Most and without together in a sentence. Totally confused!

fiji12345678

I was working on PT33 LR Section 3 Q.8. The stimulus starts with "Most people invest in the stock market without doing any research of their own." Turning it into Lawgic. At first I did "People research/ -most-> invest" But my instinct says "Invest -most-> research/" is also right. Because when I ask "what do I know about these investors?" The answer I get is "Most of them do not do research."
However, the conditional Lawgic rule states "without=sufficient negation."

I am sooo confused.

Can anyone help me?

vandyzach

I am going to tell you something that you do not want to hear. What you just said is exactly why holding true to little LSAT shortcuts instead of focusing on what the sentence is actually saying is dangerous.

Shortcuts such as "without indicates a necessary condition" are fine when it clearly indicates a necessary condition (for example: without working hard, Bob is not going to improve his LSAT score. In this example, working hard is necessary for Bob improving his LSAT score).

But in the case you are talking about, with just the sentence you mentioned in your post, THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT NECESSITY. What you should take away from that part of the stimulus is that most people invest in the stock market without doing any research of their own.

I have been studying for the LSAT for over 5 months, and let me tell you that the sooner you realize that you need to realize what the sentence is saying instead of holding true to rules such as "must always indicates a necessary condition", the more pain you'll save yourself. I tried nearly every little trick in the book and after 5 months I came to the conclusion that focusing on what the sentence is actually saying is far superior than holding true to these "rules", although the rules can help you AFTER you know what the sentence is saying.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

fiji12345678

So true! I have found out that with "without" especially applying the rule does not always work.

Thank you so much for replying!

jrkovals

yeah i say other than cases of without like the one you mentioned and the word when in the context of referential phrasings, the key words work very well.. and suggest sticking with them.

Will Edwards

I agree with vandyzach's main point, you can't blindly follow rules without understanding in English. But you could put the above statement in conditional logic and follow the rules. It would look something like this...

/research -> most people in stock market

/most people in stock market -> research

and translate back to something like, "If you don't do your own research, then you are like most people in the stock market,"
and
"If you are like most people in the stock market, then you don't do your own research."

It's not the most elegant, but it works.

Where you got screwed up is that -m-> is not a sufficient/necessary relationship. If you say hey, "Most dogs are cute," is it necessary to be cute to be a dog? Nope. Is it necessary to be a dog to be cute? Nope. You are just indicating that hey, there are these things, dogs, where 51% or more fall into the category of cute. So you can't go applying rules about negating the sufficient, etc, into the -most-> relationship, because in a most relationship, there is no such thing as the sufficient or necessary. I hope this clears up this question as well as some general concepts.