#20 - Some people believe that good health is due to

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi PCA,

The Bible is correct that in LSAT land, only one cause can exist for the effect. That's why they are so easy to weaken---any alternate cause weakens a causal relationship. In the real world, we know that effects are complex, and often have multiple causes. On the LSAT, we think of the relationship as being 1-1. One cause---one effect. This helps us understand how alternate causes, cause without the effect, and so on would weaken the relationship.

I'm not sure where you are getting the causal relationship between high education and lifestyle choices. Our stimulus states that good health is caused by informed lifestyle choices, which connects back to the high education levels mentioned earlier in the stimulus. But the author does not draw any causal relationship between informed lifestyle choices and high education levels.

Hope that helps!
Rachael

[pca99095]

Hi PCA,

The Bible is correct that in LSAT land, only one cause can exist for the effect. That's why they are so easy to weaken---any alternate cause weakens a causal relationship. In the real world, we know that effects are complex, and often have multiple causes. On the LSAT, we think of the relationship as being 1-1. One cause---one effect. This helps us understand how alternate causes, cause without the effect, and so on would weaken the relationship.

I'm not sure where you are getting the causal relationship between high education and lifestyle choices. Our stimulus states that good health is caused by informed lifestyle choices, which connects back to the high education levels mentioned earlier in the stimulus. But the author does not draw any causal relationship between informed lifestyle choices and high education levels.

Hope that helps!
Rachael

But if there is no causal relationship between high education and lifestyle choices, how can good health be resulted from informed lifestyle choices just by mentioning the correlation between good health and high education? What is the point of this correlation if high educations are unrelated to informed lifestyle choices?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi PCA,

The author attempts to draw that conclusion, but it's not supported. It mentions the correlation between good health and high education, but correlation isn't the same as causation. For example, the per capita consumption of chicken in the US correlates pretty closely with the total crude oil imports into the US. Since those two things are just correlated, we can't draw conclusions based on it. High education could be a lifestyle choice, but the author doesn't support that with anything. There are multiple issues with this stimulus, which is actually fairly common in bad arguments. We want to note how those things are unsupported in the argument, and use that to answer the question.

Hope that helps!
Rachael

[Coleman]

Hi,

I have a question about answer choice A which is wrong primarily because it uses the word "only" which is a necessary condition indicator. However, I wonder if answer choice A did not contain this "ONLY", does this possibly make A correct answer?

My reasoning goes like this:
Premise - A strong correlation was found between good health and high education. (not causal)
Conclusion - Good health is the result of making informed lifestyle choices. (This is a causal argument)
Based on this structure, "making informed choices" appeared out of nowhere. The author arbitrarily presumed that people who get high education are more likely to make informed choices.

If (A) said "presumes, without providing justification, that highly educated people make informed lifestyle choices" without the word only as it is on the original test, does this make (A) the correct answer? or is there another reason that A is still wrong even after the elimination of the word only?

Another question, (D) doesn't seem very convincing because the argument is about good health and informed lifestyle choices and their causal relationship. Nevertheless, D states "overlooks the possibility that the same thing may causally contribute both to education and to good health." I think this is more of a flaw displayed in the premise instead of the conclusion part. Indeed, the conclusion doesn't even talk about the education level. Rather, it improvises lifestyle choices out of high education and projects this reasoning to the conclusion. Could you clarify about this reasoning?

Thanks in advance!

[tonyzhu]

I got confused by this one too .

As for (A) I don't quite understand why informed lifestyle choices --> highly educated,
rather than highly educated-->informed lifestyle choices ?

Besides, option (D) seem to attack premise while leave conclusion untouched.

[Jeremy Press]

Hi Coleman and Tony,

Tony, on answer choice A, the "only" (a necessary condition indicator) modifies "highly educated people," so when we diagram that, "highly educated people" belongs on the necessary side (the right side) of the conditional arrow. The relationship implied by the answer choice means that if you make informed lifestyle choices, then you must be highly educated (because only highly educated people make such choices). The argument doesn't "presume" that relationship, because that particular conditional connection isn't required to arrive at the conclusion.

Coleman, my view on answer choice A is that they would never have written an answer choice saying "presumes, without providing justification, that highly educated people make informed lifestyle choices." But if they did, you'd have to take that answer seriously, because the argument does presume that, and there is no justification provided for it. (Whether that's a "flaw" or not could probably be questioned, and that's the reason I don't think they'd ever write such an answer.)

Tony and Coleman, answer choice D is a very common "overlooked possibility" when an author makes a causal conclusion solely from a premise about a correlation. Let's try a different example: "We see in law school students that attendance in class is highly correlated with good grades. Therefore, attending class must be a primary driver of law school grades." Not necessarily! What if both attendance and good grades are being driven by the level of motivation of the student (i.e. highly motivated students attend class {due to their motivation} AND they get good grades {due to their motivation}). That's a possibility that the simple argument I made doesn't rule out. And that possibility isn't actually attacking the premise. Similarly with this argument. The possibility that something else is the driving force behind BOTH good health AND education doesn't attack the premise, because good health and high education level would still be correlated (they'd share the same cause, after all!). But that possibility strongly undermines the causal conclusion, because it suggests there is no causal relationship between education and health.

Coleman, I know you're still bothered by the fact that the argument shifted from "high educational levels" to "informed lifestyle choices," seeming to equate them. Guess what? I am too! But that shift in terms isn't adequately described in any of the answer choices. So the test makers didn't choose to pick on that flaw in the correct answer. That's okay. Many arguments have multiple flaws. The correct answer to a flaw question doesn't have to pick on every single flaw in the argument. It just has to pick out one. Answer choice D does that here, so it's good enough!

I hope this helps!

[teddykim100]

Hi Jeremy,

I'm replying to your latest answer, regarding the second paragraph, hope you don't mind me reopening a thread two years old.


You said that if answer choice A had been written as:

" 'presumes, without providing justification, that highly educated people make informed lifestyle choices' But if they did, you'd have to take that answer seriously, because the argument does presume that, and there is no justification provided for it. (Whether that's a "flaw" or not could probably be questioned, and that's the reason I don't think they'd ever write such an answer.)"

Could you elaborate why this could potentially not be considered a flaw? This modified answer choice does seem to point one flaw in the argument, which is taking for granted that high education levels and informed lifestyle choices are the same thing.

[Robert Carroll]

teddykim,

I can't speak exactly for Jeremy on this point, but I think the whole issue is that we've departed from the wording of answer choice (A) anyway! Jeremy speculates that answer choice (A) might have been better with a certain modification. It's definitely not correct as written. Maybe that modification wouldn't be good enough? But it doesn't matter - we can only deal with answer choice (A) as written, as as written, it's definitely ascribing to the argument a flaw it never commits, so it's a Loser for this Flaw question.

It also looks like Jeremy isn't saying that the modified answer isn't a flaw...Jeremy seems in fact to say in his last paragraph that there is a problem with equating "informed lifestyle choices" and "high educational levels". Again, I can't exactly speak for Jeremy, but I think he's making the reasonable point that every little word matters. We have answer choice (A) as written - it's not correct. There's a flaw in the stimulus that even answer choice (D) doesn't address. So some answer choice could instead have mentioned THAT flaw, but none did, so any answer that DID address that flaw would have to be worded differently from any answer choice we see here. What would that look like? Any attempt to answer that question is pretty much speculation, because a modified answer choice (A) could STILL be wrong because of the precise way it's phrased, if that phrasing doesn't actually capture the flaw! So it's just not doing a lot of good to speculate about things that aren't happening, because details of these underdetermined counterfactual situations will make a big difference.

Robert Carroll