LSAT 142 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q24

QUESTION TEXT: Historian: It is unlikely that someone would see…

QUESTION TYPE: Sufficient Assumption

CONCLUSION: The more history you know, the less likely you think that history is a working out of moral themes.

H ➞ MT

REASONING: Historical knowledge reduces your tendency to judge people. And to view history as a working out of moral themes, you need clear and unambiguous beliefs.

H ➞ MJ

MT ➞ CB

ANALYSIS: On sufficient assumption questions, you should follow a three step process:

1. Identify the conclusion. (H ➞ MT)
2. Split it apart:       H                        MT
3. Fill in the evidence and find the gap.

Here, that looks like this. Take the contrapositive of MT ➞ CB and it becomes “MJ ➞ CB”. Then you can fit it in with the conclusion:

H ➞ MJ              CB ➞ MT

The gap is between not morally judging and not having clear beliefs (MJ ➞ CB). The answer could also be the contrapositive: CB ➞ MJ

Note that, technically, this question doesn’t use conditional statements. It says “unlikely”, “less likely” etc. But I drew the statements as conditionals anyway.

Why? Because on sufficient assumption questions, it works. You’re trying to get from point A to B. Don’t be a snob. Being hyper-critical about reasoning is for flaw questions. Here, you’re trying to help the argument. You can’t technically take a contrapositive of an “unlikely” statement, but in this case the process led us to the right answer.

On a critical argument question, never do this! You can normally only take contrapositives of conditional statements.

___________

1. This doesn’t match the gap. And frankly, it’s just a bunch of complicated words designed to confuse and distract you. Here’s the answer more simply: “Events that don’t bother people usually aren’t taken as demonstrating moral themes.”
    
   That’s useless.
2. CORRECT. See the analysis. This fills the gap.
3. This answer introduces two slightly different terms. The stimulus talked about “having historical knowledge” and “history as a working out of moral themes”.
    
   This talked about “understanding human history” and “attributing moral significant to historical events”.
    
   Are those the same things? You could make a decent case that history is just human history, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that “working out moral themes” and “attributing moral significant to historical events” are the same. And what would “failing to understand human history mean”….would it mean having zero historical knowledge?
    
   The concepts in this answer don’t map well to the stimulus, so this answer has zero impact.
    
   If this did have the correct terms, it might have been right, because the answer is the contrapositive of the conclusion: M ➞ H. However, as I said in the analysis, you can’t actually take a logically sound contrapositive of a statement with “unlikely”, which is what the stimulus had. So by saying “only”, this answer has a third difference from the stimulus.
    
   So….there’s way too much wrong here.
4. This answer is just a reversal of one of the statements from the evidence. We already had MT ➞ CB (it was the first sentence). This answer says CB ➞ MT. This doesn’t help us connect MT or CB to any other statements.
5. Ridiculous. The stimulus wasn’t talking about objectivity. This answer connects with nothing.

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