- Tue Oct 14, 2025 9:35 am
#121828
Hi kristina,
I think that you may be making this question more difficult than it is, likely due to diagramming sentences that are not conditional as if they were conditional.
To simplify the argument, let's imagine that the second premise wasn't there.
We'd have:
Premise: If an activity significantly reduces chronic lower back pain, doctors should be prepared to discuss the merits of that activity with patients who ask about it.
Conclusion: Thus, doctors treating patients with chronic lower back pain should be prepared to discuss the merits of yoga.
If this were the argument, it should hopefully be fairly straightforward that the missing premise (i.e. the assumption) is that yoga significantly reduces chronic lower back pain. If that statement were added to the argument, it would link the new information in the conclusion (yoga) back to the premise. Since the sufficient condition would apply to the term "yoga," that would mean that the necessary term would also apply to "yoga."
Of course, to complicate the reasoning a bit, the argument does include a second premise that yoga is similar to stretching with a physical therapist in terms of reducing chronic lower back pain. Unfortunately, this premise is useless in supporting the conclusion unless we also know that stretching with a physical therapist significantly reduces chronic lower back pain. It is not enough that these activities may reduce chronic lower back pain a bit; they need to significantly reduce chronic lower back pain in order to trigger our conditional premise and allow us to properly draw the conclusion. Answer B, which is a Supporter assumption, provides this missing information and closes the logical gap in the argument.
(Incidentally, even though this question is an Assumption question rather than a Justify question, often in arguments containing conditional reasoning like this one, the correct answer is both necessary for the argument and sufficient to justify it.)
As for Answer E, this answer is not conditional, so I would not recommend that you diagram it. More information on when to diagram conditional statements, including avoiding trying to diagram everything as a conditional statements, in "The Logical Reasoning Bible."
There are several problems/red flags with Answer E. First, the stimulus states what "doctors should be prepared to discuss" (my emphasis) while this answer describes what many doctors do discuss. These are not identical/synonymous, and that alone is a reason to eliminate this answer. In any argument about what doctors should do, statements about what doctors actually do will usually be irrelevant. Second, this answer refers to "many doctors." The word "many" is a vague word on the LSAT and often appears in wrong answers, so be wary of choosing answers with this word. The test makers know that test takers often confuse the word "many" with the word "most" even though they are not the same.
If you negated Answer E, the negation would be: "Not many (i.e. few) doctors treating patients with chronic lower back pain discuss with their patients the merits of taking stretching classes with a physical therapist."
As discussed, this does not weaken the argument because what doctors actually do has no effect on what doctors should do. For example, the fact that many people actually eat a lot of junk food has no effect on whether people should eat a lot of junk food.
