PT41.S1.Q22 - If violations go unpunished

TrusttheprocessTrusttheprocess Member
edited October 2019 in Logical Reasoning 776 karma

So I know this is a tough flaw question.

With tough questions like this - I almost always double check line 1 with the conclusion at the end, because there is always this jump that somehow (or a lot of time is the fall)... routinely with never in this case.

However, knowing this - I just don't understand/struggling to translate AC D.

I know B C E were just pure garbage to me in the beginning. I was left with A and D. A is wrong b/c of domain jump of "avoid chaos" - we do not know what accomplishes this.

Any help would be awesome... thanks

Admin note: edited title; please use the format of "PT#.S#.Q# - [brief description]"

Admin note: https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-41-section-1-question-22/

Comments

  • Trust the ProcessTrust the Process Alum Member
    edited October 2019 304 karma

    For me this question depends on understanding the word "impunity". Not trying to sound condescending but do you know what that word means?

  • BinghamtonDaveBinghamtonDave Alum Member ⭐ 🍌🍌
    8689 karma

    It might be helpful to try to view this in a slightly different form, the one in the lesson is certainly great, but it might help to look at a slightly different angle here.

    A couple of tricks here that the LSAT will employ. The first is the idea of a chain of events (normally either causally related or conditionally related) leading to a certain consequence that I believe the test writers want us to see as undesirable. Here that concept is chaos.

    So if a line of reasoning says that A causes B and B leads to chaos, a much better argument here would be for their conclusion to say something like: we should prevent A from attaining/we should not do A. This is actually a form that appears with some regularity on the lsat. It will say something like:
    “Smoking 3 packs of Cigarettes per day for 20 years is correlated with a higher chance of lung cancer therefore we should not smoke 3 packs of cigarettes per day for 20 years.” The base form here is correlation in the premise, assumption of causation, conclusion states that we should take away this particular cause (again under the causal assumption that taking away a cause will result in less of the effect.). This argument type actually still commits the correlation/causation error in a sense.

    But this particular problem you highlight here actually does not make the causal error in my opinion. Because there is a difference in terms that I look at as preventing the causal error from obtaining. For an analogous argument let's look at our previous form:
    “Smoking 3 packs of Cigarettes per day for 20 years is correlated with a higher chance of lung cancer therefore we should not smoke 3 packs of cigarettes per day for 20 years.”

    and let's change it to be more like 41-1-22:
    “Smoking 3 packs of Cigarettes per day for 20 years is correlated with a higher chance of lung cancer therefore we should never smoke a single cigarette or even take a single drag from one.”

    Notice with the amended example that the way there is a gap between the decent (but still potentially flawed) conclusion I could make and the actual conclusion I did make I have diverged from any potential internal consistency that I could uphold with that second conclusion. That is why this problem is flawed in my opinion. The second key takeaway here is to try to ask ourselves: what conclusion could they support here vs. what conclusion the did offer. Sometimes, the gap between those two things is our answer.

    Now, why do I choose this way of looking at this argument? That this is slightly more of a causal rather than a conditional (although both ways of viewing it are helpful and should be explored) because the conclusion is a prescription: ought.

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