LSAT 106 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q18

LR Question 18 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: The human brain and its associated mental capacities…

QUESTION TYPE: Principle – Strengthen

CONCLUSION: You have to judge someone’s aesthetic judgements based on whether they will help that person survive.

REASONING: Our aesthetic sense developed to help us survive. This is true because all of our brainpower evolved to help us survive.

ANALYSIS: This is a bad argument. Our capabilities evolved in a certain environment, but we now live in a different environment.

I’m typing these words using fingers originally adapted to grasping sticks and climbing trees.

There’s no obvious reason to judge my typing based on the original reason that fingers evolved.

We must support the argument, so we need a principle that says that any action must be judged according to the reason the capability for that action first evolved.

___________

1. This broad statement isn’t useful. We already know that our aesthetic sense evolved thanks to the brain.
2. We’re supposed to evaluate our aesthetic sense to see if it contributes to the success of an individual. This weakens that possibility: if our aesthetic sense no longer helps us survive as a species, then evaluation is impossible.
3. CORRECT. This says we must judge our aesthetic sense according to its original function.
4. The argument didn’t say our evaluation must be true or false.
    
   Even if it did, this answer wouldn’t help. It’s telling us when we can’t evaluate, but we want to evaluate.
5. We don’t know if our aesthetic sense made us proliferate better. It might have helped us survive by preventing our numbers from shrinking.
    
   But that’s not the main point. We’re not judging the human aesthetic sense. We’re evaluating the aesthetic judgements of individual humans.