LSAT 153 | Section 4 | Reading Comprehension: Q26

RC Question 26 Explanation

DISCUSSION: Freudianism is discussed in the middle paragraph 1 (second sentence). The author says Freud believed that all human interaction sprung from universal psychological traits.

It’s the universality that is key. The rest of paragraph 1 (start and end) says that deterministic theories use a single explanation, and believe history progresses according to laws. Universal psychological traits = laws. E.g. Freud may have argued that if you have a particular sort of recurring dream, that leads to or indicates a certain sort of personality defect.

___________

1. This is extremely tempting. This universality of personality traits was the key feature of Freudianism that allowed it to make deterministic predictions.
    
   But you need the second half. Freudianism was deterministic because it used universal psychological traits to make predictions. This answer doesn’t mention predictions: it only mentions believing in universal traits.
    
   E.g. If you own a baseball bat, are you a baseball player? No. It is using the baseball bat that makes you a player. This answer is wrong because it doesn’t mention an explanation, a key trait of determinist theories.
    
   This answer would have been right had it continued “and used those traits to make predictions about humans.”
2. This means nothing. A theory’s truth has nothing to do with how its adherents treat it. The adherents can be mistaken. We care about an accurate description of a theory, not what people believed about it.
3. This isn’t distinguishing enough. It’s true that grand theories provide narrative satisfaction. But that isn’t what makes them deterministic. The author’s proposal in the second to last sentence of paragraph 3 also should provide narrative satisfaction, without being deterministic.
4. CORRECT. This matches. The first sentence defines a grand theory as one that tried to explain everything with a single explanation. The second sentence then says “for example” when describing Freudianism. So this implies that Freudianism did try to explain everything with one explanation: universal psychological traits.
    
   [Broad ranges of phenomena more or less means “everything or many things in the world”]
5. Contingency, particularity and novelty were the author’s themes from paragraph 3, whereas the description of Freudianism is in paragraph 1, and it completely unrelated. This answer is just a mishmash of unrelated concepts, intended to seem familiar and distracting.
    
   LSAC has an answer like this on most reading comprehension questions. It’s worth understanding just how useless this type of answer is. It’s like saying “I want to study for the LSAT using the bar exam”. The words are all familiar but the sentence has no meaning.