Contrapositives needed?

Comments

• taschasp Alum Member Sage ⭐

  February 2020 edited February 2020 796 karma

  Is your question about whether you need to understand contrapositives in conditional reasoning, or about whether you need to diagram them on LR questions?

  If it's the former, the answer is yes. If you don't understand how contrapositives work you're going to have trouble with a sizeable enough chunk of LR questions, and you need that knowledge anyway for LG, so you should definitely learn the logic.

  As for the latter, it depends. You don't need to diagram conditional relationships on the vast majority of LR questions. But on some LR questions, diagramming the conditional relationships will simplify the stimulus and make it easier to answer the question, not the other way around. In other words, there are some questions that we would all really have a lot of trouble trying to answer without diagramming anything because of how much we'd have to retain in our heads at once.

  (I will add that ironically, if you are trying to score a 180, you might be able to get by without diagramming conditional relationships--I got a 179 and maybe diagrammed 1 LR question on each section--but only because I internalized the logic thoroughly enough that I could actually get by without writing any of it down. So, counterintuitive as it may be, I would approach this question in the opposite way that you've framed it!).
• KevinLuminateLSAT Alum Member

  February 2020 984 karma

  You won't achieve a score over 160 if you cannot reliably understand the contrapositive of a conditional relationship. But if you're asking about whether you can score 160+ without drawing conditional diagrams in LR or their contrapositives, the answer is...yes, as long as your scores in RC and LG are very strong. But you'd be making some problems significantly harder for yourself in LR.

  One reason to keep training your diagramming ability is that many problems based on conditional logic are among the more formulaic ones in LR. And more formulaic usually means easier to get improve on.

  It's normal to find conditional logic frustrating when you're first learning it. And for a long time thereafter. But a deep understanding of conditional logic, born from many hours of practice, is well worth the investment.