive/converse explanation. I believe Powerscore calls it "mistaken" because in the context of conditionality; if given A implies B and then we're given B by a premise, it would be "mistaken" - at least logically - to conclude A. We'll leave that alone, though, since for one, I'm not trying to adulterate the forums with P-score terminology which might complicate things, and two that's something everyone can agree on!

I wanted to touch on the conditionality vs causation debate. I just realized that I was confusing something said about causal conclusions with causal premises. Causal conclusions carry with them the assumption that there aren't other causes to the effect, thereby rendering them flawed. For example, I got sick after eating shrimp and grits. Therefore the shrimp caused my sickness. I'm assuming the grits didn't make me sick and therein lies the flaw.

However, the actual causal relationship between A and B (more specifically, A causes B ), and knowing that A doesn't always have to cause B - thereby differentiating it from a sufficient condition - applies to causal premises and that's the distinction I failed to make. I agree. A causing B, when expressed in a premise, could lead to sometimes A not causing B in exceptional cases.