PT1.S4.Q21 - a society in which there are many crimes

Seriousbird

I am totally lost on this question. What I did was diagram :

--L ---> --C
C --> L

I picked E because it had the word many in it, and I thought from the first sentence it was being consistent. Initially, I was thinking D because of "some" but then I thought well the first sentence has "many" so I should be congruent.

I'm really lost and cannot figure this out. If someone could help me out, I would be most appreciative!

Cant Get Right

Even before I looked it up, I knew it was going to be this one!

So, we learn in the curriculum that many = some. Well, on the modern LSAT that is a perfectly fine thing. But back in the early days, the LSAT exploited the difference between the two. They aren’t actually logically equivalent, that’s just a rule we can apply to the LSAT. So what MBT here? Let’s look at E. Does “many crimes” absolutely have to mean the society has “many laws?”

What if there’s only one law? This is where the difference between many and some comes into play. We know some is 1+, but who’s to say what many means? It’s a subjective term. Many mice is a different amount to different people. To my mom, one mouse is too many. To me, I don’t hit my many threshold until around four dozen or so.

So let’s say there’s only one law in this world and that law is that eating ice cream is henceforth forbidden. I imagine I could assemble a pretty large gang of outlaws here. So even if there’s only one law, there will be many crimes in this case. (If only the distribution of ice cream were also illegal, we could make a killing on the black market.) So, we don’t need many laws, we just need one law that is frequently broken. So, "many" fails to account for this. “Some,” meaning 1+, definitely includes this scenario. That’s why the “some” answer is correct and the “many” answer is wrong.

Hope this helps!

Seriousbird

I'm with your mom on the mice issue! Thank you SO much for your help, I understand why E is incorrect now. Can you explain the other answer choices?

I think C would be incorrect because if you have many laws it does not mean you have many crimes, you could have a few crimes or no crimes. Correct? And A) is similar to C's reasoning.

Cant Get Right

@sweetsecret said:
I'm with your mom on the mice issue!

Haha, yeah, I don’t see much difference between them and squirrels or chipmunks or something. Although, I guess squirrels don’t have a history of wanting to be inside with us! I wouldn’t want a squirrel in my house either, so maybe it’s not a fair comparison.

And yeah, for the rest of the answers, it sounds like you got it. The argument is just saying that by definition, the existence of any crime requires that there be laws to break. If there are no laws to break, then bad things can still happen- they just wouldn’t be crimes. So, the relationship definitely goes: Crime —> Law. But what can we really conclude from that? Maybe there are laws and everyone follows them. So we can totally have law without crime. So any answer choice that has any form of “Law —> Crime” is wrong for that reason.