conclusion and premise indicator words

[aatakyi1]

I have been having trouble trying to identify indicator words when reading logic reasoning passages. I realized that sometimes the conclusion/premise indicator words are not always helpful in answering some questions. Can you explain a subsidiary conclusion vs. the main conclusion?

[Kristina Moen]

Hi aatakyi,

Welcome to the Forum! The Premise/Conclusion Indicator list is not exhaustive. One thing to remember is that you only need one. For example, "Because it is a raining, I will stay home" has the same premise and conclusion as "It is raining, so I will stay home." In the first example, the word "because" is a premise indicator. In the second example, the word "so" is a conclusion indicator. But sometimes there aren't easy indicators to underline like "therefore" and "due to." In that case, you need to think about the content. The premise answer "why?" and the conclusion answers "what is the author driving at?" For example, what if I said "It's raining. I should stay home." There, "staying home" is not WHY it's raining. So it can't be the premise. It doesn't make much sense to say "It's raining because I should stay home." However, it makes a lot of sense (to me, a homebody!) to say "I should stay home because it's raining."

Sometimes you'll see intermediate conclusions. That's when a premise leads to a conclusion, which then leads to another conclusion. How to tell the difference? You can use the same technique. To continue with this example: "I'm canceling our coffee date! It's raining, so I should stay home." There's two conclusions: "stay home" and "cancel coffee date." But think about which one helps EXPLAIN the other. Here, staying home helps explain WHY I'm canceling the date. Canceling the date does not help explain WHY I'm staying home (unless I'm embarrassed and really trying to avoid the person, but that's another matter!).

Hope that helps.

[aatakyi1]

Yes very helpful thank you

[Dave Killoran]

Hi Aatakyi,

I'd like to add a thought to the excellent points Kristina made. The thing about indicator lists is that they are not exhaustive because an exhaustive list would be so long as to be useless due to its size! So, one important thing for you to do with those lists is to get a sense of how those words work, because once you have that, you can identify when any word is functioning in that manner.

That said, those indicator lists typically cover the most frequently used words in each category, so I always recommend that you memorize the lists so you can recognize what's happening in 80+% of the cases.

So, for any indicator list, memorize them so you have the majority of cases covered, but then examine how the words work so you get the big-picture sense of what type of words would introduce each idea. That covers you for all possibilities

[LilyKroger]

Understanding inference and premise indicators is crucial to logical reasoning, especially in tests like the LSAT. These indicators help to determine the structure of an argument. As you mentioned, words like “because” indicate a premise and “therefore” indicates a conclusion. However, sometimes the indicators are not so clear, and you need to rely on the content of the statements.