LSAT 159 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q25

LR Question 25 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Artist: I have never won a prize at the Art Competition …

QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Parallel Reasoning

CONCLUSION: Winning the competition means you’re a bad artist.

REASONING: Multiple artists who are popular, including myself, have never won.

ANALYSIS: Two errors here:

1. Popular vs. good. The artist’s works are popular, but that doesn’t need to make their art good.
2. The argument is anecdotal. If all popular artists lost, then we could say “If you win, you’re not popular (bad?).” But you can’t use info about some artists to make the same claim.

Note that the author tries to do the contrapositive. This is a small point of distinction that’s worth noting. In rare cases, parallel answers can distinguish on whether logic uses the contrapositive form or not – one answer here fails to parallel on this point.

___________

1. This feels close, but it is not parallel.

   1. Patenting inventions and the inventions being lucrative does mean those inventions are marketable. No flaw here.
   2. The researcher says “we are marketable and didn’t win, so the criteria must be something other than marketability”. They should have said “So the winners must not be marketable”.

   You can have a trait even if it isn’t a selection criterion. Law schools don’t select on fashion, but that doesn’t make you unfashionable!

2. Two differences:

   1. If your cooking is unappealing to most people then it is true that your creation is not to people’s taste. No flaw here.
   2. The argument is anecdotal which matches. But the cook follows their logic in the normal way, whereas the original tried to do a contrapositive. This answer would be more parallel if the cook had said “Therefore, if your creations are to most people’s tastes then you won’t win.”
3. This is comparing the same essays that win sometimes and lose other times. It’s not comparing winners vs. non-winners.

4. CORRECT. This makes the same pair of flaws:

   1. The student mistakenly thinks that popular proposals are the same thing as good proposals
   2. The student uses only anecdotes to support their argument, and tries to do the contrapositive with the anecdotes. They say “some popular proposals are not taken seriously, so if a proposal is taken seriously it must be bad (unpopular?)”
5. This is an unsupported inference regarding motive (maybe his creative and dedicated work is just really bad, and when he’s rushing he actually gets it right so that’s why he’s being rewarded). But that’s not the flaw in the stimulus.