#15 - It has been said that understanding a person

[HarmonRabb]

A bit of a tangent here. I took "leads to" to imply a conditional relationship and not causal one. Can you help me out on untangling that?

[apple1234567]

The explanation that the Powerscore folks make seem to directly contradict the The Central Assumption of Basic Causal Conclusions (i.e., When LSAT speaker says one caused another, the speaker assumes that the stated cause is the only possible cause of the effect and that the stated cause will always produce the effect) which is brought up in Powerscore essentials multiple times.

Because the writer posits that "understanding a person completely leads one to forgive that person entirely," doesn't this make all other causes invalid? In other words, according to the central assumption, there is no flaw in the second sentence.

[terranceof92]

This was a tricky tough one I can say I missed it.I need to review the flaws section more in depth.

[Adam Tyson]

HarmonRabb: "leads to" is one of the common causal indicators, not conditional. When one thing leads to another, or produces another, or inspires another, or brings about another, etc., there is an active relationship of the first thing proactively making the other thing occur. Conditional relationships are passive descriptions that do not necessarily imply any sort of activation like that. Add "leads to" to your list of causal clues!

apple1234567: The whole point of that basic causal assumption is that the author of the causal argument is making that assumption. That doesn't mean they are correct in doing so! In fact, that is the basic flaw in many causal arguments: the author assumes this is the only possible cause, which means they fail to consider other possible causes. That's the issue here. The author made that bad assumption, and the correct answer points out the fact that it's a bad assumption.

terranceof92 : In particular, pay attention to the language that indicates causal relationships and to the underlying flaws inherent in those claims, like failing to consider other possible causes, the cause happening without the effect, the effect happening without the cause, the cause and effect being reversed, and the underlying data being flawed.

[HarmonRabb]

Adam, thank you very much for confirming that! I had mistaken it for conditional because I reasoned that if "a leads to b" then when A happens B always happens and thus it's a conditional relationship. I'll surely add this to my mental map of causal indicators.

[180hopeful]

Slight misunderstanding here, but if the premise is causal, why are we not accepting it as true? The conditional seems to me a mere assertion of the central causal assumption. If so, why is it flawed since the premise is indeed causal?

[Amber Thomas]

Hi 180hopeful!

Let's break this down:

Understanding a person completely causes you to forgive that person. Therefore, you can never completely forgive yourself, because you can never completely understand yourself.

The reason we can't accept this to be true is as follows: completely understanding someone is only one cause to forgive someone. It is not the only potential cause of forgiveness. Another cause could be an apology, or an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, or a variety of other potential circumstances or events. So, just because we are barred from forgiving ourselves this one specific way, that does not imply that we cannot ever forgive ourselves another way.

I hope this helps!