Self-study
Faculty member: The university's financially minded president holds that some academic programs should be eliminated because they do not serve student demands. █████████ ██ ████ ███ ██████████ ██ █ ████████ ███ ███ ████████ ███ ██████████ ███ ██ ██ ███ ██████████████ ██ ███ ████████ ██ ███████ ████████ ███████ ███ ███ █████████ ██ ████████ ██ ███ █████████ ██ ███ █████████ ██ ████████ ██████ ██████████ ███ █████████ ██ ████████ ██ ████████ ████ ████████ ████████ ██████ ██ ████████ ██ ████ ███████ ███████
Objective: Flaw / Descriptive Weakening Questions
In Flaw / Descriptive Weakening questions, we approach the stimulus with a critical eye, looking for unreasonable assumptions and faulty reasoning methods. With practice, it’s often within reach to proactively identify the argument’s flaw well enough to move into the answer choices looking for that specific flaw.
This process is aided significantly by the fact that the LSAT writers routinely pull from a list of common flaws – learning to recognize these flaws when they appear in stimuli and answer choices will save you an enormous amount of time and mental energy.
Argument Summary
This stimulus is long, and the claims within it are somewhat complex. Approaching this question without LSAT-specific practice would be difficult and/or time consuming even for someone with strong logical intuitions.
But you do (or at least you will) have LSAT-specific practice, and this question gets a lot easier when you have mastery of two core skills from our curriculum: breaking down an argument’s structure (specifically, separating context from premises and conclusions), and recognizing common flaws (cheat sheet linked above).
Here’s how the stimulus reads if you’ve got those skills on lock:
Context: The president makes aclaim , and supports that claim with ananalogy .
Premise: But that analogy is bad.
_________
Conclusion: The president’s claim is false.
This structure is enough to recognize the lack of support vs. false conclusion flaw, which is quite common on the test. Here’s another example:
Me: It is Monday. I know it is Monday because the sky temple sent a beacon to the bacon I was baking this morning.
You: That makes no sense at all. It must not be Monday.
Just because someone is bad at making a point, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
15.
The faculty member's argument is ████ ██████████ ██ ███ █████████ ████ ██
a
argues for a ████ ███████ ███████ ████ ██ ████████ ███████ ████ ████ █████
The primary lens through which to view (A) is as a slightly-off wording of the lack of support vs. false conclusion flaw that we’re looking for. If (A) said “argues for a view simply because an argument against the view fails,” we’d be cooking.
So practically speaking, (A) is probably wrong because it doesn’t say what you thought it said. But what (A) does say still has to be wrong on its own. So let’s address that.
There’s a few different readings of (A) to address. First, maybe you read “a view” to mean the president’s view. In that case, (A)’s wrongness is quite straightforward: the faculty member does not argue for that view.
But maybe you read “a view” to mean the faculty member’s view. If that’s the case, then “an argument against that view” is the president’s argument. So (A) says the flaw is that the faculty member fails to show that the president’s argument fails.
This position can be countered in two ways. (By the way, are you enjoying all this “there are two different blah” and “here’s two reasons that blah”? You’d better be, because legal opinions are absolutely full of this stuff.)
But okay two counterarguments to “the flaw is that the faculty member fails to show that the president’s argument fails.”
One: The faculty member does show the president’s argument fails.
Two: Even if the faculty member failed to disprove the president’s argument, it’s perfectly fine to present your own positive argument without having to actively disprove every conceivable opposing argument. So (A) accuses the faculty member of doing something that is completely allowed.
Really what you want to strive for, though, is the ability to recognize the lack of support vs. false conclusion flaw in the stimulus, recognize (A) as a slightly-off way to point to that flaw, move on from (A) without diving so deep, and never return because (E) presents the flaw on a silver platter.
b
appeals to popular ███████ ██ ███████ █ ██████████
(B) points to another common flaw, which in this case you could either think of as facts vs. beliefs (just because people believe something is true doesn’t mean it’s true in fact) or as an inappropriate appeal to authority (the hoi polloi cannot be trusted in matters of university policy).
Either way, as with (D) and thousands of other wrong answers on the LSAT that point cleanly to a different common flaw than the flaw displayed in the stimulus, the argument just doesn’t do any of that.
Like maybe the concept of popular opinion comes up in the president’s analogy about consumer demand, but the author certainly doesn’t appeal to consumer demand to justify their conclusion.
c
treats merely analogous ██████ ██ █████████
(C) gestures in the direction of another common flaw, which we playfully call analogies that aren’t analogous enough. It’s a thing that sometimes happens! Authors will sometimes make an analogy, then stretch themselves thin trying to apply it when in fact the two concepts being compared are different in important ways.
Maybe that’s a good description of the flaw in the president’s argument (you know, the one presenting the analogy), as seen by our faculty member. But this question is about the flaw in the faculty member’s argument.
And anyway, identical is a strong word. The answer choices in Flaw questions are accusations, and accusing the author of treating analogous concepts like they’re identical is quite the claim. Identical would look like this:
“Birds are like wolves – they travel in groups, they make noises, and also they are exactly the same concept guys there are literally zero differences between birds and wolves.”
So yeah, our author doesn’t do that. The president doesn’t do that. No one does that.
d
improperly attacks the ██████████ ███████████ █████ █████████
(D) points to another common flaw: the argumentum ad hominem. Attacking the person making the argument instead of the argument itself.
But as with (B) and thousands of other wrong answers on the LSAT that point cleanly to a different common flaw than the flaw displayed in the stimulus, the argument just doesn’t do any of that.
The closest we get is calling the president “financially minded.”
e
rejects a view ██ ███ ███████ ████ ███████ ███ █████ ██████████ ███████ ███ █████████ ████ ████
Make a note, because this is what it looks like when the LSAT points to the lack of support vs. false conclusion common flaw: you did a bad job convincing me of your view, so I have decided you must be wrong.
Mapping (E) onto the stimulus, our faculty member