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Related Discussions
Chaining Conditional Statements Help
SpinnerT
Core Member
help!
Greetings all! I've gotten really good at identifying and parsing conditional statements... I can quickly identify the indicator group and from there the rest is history. However, for whatever reason, I'm really struggling with chaining the statements together. On the syllabus examples, the Game of Thrones prompt really threw me for a loop and I ended up with way more possibilities that weren't addressed in the explanation. This is so frustrating because I've gained so much ground but ultimately know that if I cant combine the statements then I'm really not that much better off on any LG.
Im specifically struggling with understanding whether or not in an actual scenario the implicit contrapositive can always be applied. Obviously, the rule says it can, but I'm getting the feeling that practically you shouldn't always assume so. My intuition is getting it...
Does anyone else struggle with this? Is there any more material that I'm missing to better explain and practice chaining? Do I need to just do more and more practice LGs and see where I improve? Thanks!
Comments
Hi there! I think that in general, practice is a good thing, but you have said that you are already getting the concepts. As far as your question about contrapositives, you can always trigger the contrapositive, unless it results in a contradiction. So for example, lets say you have a rule that says A --> B --> C. The contrapositive would just be /C --> /A. However, if you had an additional rule that said /B ---> A, then you could not trigger the contrapositive because you would end up with both A and /A. Outside of some tricky situation like that, I think that you should always be able to trigger and apply the contrapositive of a conditional statement. Do you have an example of one of the statements where you don't think that you can trigger it?
@jmarmaduke96, I cant think of an immediate example, but I take your point: as long as the result doesn't contradict a different established rule, then accept it. Thanks for some clarity and encouragement.
Absolutely! Happy to help! If you think of an example, feel free to DM me and we can discuss it!
Hi! I think you should always be able to take the contrapositive no matter what because ultimately they mean the exact same thing. If A > B is true, then /B > /A must be true. If the contrapositive breaks a rule then the original is broken too because they mean the exact same thing. In the example jmarmaduke96 gave, if there's a rule that says A > B > C and a rule that says /B > A. Chained up that would be /B > A > B. That just doesn't work. Although I have seen games, where the LSAT uses this as a convoluted way of saying that A is NEVER in while B and C are ALWAYS in so that the apparent contradiction falls away, but the rules still apply and the contrapositive would still hold. Hope that helps!