RC Question 17 Explanation
DISCUSSION: Maritain’s view is that bees do their dance with no intention to communicate. To support that, we should take a quote from passage A where animals lack intention to communicate.
All of the wrong answers fail to mention intention or knowledge.
This is like a “strengthen” question from logical reasoning. Increasingly, RC questions depend on logic.
___________
- This answer is about why language exists. But the question is about why animals use language. You can use something that has an effect without intending to produce that effect.
I’m being generous here and taking the waggle dance to be a form of language. - This could explain why bees evolved dance. But it doesn’t address whether bees evolved intention. Animals (including us!) have lots of involuntary behaviors, done without intention.
- This weakens Maritain’s argument. Maritain is arguing that bees don’t know what they’re doing. If you can attribute mental states like humans do, then maybe you can produce intentional communications like humans do too.
If you read lines 6-11 in full, you’ll see that the author of passage A is singling out chimpanzees as a possible exception to the argument. - CORRECT. The full quote is lines 11-17. This sounds like Maritain’s situation. The frog calls produce an effect, but we can’t say that the frog does its calls because it knows they will produce an effect.
- This is just a random fact about Macaques. This doesn’t tell us whether Macaques intend to produce effects by their calls.
Hey Graeme!
You say E is a random fact about Macaques, but when taking into context the surrounding info as outlined in 20-25, I don’t understand how it’s any different than the P frogs. Doesn’t the last sentence of Passage A “many animal vocalizations whose production initially seems goal directed are not as purposeful as they first appear” provide support that the Macaques do NOT make their decisions based on conscious intent?
You’re only supposed to look at the line itself. Take this sentence. “There is much support for Maritain. Yet, Maritain is wrong”.
Q17 is asking: Which line provides support for the view attributed to Maritain:
A. There is much support for Maritain
B. Maritain is wrong
In context, the author clearly disagrees with Maritain. But the snippet in D supports Maritain, just as my isolated snippet above also supports him.
Is this a common thing in the LSAT? Literally we are told to refer back to the passage for every RC question… and this question forces you to NOT refer back to the passage and ONLY examine the snippet statement they give you… It feels dirty haha.
For anyone reading this and wondering: it isn’t common at all. This is the only RC question I’ve seen like this.
Just came back to the question and saw this comment.