How to Recognize Conditionality When no Indicator Words Pres

[Leslie Wallace]

How do I recognize conditional reasoning in Logical Reasoning questions when no indicators words are present? I read a response to this question on the Forum that was helpful in a few instances. I can now see the conditionality in, say, Answer Choice D on p 520 ("In the event that my flight had been late, I would have missed the committee meeting" etc), but I don't see the conditionality in this: On page 593 of the LR Bible, the first sentence of the problem at the top of the page ("Good students learn more than what their parents and teachers compel them to learn") is described as the first of a series of interrelated conditional statements.

Would you please post a more detailed explanation on this topic?

Thanks!

[Claire Horan]

Sure, Leslie, and good question!

The crux of recognizing conditionality is to ask yourself whether the statement gives you information about a relationship such that once you know a particular fact is true, you will also know something else.

That's kind of wordy, so let's use your example:

"Good students learn more than what their parents and teachers compel them to learn"

Here we see a relationship between good students and learning. Once you know one thing (that someone is a good student), you also know another thing (learning more than what is compelled by parents and teachers). I call this a relationship to emphasize that, factually, we don't actually know anything yet, beyond this correlation between hypothetical good students and their learning.

Consider an additional premise: Jane is a good student. Now that we have this fact, we can apply the conditional above to it to get a new fact: Jane learns more than what her parents and teachers compel her to learn.

A good analogy is that a conditional statement is like a computer with inputs and outputs. One fact goes in that is sufficient for a new fact to necessarily come out.

All this is to help explain the concept. In practical terms, you can determine whether a statement is conditional when you can rewrite it as an If-then statement. The example above can be rewritten as "If someone is a good student, then he/she learns more than what his/her parents and teachers compel him/her to learn."