p. 498 Q#4; 2016 Ed.

[LSAT99.9]

Hi,

I have a question about question 4. I got the answer right, but it was via elimination not identifying the correct answer. Thus, I just want to clarfiy a few things.

The Philosopher in the stimulus talks about "most scientists" and then makes an inference about the larger scientific community ("the scientific community largely.") In the chapter on formal logic I learned that "most" implies greater than 50%, possibly all. When the author says "the scientific community largely" then, I interpreted this to mean "the scientific community mostly." But then, in a hypothetical situation, if most scientists are x (say 51% of scientists) and the others (say 49% of scientists) do not believe x, then the scientific community as a whole would have most scientists believing x (51% vs. 49%). If this is true, then why does the author "improperly fraw an inference about the scientific community as a whole from the premise about individual scientists?" The Philosopher does mention "scientists" in the beginning but then goes on to discuss MOST scientists. I know there is a flaw somehwere here in my own reasoning. Is it that I am just assuming the the scientific community is made up of only scientists, and could be made up of other people possibly?

Help!

[Nikki Siclunov]

Hi LSAT99.9,

Thanks for your question.

The author observes that most scientists are preoccupied with personal career enhancement, from which she concludes that "the activities of the scientific community are largely directed toward enhancing the status of that community as a whole." The conclusion of the argument depends on the erroneous transference of an attribute from the parts of something (the individual scientists) onto the whole (the scientific community). This, as discussed in the Logical Reasoning Bible, is an Error of Composition.

You argue that the conclusion is not about the whole class of scientists, but rather about "most scientists." Your position is supported solely by your observation that the conclusion uses the adverb "largely," which, you claim, is synonymous with the adverb "mostly," and thus constrains the scope of the conclusion to a class that is somewhat narrower than the whole class of scientists. This is incorrect. Even if "largely" and "mostly" are interchangeable, "largely" is not used to qualify the class of scientists, but rather the activities that they conduct. If the scientists' activities are largely directed toward enhancing the status of their community, we can assume that their activities also have other, perhaps secondary, purposes. Whatever the range of possible activities conducted by the scientific community, however, the conclusion remains a statement about the scientific community as a whole, not about most scientists.

Compare the following two statements:

• The students in the class mostly enjoyed the assignment.
  Most students in the class enjoyed the assignment.

The first statement is about the students in the class as a whole. That they "mostly" enjoyed the assignment doesn't necessarily mean that most of them did, but some didn't. It is entirely possible that the class as a whole had a favorable - though not absolutely positive - view of the assignment. By contrast, the second statement explicitly narrows the class range to "most students," suggesting that the assignment was enjoyed by most, but perhaps not all, students.

Hope this clears it up!

Thanks,