QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning
CONCLUSION: Our ability to taste the four tastes is completely explained by the fact that the taste can show us if a food is healthy. (four tastes: sour, bitter, sweet, salty)
REASONING: Each of the four tastes helps us determine the healthiness of food.
ANALYSIS: This is a good argument. The problem is with one word in the conclusion. It says the reasoning is a complete explanation of taste. Taste is a complicated phenomenon, and we’d need more evidence to show that healthfulness is the only reason taste is useful.
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- This is the flaw of reversing a conditional statement. That’s different. This argument doesn’t really have a conditional statement. At least not anything you can usefully draw.
Example of flaw: If something is poisonous, it is bitter. So anything bitter is poisonous. - The argument isn’t saying taste is better than smell. It’s only saying taste can be used to figure out which foods are healthy.
- This isn’t a failure. Maybe those same foods were poisonous raw, but not cooked! In any case, the argument doesn’t have to tell us every single food fact that exists. It’s a short question, not a 400 page treatise on food.
- This is irrelevant. Whether the range of foods is large or small, the four tastes still tell us if a food is healthy or not. This answer isn’t saying taste’s function change if you eat more foods.
- CORRECT. Bingo. In the past, the LSAT often tended to use complete explanations. Recently they’ve been making more subtle arguments and recognizing that things often have multiple explanations and multiple causes. So, watch out for a conclusion that seems too definitive: this may be the flaw.
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