LSAT 150 | Section 4 | Reading Comprehension: Q13

RC Question 13 Explanation

DISCUSSION: Lines 21-25 and 34-40 are especially relevant. The author said expertise shows us why we believe we see thoughts directly: experts think they see relations in their field directly, just as we think we see our thoughts.

But what actually happens with experts is they make incredibly fast intuitive judgements, and this appears to them to be a direct observation. They don’t notice the inference.

Similarly, paragraph 3 explains that we make fast inferences about our thoughts by observing fleeting impressions in our mind. For example, we feel a warm feeling, and we make the inference “I think I am happy right now”.

But we can’t see our thoughts directly. All we saw was the warm feeling. And the inference about our state of mind happened so fast we mistook it for direct observation of our thought.

___________

1. What feedback? We don’t even know we’re making inferences about our thoughts! If you don’t know you’re doing something, you can’t get any feedback about it.
    
   To know you’re doing something wrong, you first have to know you’re doing it.
    
   (This is the central challenge of the LSAT, incidentally: you don’t even know the things you do. To get to 170+, you need to analyze your autopilot and train it to function at a higher level. That’s what expertise is. If you can’t observe your autopilot, you can’t start this process, because you don’t know your own actions.)

2. Rubbish. This answer jumbles together concepts from the passage to make a nonsense answer. It’s very important you learn to identify when RC answers do this.

   1. Everyone has thoughts. Line 1 refers to common sense, the opposite of expertise. That’s how people think about their own thoughts.
   2. Experts were mentioned in paragraph 2, as an analogy. Seeing how experts think lets us make an analogy to how everyone thinks.

   This answer take those two things: “our thoughts” and “experts” and puts them together in a single answer. But it completely contradicts the passage! The psychologists were arguing that we do not have direct (unmediated) access to our thoughts.

3. CORRECT. This sums things up the best. The inferences about our thoughts happen so fast that we are not aware of them.
4. This practically contradicts the passages. Lines 38-41 show that experts don’t realize they can be wrong in their judgements. And expertise was analogous to thoughts. So the psychologists are implying that we can be wrong about our thoughts and not realize it.
5. The passage implies the opposite: our inferences are so fast and feel so certain that we don’t even notice them. Lines 1-4 show that people’s common sense makes us think we directly know our thoughts and can never be mistaken about them.