IF-Then with a qualifier?

Comments

• LSATisland Free Trial Inactive Sage

  January 2016 1878 karma

  Yes, the frustration of applying the LSAT to the world and expecting nice, clear categories. People just mean "likely" or "probably", and are avoiding categorical statement because things are typically not that clear and categorical.
• nye8870 Alum ⭐

  January 2016 edited January 2016 1749 karma

  Swell example @as5324therapy of the vague logic in the real world. I see this as: "If demand for housing increases, then there is a possibility home prices will rise." Contrapositive: ?
• nye8870 Alum ⭐

  January 2016 1749 karma

  Contrapositive: "If there is no possibility of home prices rising, then there is no demand for homes."....?
  
• hlsat180 Free Trial Member

  January 2016 edited January 2016 362 karma

  Causal vs. Conditional Reasoning
• Q.E.D Alum Member

  January 2016 edited January 2016 556 karma

  There are different ways to schematize that, just depends on which features are relevant to the context. Looks like it's probably confusing because the consequent could be interpreted as a proposition in a modal context, i.e. P->◇Q.
  
  The conditional you've learned is called the material conditional. It's the easiest formal construct for natural language conditionals, but it's distorted owing to its limited expressive power. Richer systems like modal logic are better equipped to capture the niceties of ordinary language.
  
  In brief, that's perfectly fine logic. I think your problem is just that sentence logic (SL, aka Lawgic) isn't equipped to schematize all the reasoning in ordinary language and, for that matter, the LSAT.
  
  For more on problems with the material conditional, see
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxes_of_material_implication
  
  And
  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal-origins/