LSAT 135 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q12

LR Question 12 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: No matter how conscientious they are, historians always …

QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning

CONCLUSION: Historians should interpret what participants thought about historical events instead of interpreting the events themselves.

REASONING: Historians always have biases, and those biases affect their work.

ANALYSIS: So why wouldn’t historians’ biases also affect their interpretation of what participants thought?

The reasoning is that historians are always biased, which necessarily affects their work.

So yes, that would affect their interpretation of historical events.

But if that’s our reasoning, that would also affect their interpretation of participants’ thoughts.

They’d still have to decide which sources are reliable, interpret diaries and letters, infer motives, resolve conflicting accounts, etc. Their biases don’t magically disappear just because they’re interpreting people’s beliefs instead of the events themselves.

The argument’s assuming that if they change the focus of their interpretation, that would remove the bias. But it doesn’t actually explain why that would be true.

___________

1. Even if historians sometimes agree, that doesn’t address the proposed solution.
2. What happens in other disciplines is irrelevant. The argument is only about historians.
3. Knowing how bias works doesn’t fix the flaw. The issue is whether the proposed alternative avoids bias.
4. The argument already assumes biases exist and will affect work, so whether historians recognize their biases has nothing to do with the reasoning.
5. CORRECT. The author assumes that switching from interpreting events to interpreting participants’ beliefs solves the bias problem. But historians’ biases would likely affect both kinds of interpretation. The proposed solution doesn’t actually address the stated problem.