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PT58.S1.Q11 & PT62.S4.Q19: Come on, where's the 7sage community! My post is getting ignored!
Ashley2018-1
Alum Member
I just couldn't anticipate the flaws with either of these questions and would like to know how people who got these correct went about doing them. My pre-phase going into the answer choices was that there wasn't a perfect correlation in the premises and so the author is incorrectly concluding that therefore there was no causal relationship. Is this the correct pre-phase? Is there a better one?
Admin Note:
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-58-section-1-question-11/
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-62-section-4-question-19/
Comments
On it @Ashley2018 !
I think these two questions are actually great examples of the limits on the pre-phrasing strategy. To be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect going into the AC’s. I understood that the arguments were flawed, and I had some notion of why, but articulating it was more challenging. If I used pre-phrasing, I don’t think I’d’ve quite come up with what the answers say. No problem though. The right AC’s gave away the phrasing much better than I could’ve attempted to predict. Instead of pre-phrasing, this is what I do. I just check in with the AC’s to let them do the phrasing for me. Each serves as a prompt which gives me something to consider. That consideration, in turn, gives me a different perspective on the argument which I may or may not have predicted. Pre-phrasing locks you in to one perspective, and you can lose a lot of your room to maneuver.
For both of these questions, the flaw is that it assumes all chromosome damage and all back issues happen without any significant differences. The correct AC’s ask you to consider if that is necessarily the case or not. Chromosomes are complex. Damage to one area may have dramatically different impact compared to damage to another area. One type of damage may very well cause problems where another type of damage may be totally harmless. The right AC creates sub-worlds within the object under consideration. Some sub-worlds have a causal effect and others don’t. So we can’t conclude no cause/effect about the bigger category.
So that’s not a pre-phrase. But it’s the understanding the AC’s helped me develop. No need to do it on your own. Let the answers help you out and make suggestions!
58 - The term "NO causal connection" is a big hint in the conclusion - it will be hard to show NO connection, and the evidence just shows imperfect correlation - that one can occur without the other. This is more of what I call a "structural flaw;" the terms will match up but the relationship is what shifts. So, yes, I think that prediction is spot on. You don't have to have a fancy perfect sentence for the prediction, just a handle on what two things you are connecting.
And 62 is somewhat similar - because THESE people don't get pain, it couldn't cause pain in other people. Like saying "because I can eat peanuts without an allergic reaction, peanuts can't possible cause allergic reactions in anyone."
Hi!
The thing I found confusing in the back pain question was the use of "sufficient" and "necessary" because I wasn't sure whether to treat this like a conditional or causal type question. And so I found A and B incredibly difficult to distinguish. Is A saying bulging disks are not necessary for pain but may be sufficient? I thought the stimulus was describing a different situation (bulging disks but NO pain) while A is saying you can have Pain without bulging disks.
Yeah, A is trying to call bulging disks sufficient for back pain, which we know can't be true because of the people we know have bulging disks and no pain. If bulging disk were sufficient for pain, these folks would have to be in pain. They're not, so that's not the relationship. B says it right: It's clearly not sufficient, but that doesn't mean it couldn't contribute to the problem and result in serious pain.
This is a good opportunity to clear up misconceptions...I was under the impression that causal arguments on the LSAT were absolute in that it was one cause, one effect. Doesn't the bulging disks question indicate that there can be more than one cause per effect? Because the correct answer choice is saying that bulging disks is only a partial factor.
Good question! So the idea here is that it might be a compound cause. So maybe a bulging disk doesn’t cause pain. Maybe a clinched spinal muscle doesn’t cause pain. But maybe the combination of both is excruciating. Together, they create causation. You can think of this kind of like a compound sufficient condition. (Conditional relationships do not imply causation, but causal relationships do imply conditionality.)
An LSAT tutor claims that if A and B then C. But a question has A and not C, so that conditional relationship is wrong.
The flaw there is simply that A was never claimed to be sufficient. It’s completely missing the B which must also be present to trigger the sufficient. Kind of the same thing with this question, but it’s trickier because they never even reference the possible existence of B (until you see “partly responsible” in the answer). So there is still only the one sufficient here. That it’s compound doesn’t mean it’s plural. There is exactly one condition which triggers, it’s just a complex condition.
Whoa…ok, so it’s still one cause, albeit a complex one.
Cause: X
Effect: Y
Cause: X (Bulging disks+ factor A), Effect: Y (Pain)
And the use of conditional language is acceptable here because, as you have stated, the causal relationship implies conditionality. So when it says X is sufficient (enough) to cause Y, or bulging disks is sufficient to cause Y, it’s simultaneously referring to the conditional and causal relationship.
Yeah, I think you pretty much got it. It’s a really complicated problem the way they mix the conditional and causal relationships here:
“a factor that is not itself sufficient to produce a certain effect. . .”
Damn. I mean, that’s a lot to process.
I’m also curious in the causal language in the stimulus—“lead to”. This is actually a whole other problem the test writers didn’t choose to explore/exploit. I think it might suggest that a bulging disk could cause pain after all, but there may be a time delay between cause and effect. The people in the study weren’t tracked over time, they were examined once and conclusions were drawn from this snapshot. It’s not completely inconsistent with this information that a bulging disk could cause pain, all by itself, just it might take years for all we know to get there. The test writers chose not to go down that path, but I think it’s nevertheless an interesting point worth noting.
About that chromosomal damage stimulus, how could you tell if such a presumption is being made, especially because presumptions I assume are assumptions, aka unstated (B)
I think that just goes to the nature of “damage.” Think about all the ways someone could damage their leg. That would range from something like a sprained ankle up to karate kicking a wood chipper or something. Again, we just have to be more specific. Our clue comes where the answer refers to “some but not all types of damage”. That creates the distinction between the different types of damage.
Oh no I was referring to answer choice B.
And I thought these two questions would have similar/same answers because I saw similarities in the stimulus (chromosomal damage without schizo and bulging disks without pain) so what makes the answers so different?