LSAT 158 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q22

LR Question 22 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Historian: Because medieval epistemology (theory of knowledge)…

QUESTION TYPE: Weaken

CONCLUSION: We should define medieval epistemology in such a manner that it is whatever its practitioners’ beliefs are.

REASONING: If we want to know if a claim is part of medieval epistemology, we’d just ask if any practitioners believed it.

ANALYSIS: The difficulty of this question isn’t really due to the nature of the problem, but rather, how tedious it is to read it. All in all, it’s basically saying “whatever these people think about a claim, we’ll just go with that”. The problem with this is that the historian is labeling a group of people as medieval epistemologists without considering if any of them were actually epistemologists. If they weren’t, then why should they get to decide what is and isn’t medieval epistemology?

Two important things to note:

• The argument is not talking about non-epistemological beliefs of the epistemologists. So those are irrelevant. This eliminates a couple of answers.
• Contradictions aren’t a problem. The argument explicitly says that if an epistemologist believed the opposite of another epistemologist’s belief, then both claims are part of epistemology.

To give an LSAT example. Let’s say we have two LSAT students:

• Jebediah believes that you should read the stimulus first and that the sun is pretty.
• Obadiah believes that you should read the stem first, and that the moon is pretty.

We would say that “read the stim first” and “read the stem first” are both LSAT related beliefs of LSAT students. And their beliefs about the sun and moon are irrelevant. However, if we couldn’t tell if these two were really LSAT students then the whole claim is shaky.

One tip is to reread this question but replace each use of epistemologist with “farmer”, and imagine the question is about farmers. It would be very hard to figure out the beliefs of farmers if we couldn’t tell who was a farmer.

___________

1. Who are “ancient epistemologists”? These people aren’t even mentioned in the stimulus. Beliefs can be shared across time, there’s no need for medieval epistemologists to discard everything the ancients believed.
2. This one sounds like a tongue-twister. But we don’t care about epistemologists’ beliefs about nonepistemological matters! Eliminate. The stimulus clearly restricted itself to epistemological beliefs. How epistemologists got those beliefs doesn’t matter.
3. Irrelevant. Eliminate. The stimulus clearly said it is only concerned with “the epistemological beliefs of the medieval epistemologists”.
4. This is a very tempting wrong answer. Isn’t the LSAT all about contradictions? Well, not in this case. Look at the final sentence. The argument explicitly says that contradictory (opposite) beliefs are fine. If two epistemologists believed opposite beliefs, then both beliefs are included. We don’t care what epistemologists disagree about. We just want to catalogue what everyone thought.
5. CORRECT. The whole method was “identify epistemologists, see what they believe”. If we can’t identify who the epistemologists are then this argument fails at its first step. This answer even says “if any” meaning there might not have been medieval epistemologists at all! If so, there would have been no medieval epistemological beliefs.

Recap: The question begins with “Historian: Because medieval epistemology (theory of knowledge)”. It is a Weaken question. Learn more about LSAT Weaken questions in our guide to LSAT Logical Reasoning question types.