Hey Everyone,
Needed some help with this conditional statement.
"Deep empathy is required for full understanding of an individual's actions. Internal empathy will grant partial understanding, but only if the individual is open minded towards the process."
I have: Full Understanding ---> Deep Empathy ; (Internal Empathy --> Partial Understanding) --> Open Minded.
The question asks: Dina has acquired both deep and internal empathy of Barry, who is not open minded towards anything. Relative to Barry, Dina will gain: _________
So I know that it is unknown whether Dina will gain full understanding as she satisfies a necessary condition. But, will she also not gain partial understanding since the necessary condition is deinied (Barry is not open minded)??
How do we translate this statement and it's contrapositive: "Internal empathy will grant partial understanding, but only if the individual is open minded towards the process".
Any help would be great. Thanks for your time.
Comments
For the original question, I don't think Dina will gain anything.
This statement is not intuitive to diagram (any philosophy major, please weigh in) but I think this version better represents the argument* (and more consistent with your explanation) to make short work of the answer:
Partial Understanding --> Internal Empathy + Open Minded
To answer the OP, since Dina fails a necessary condition (i.e., not Open Minded) she does not gain Partial Understanding.
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*To test the diagram, substitute a parallel argument: A [Vaccine] will grant [Immunity] but only if the individual is [Already Healthy]:
Immunity --> Vaccine + Already Healthy
What confused was the "only if" that was mentioned before open mindedness. This definitely was not easy for me to grasp, but now it makes sense.
Could someone (JY Ping, Jonathan Wang, quinnxzhang) definitively explain how to construct this argument?
Although, I would appreciate further clarifications as well. This, indeed, is hella confusing. @quinnxzhang ... any help, please and thank you?
I read: Only if open minded will internal empathy lead to understanding. If not open minded, then this says, to me, that the relationship between empathy and understanding does not hold. So my contrapositive here would be something like:
~Open minded —> ~(Internal empathy —> Partial Understanding)
What you say is true in the "real world" but irrelevant to LSAT LR. If the LSAT said, "All clowns are blue but only if they are short" then you could argue the argument is flawed (more precisely: unsound) because in the real world there exist tall, blue clowns. But LSAT LR doesn't care.
The purpose of this "test" (substituting in simpler terms) is to help distill the underlying conditional logic from an argument obfuscated by strange terminology (e.g., internal empathy, partial understanding, etc.). In other words, the purpose is to help understand an argument's validity rather than its "real world" soundness - which LSAT LR never "tests."
So our problem still remains: What is the valid diagram for the OP's statement (below) and how is it determined?
I just sort of did this in my head, but I looked back at the curriculum. I’m no longer 100% certain anymore with my logic. I’m calling in @c.janson35 to figure this out.
EDIT: After further thought and testing, I too agree with this diagram:
"X grants Y but only if Z" translates to "( X -> Y ) -> Z"
Therefore, the answer to the question is no effect because, via the contrapositive, NOT Z (Barry is NOT Open Minded) means X does NOT trigger Y:
NOT Z --> NOT ( X -> Y )
This all disagrees with the OP's friend/his instructor's diagram and so I still remain interested in how they arrived at their solution. @notwilliamwallace could you find out?
The word "grants" tells us that Internal Empathy is sufficient for partial understanding. However, it is not really sufficient in that this technique of using internal empathy to get partial understanding requires being open minded as a necessary condition.
Thus we get (Internal Empathy *technique* -> Partial Understanding *result of technique*) -> Open Minded *necessary for technique to work*.
Because of this relationship, one could say that being open minded is a necessary and sufficient condition for using the technique of internal empathy to derive partial understanding. Thus, I do believe that the teacher's use of Internal Empathy + Open Minded -> Partial Understanding does hold up.
@"Cant Get Right"'s contrapositive of ~Open minded —> ~(Internal empathy —> Partial Understanding) makes a lot of sense. If the person is not open minded, the technique of using internal empathy to derive partial understanding will NOT work.
The super important thing to realize is that being open minded is NOT a necessary condition for Partial Understanding. It is only a necessary condition for the particular technique of using internal empathy to derive partial understanding. For all we know, there is another technique that can be used to derive partial understanding without needing anyone to be open minded.
On the LSAT, the sufficient term is usually a singular item. In this case, we are dealing with a set of sufficient conditions. This leads to a lot of difficult and confusing logic. Thankfully, I don't remember seeing this type of issue coming up to much on the LSAT (LG is the only place that comes to mind). It is still a great mental workout.
I'm on the fence about whether the IE + OM -> PU interpretation is correct, but I lean toward no. If the word 'but' wasn't present then this interpretation would be wrong for sure: "Internal empathy grants partial understanding only if the subject is open-minded" definitely doesn't imply that open-mindedness is the only necessary condition. The word 'but', in this case, looks to me like it just functions as a conjunction, so my instinct is that it has no logical force. But I haven't thought deeply enough about it to say that with 100% certainty. I can certainly see how it changes the reading.
Anyway, since it's not required for the question in this case, it's a moot point in this context. If it mattered for the question, I'm betting that the rule would be expressed more unambiguously.