#13 - Writer: In the diplomat’s or lawyer’s world, a

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Assumption. The correct answer choice is (A)

The author argues that legal and diplomatic language lacks literary merit, because it is designed to prevent misinterpretation (i.e. to be understood). The necessary assumption behind this statement is that any language that does have literary merit would be more likely to be misunderstood:

• Understanding Literary Merit
  
  Literary Merit Understanding

Answer choice (A): This is the correct answer choice. If literary value were required for proper understanding, the author's conclusion would be seriously weakened. Since the logical opposite of answer choice (A) weakens the argument, this answer is essential to the author's conclusion.

Answer choice (B): The relative importance of literary and legal documents is irrelevant to this conclusion.

Answer choice (C): If legal and diplomatic language is designed to prevent misinterpretation, then lawyers and diplomats are probably less likely to be misunderstood than are novelists. While this may be an inference that follows from the author's central premise, it is not a requirement for her conclusion, which is about literary merit. This answer choice is incorrect.

Answer choice (D): It is irrelevant whether the issues of interest to lawyers are also of interest to others. Even if such interest were shared by everyone, legal language may still be stilted and without literary merit.

Answer choice (E): While it strengthens the idea that the likelihood of a severe consequence requires linguistic expression designed to prevent misunderstanding, this answer choice falls outside the scope of the argument and is not essential to it.

[avengingangel]

I got the same answer, but my diagram looked like:

Literary merit misunderstanding

the contra being: misunderstanding literary merit

And the gap I'm looking to fill / my prephrase being: literary merit misunderstanding

Is that OK to do it like that, too ?? I think I asked this question a while back, about, in diagramming, when to negate a term or when to use the term as-is. (aka, using misunderstanding instead of understanding. Let me know if my question isn't clear. Thanks!!

[Nikki Siclunov]

Hi Angel,

To answer your question about negations, do what makes more sense, but keep it consistent. For instance, you can diagram "avoid misunderstanding" as either what it sounds like ("avoid misunderstanding") or you can simply cross out the word "misunderstanding" ("misunderstanding"). Obviously, if we want to avoid misunderstanding, we actually seek understanding, so you can further simplify this by simply diagramming it as "understanding." Whichever you decide to do, it is critical not to change your operational terms when diagraming the argument: keep them consistent!

Here's how I'd diagram this stimulus:

• Premise: Legal language Misunderstanding
  Conclusion: Legal language Literary merit

What is the supporter assumption in this case? Clearly, the author is assuming that if a language is designed to prevent misunderstanding, it cannot have literary merit:

• Assumption: Misunderstanding Literary merit
  Contrapositive: Literary merit Misunderstanding

Note that your diagram is the MR of mine, although your prephrase is actually correct. Not sure what happened there... you better double-check your diagram

Either way, you approached this question correctly. Good job!!

[LustingFor!L]

Can you explain the Unless Equation applied to this question. I saw "without", so I immediately put Literary Merit as the necessary condition. Then for the sufficient condition, I know that it needs to be the sufficient condition then negated. So the sufficient condition would be "misinterpretation" (or misunderstanding) which is negated to understand?

Just want to make sure that's correct. Thank you!

[Charlie Melman]

Hi Lustingfor!L,

This isn't a situation in which you'd use the Unless Equation. It's appropriate for situations such as "without x, y," whereas here the stimulus is just saying that "x doesn't have y." See how those two statements are different? This isn't an easy question, but you don't need the Unless Equation to solve it.

Hope this helps!

[Blueballoon5%]

• Premise: Legal language Misunderstanding
  Conclusion: Legal language Literary merit

Hi Nikki! What part of the stimulus did you get the first premise conditional statement? ("Premise: Legal language Misunderstanding")

• Understanding Literary Merit
  
  Literary Merit Understanding

Moreover, in the administrator's explanation, where did he or she get the first conditional statement in the stimulus? I don't see the conditional statement "understand literary merit" there.

[Adam Tyson]

First things first, Bluballoon, and that is to point out that very early in this thread we elected to use the word "misunderstaning" interchangeably with the language in the stimulus that talks about misinterpretation. The stimulus talks about misinterpretations, but many of the answers talk about misunderstanding, so in order to make analysis easier and more consistent, we are sticking with misunderstanding as having the same meaning as misinterpretation.

Now that we have the language sorted out, let's look to the stimulus, specifically the second sentence, which tells us that legal and diplomatic language prevent misinterpretation. That is where Nikki got the conditional statement you asked about - first, by translating "prevent misinterpretation" to "misunderstanding", and then by connecting the two concepts in that sentence with a conditional arrow. This could have also been viewed causally, since "prevents" is more typical of the active language found in causal rather than conditional statements, but it still works conditionally. It's easy to see that if you accept that premise as true, then you would agree that legal language would have to be sufficient for preventing misinterpretation, right?

The conditional statements you asked about in the adminstrator's official explanation isn't in the stimulus - that is the prephrase for the assumption, the thing that we need to close the gap in the argument. The author argued that because the language is designed to avoid misinterpretation, it must lack literary merit. The missing piece of the puzzle is that language that has literary merit must be open to misinterpretation. Again, you have to do a little translating from there to get to understanding, but the nature of these diagrams is that they are a form of shorthand, not meant to capture the concepts perfectly but only to capture their essence in a way that works well for you. If you have another way that you would choose to abbreviate those concepts, and they work well for you and lead you to the correct answer choice, then by all means use them! The underlying idea will still be the same, no matter how you choose to capture it in your diagram.

I hope that clears it up for you!

[jbrown1104]

Hello PS,

For this question I was between A and C and chose (C). I think it's because I did not set up my conditional statement correct. Can you please explain how "thus legal and diplomatic language is stilted and utterly without literary merit, since by design it presents misinterpretation, which in these areas can have severe consequences."

I am not seeing how this is a conditional statement. Furthermore, since it is conditional reasoning why does the Unless Equation not apply?

Thanks!
~JB

[deck1134]

Hello,

I am curious as to why E is out of scope. It seems more in line with the question, and if you use the Assumption-Negation technique, the answer falls apart. I'm somewhat confused on what the LSAT considers out of scope, as we have seen more "out of scope" answers be in scope than this one.

[Jonathan Evans]

Hi, Deck,

On LR questions, we must be careful in our analysis to identify the concepts that are:

1. Explicitly identified in the stimuli.
2. Implicitly part of the discussion.
3. Out of scope.

The explicit ideas/concepts are spelled out for us. For example, here we would consider "misinterpreted statement," "legal and diplomatic language," and "literary merit" to be explicit. These are discussed verbatim in the passage.

Implicit ideas here might be the connection between "lawyer's world" and "legal language" or the connection between "international incident/undeserved prison term" and "severe consequences." These are valid connections we may make between ideas within a stimulus.

Out of scope ideas may appear related but do not withstand further scrutiny. For instance, can we infer that "language that prevents misinterpretation" is conceptually equivalent to "people expressing themselves more cautiously?" We might be able to say that "language that prevents misinterpretation" is a form of people expressing themselves cautiously. However, it would not be valid to claim that people expressing themselves cautiously necessarily means using language that prevents misinterpretation. I could be expressing myself cautiously in order to be deliberately ambiguous about something, perhaps in order to avoid offending someone. Likewise, we might be able to make a connection between "something important at stake" and "severe consequences," but again I would be careful.

Above is a general discussion of conceptual links. With respect to this problem, we must restrict ourselves to the task assigned, which is to find an assumption necessary for the conclusion to be valid. Let's start by identifying the conclusion:

• Legal and diplo language totally without merit.
  
  Symbolically: LDL M

What premises back this up?

• Legal and diplo language prevents misinterpretation.
  
  Symbolically: LDL PM

What's the attempted connection here?

• Assumption: Language that prevents misinterpretation lacks literary merit.
  
  Symbolically: PM M

With this assumption, we could conclude that legal and diplo language prevents misinterpretation and therefore lacks merit.

We do not need an assumption quite this strong here because we are only looking for something that the author must believe, not necessarily something sufficient to guarantee that our conclusion is valid. However, it is highly likely that the credited response will connect these ideas of "preventing misinterpretation" with "lacking merit."

Notice that both these ideas are present in Answer Choice (A). Notice also that Answer Choice (A) uses the expression "literary value," which is conceptually equivalent to "literary merit."

With respect to Answer Choice (E), note first that this connection identified above (preventing misinterpretation and literary merit) is not present here. That's a clue that this might not be the credited response. However, maybe this response is talking about another assumption that we did not identify in our initial analysis.

Therefore, we may ask ourselves, "Must the author believe that people express themselves more cautiously when something important is on the line?"

Let's do the Assumption-Negation Test™. What if people did not express themselves more cautiously when something important is on the line? Is it still possible that legal and diplo language is without literary merit? Sure, I suppose so. Even if people threw caution to the wind when something important is at stake, legal and diplomatic language could still be dry and terrible.

The concept discussed in Answer Choice (E) might appear related to the argument in the stimulus, but the two problems are that (1) the concepts in Answer Choice (E) do not correlate precisely to what's discussed in the stimulus and (2) this statement does not correspond to the assumption we have identified in our analysis.

Good question. I hope this helps!