LSAT 150 | Section 4 | Reading Comprehension: Q8

RC Question 8 Explanation

DISCUSSION: The main point of the passage was to show that we can’t necessarily know our own thoughts, even though we feel that we do.

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1. This answer mixes up several concepts from the passage. First, paragraph 2 doesn’t say that experts perceive thoughts directly: it says they perceive entities. This means that a chess player perceives concepts like “The knight is under threat”. Second, the author actually said that experts do not perceive these entities directly. They only think they do. Experts are wrong about perceiving entities directly, just as we are wrong about perceiving our thoughts directly. Finally, we don’t infer our own thoughts the same way as we do others’ thoughts. We figure out what other people are thinking based on watching what they do and say. Whereas we infer our own thoughts from internal impressions, see lines 51-58. Whereas we judge others’ thoughts from external impressions.
    
   This answer completely misrepresents the ideas in the passage. I’ll admit it’s a fairly dense answer, but a crucial part of the LSAT (and law) is disentangling complex answers like this and figuring out what the words actually mean, rather than loosely recognizing familiar words.
2. CORRECT. The common belief is stated in lines 1-2. The whole rest of the passage discusses psychologists’ arguments that this is wrong. You can see some mentions of this idea at the end of paragraph 1 (lines 19-21), and the start of paragraph 3 (lines 42-43).
3. The “common belief” part of this is right. The second half is close but it’s actually the opposite of the passage. This answer says we can’t make quick, reliable inferences. But, the author implies that we do make quick and reliable inferences: this is the point of paragraph 2. However, the problem is that these inferences are so fast that we don’t realize we’re not actually perceiving our thoughts. So it’s actually our ability to make quick inferences that blocks us from seeing our thoughts.
4. This is an utter garble of concepts from the passage. Expertise was only mentioned in paragraph 2, and it had nothing to do with children. Instead, it was used to show how expertise gives us the illusion of directly perceiving entities. So, expertise doesn’t actually help us see things, and it wouldn’t help children identify their thoughts.
5. This contradicts paragraph 3. The first sentence of that paragraph asks “do psychologists claim that we only base our inferences on our external behaviour?”
    
   The very next line says “But, in fact, their arguments do not commit them to this claim”. So, psychologists do not claim that we only judge our thoughts from external clues.