Conditional Reasoning

[ronnieronnie]

Hi,

I am in the virtual course and we have just finished up lesson 8 and I am still having trouble with conditional reasoning even though I've reviewed lessons 2&3 and listened to the online module repeatedly. I am great at logic games and understanding how conditional reasoning works there and I am good at conditional reasoning in parallel reasoning, but I can't seem to grasp it in MBTs, Weakens, Strengthens, or Flaw in Reasoning, no matter how much I review!
I do have trouble focusing on the stimuli in LR and it takes me way longer to diagram and half of the time my diagram is wrong, but practicing is not really improving my performance

Help please!

[Nikki Siclunov]

You say you've reviewed the basics of Conditional reasoning repeatedly, and listened to the virtual recaps of the material. So I'm assuming you know what the contrapositive is, are able to avoid making MN/MR, and have a thorough understanding of the sufficient and necessary condition indicators that identify the conditions presented. These are the basics.

You also need to be able to create chain relationships and identify additive inferences on that basis. This takes more practice, but we have included a sufficient number of questions in the lessons to help you out (see Lesson 2). A more difficult concept is applying S/N skills to solving Justify questions mechanistically. I suggest you review Lessons 4 and 5. In Flaw questions, whenever you see a conditional reasoning flaw, look for an answer describing such flaw, usually using terms such as "sufficient," "necessary," etc. You also need to know why the presumption that a sufficient condition is necessary (or vice versa) is fallacious.

Most importantly, when you get a S/N question wrong (let's say your diagram was wrong) you need to realize that you made a mistake after looking at the answer choices, and check our own explanations of the question. Flag all such questions and return to them a few days later.

Conditional reasoning takes some work, but it becomes a very mechanical process once you get used to it. Clearly you have improved on Games: there is no reason why you can't do the same with conditional reasoning in LR.