Using Lawgic

jaibandekar

Ive become familiar with the system of translation but Im still struggling to understand the practical use of making the translations. Is it just that I can not do them fast enough yet? or is it something that I'm possibly missing? Any advice or tips would be appreciated, thanks!

yunonsie

Are you working on LR questions or LG? You should see your lawgic translations pay off there. If you feel like you don't need lawgic to answer the questions, then maybe you're amazing at being able to intuitively interpret these statements.

jaibandekar

My bad, should have clarified, LR is the issue. Lawgic makes a lot of sense with LG, but with LR I can't see how making those "diagrams" are helpful given that I have such limited time. I also still do not understand how they are helpful in answering most questions (for LR).

Also, Im definitely not amazing at intuitively interpreting LR statements.

BinghamtonDave

The practical use I think is twofold. 1. is to shorten/abridge the concepts down to pieces of information that can be read quickly and efficiently, much like how we would abridge rules on logic games down ultimately to quickly and more efficiently use them to help answer questions. So a 5 space sequencing game that gives us a rule that says: A is separated from B by exactly 2 spots with A preceding B. The rule is quite a mouthful and would be inefficient to repeatedly return to each time we were answering a question or making a game board. So we abridge it down to something like: A _ _ B to capture the idea in a glance rather than a whole sentence.

The same goes for "lawgic" The statement given to us might be something that is clunky/convoluted: Unless David can get his car started, he won't be going to the soccer game. We can abridge that down to: SG---->CS
The * symbol meaning "David." This allows us to save valuable time. I tell my students that if you can save 10 seconds on a question: that is a victory! In this sense confident and competent lawgic can help us.

1. The second practical use in my mind is that when we have boiled the concepts down to these more manageable concepts, we can proceed with the various "operations" and combination building that the LSAT expects of us. For a nice illustration of this please see PT 49 Section 2 Question 7.

Sometimes people might say something like "I don't have enough time for lawgic" on LR. I think this is slightly misguided. The time we spent on a solid lawgic set up is time invested and confidence in the answer choice we select. It is well worth the investment and 7Sage's CC has plenty of drills to this end.

Jonathan Wang

I wrote a piece about this a long time ago: https://7sage.com/discussion/#/discussion/2763/why-formal-logic

tl;dr - it's a means to an end, and a very important one at that. your proficiency is likely what's holding you back.