PT61.S2.Q24 - historian: it is unlikely that someone

Tina Cho

Intuitively I thought what said in the argument is contradicting...I thought people usually learn from history and as they increase knowledge about history, they will know better about what is good or bad. (Do people read passages/stimuli related to your life?)
But in the argument it says it's the opposite...right?
As people know more history, they will not judge people morally or not work out of moral themes.
Could anyone give me examples of this?
I don't know why, but for some reason I felt it's not true in real life...and that confused me a lot.
What is working out of moral themes or inclination to morally judge human behavior anyway?
Don't people actually judge what others do and they learn those part from history?
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-61-section-2-question-24/

nye8870

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-61-section-2-question-24/

inactive

@"Tina Cho" Please format your titles like I've edited above. I've had to edit a lot of your threads to comply with our formatting rules lately.

nye8870

The important thing here to realize is that

@"Tina Cho" said:
I felt it's not true in real life.

doesn't matter to LSAT writers. Although many passages/stimuli are drawn from actual studies beliefs etc. the logic does not have to be true in real life. It is critically important to ignore your life experience and just follow the logic given to you in the stim. If the stim says all dogs speak English then that's what we must consider fact. I know its frustrating but once you give in to their logical construction and accept it as fact you will be able to work the questions in a very formulaic way (which is highly beneficial/efficient for us).

Tina Cho

@"Dillon A. Wright" sorry but when I typed I found many people write PT#,#,#etc and I was not sure which one to follow...:(

@nye8870
So...am I correct that this is actually not true in real life? Does this happens a lot in hard questions? or any questions?

blah170blah

@"Tina Cho" I know it's hard but you really have to resist questioning the stimulus for this question. Sometimes, it could be helpful to use real logic to help you understand an argument better or to even challenge what's been given to you (like flaws, weakens, strengthens, etc.) For SA, you want to stick with the logic which is pretty straightforward.

You have:
P1: someone can see history as working out moral themes -> hold clear and unambiguous beliefs
P2: increase in history knowledge -> decrease in moral judgment
-----
C: more history --> less likely to work out themes

For our conclusion to hold we need to connect the sufficient condition in P2 to somehow connect to the contrapositive of the sufficient condition in P1. It behooves us then to rewrite P1 as: /hold clear and unambiguous beliefs --> /less likely to see history as working out moral themes.

The rest of the question runs like a math problem. We got to match P2 to the contrapositive of P1:
increase in history --> decrease in moral judgement -> /hold clear and unambiguous beliefs -> /less likely to see history

The bold is the SA needed to reach the conclusion, which is represented by (B).

blah170blah

^^ I don't actually know if that made any sense to you but it's the way I process SA questions LOL

Tina Cho

@blah170blah
Thanks,
Yeah maybe I should not think about the contents for SA questions...
I just wanted to avoid drawing diagrams bc it takes time. So I thought it would be great if I could solve the questions without drawing anything...but just by reading and get to the correct answer.
I guess that does not work for SA questions?
><
I don't know but it just...feels weird, feels like it's not testing logic but more like math problem...

blah170blah

So you don't always want to diagram but this question is just giving you so many relationships, you don't want to place the burden on remembering everything.

Cant Get Right

@"Tina Cho" said:
I don't know but it just...feels weird, feels like it's not testing logic but more like math problem...

So, you're actually on to something here. Logic, in a very real sense, is linguistic mathematics. The content really and truly doesn't matter. So if we've got an SA question with an argument structured like so:

A --> B
therefore:
A --> C

It does not matter what we plug in to those variables. Period. Let's say:

A = giraffes
B = gasoline
C = Abraham Lincoln

Logically, what we need here to make our argument work is B --> C. In English, what we need is "if gasoline then Abraham Lincoln." That allows us to arrive at our conclusion: "If giraffes then Abraham Lincoln." No problem.

Now, of course this is absurd, but it's important to recognize that it is still a perfectly valid argument. If you're going to do well on the LSAT you need to get comfortable with this. You seem to be confusing the concepts of validity and soundness, so maybe learning the distinction between the two would be useful.

Here's an excerpt from my college Logic textbook:

. . . a valid deductive argument is an argument in which it is impossible for the conclusion to be false given that the premises are true. In these arguments the conclusion follows with strict necessity from the premises. . .
To test an argument for validity we begin by assuming that all the premises are true, and then we determine if it is possible, in light of that assumption, for the conclusion to be false. (41-42)

A sound argument is a deductive argument that is valid and has all true premises. (44)

Hurley, Patrick J. A Concise Introduction to Logic. 9th ed. Australia: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2006. Print.

So, on the LSAT, we are not concerned with soundness, only validity. This means that no matter how ridiculous, counterintuitive, or wrong a given premise may seem, we must assume it is true. So if they throw something at us that says "if giraffes then gasoline; therefore if giraffes then Abraham Lincoln," you've got to be able to assume it's true and roll with it.

Tina Cho

@"Cant Get Right" Hi, thanks for your response.
So...just wanted to double check, the argument in this question actually sounds a little weird right?
Or is it only me who feel so?
I thought people can learn something from history and as we learn more, people can distinguish what is good and what is bad...
Sorry to bother but just wanted to make sure so that I can distinguish validness from soundness.
Thanks in advance!

Cant Get Right

Nothing sounds weird in LSAT conditional reasoning. It only sounds valid or invalid. Honestly, if they threw my crazy ass giraffe question onto a real test I don't think I'd even notice at this point. Read past the words, you've got to dig deeper and see the logical structure or the LSAT is going to use this to crush you.