Are answers that attack the premise or conclusion always

[notpremed101]

Hi,

So I know for weaken questions, we have to weaken the relationship between the premise(s) and the conclusion, but I'm confused as to if all answers that attack one or the other are incorrect. And in general, we assume the premises are true, right?

[Luke Haqq]

Hi notpremed101,

When you write,

...I'm confused as to if all answers that attack one or the other are incorrect.

If you asking whether an answer choice might attack the conclusion, or might instead attack one of the premises--then the answer is yes. For example, the right answer choice on a weaken question might attack the conclusion--say, by showing that it's too strong to be warranted from the given information. Or instead, the right answer on a weaken question might instead attack a premise--for instance, if a premise involves the results from a study, the right answer choice might give reason to call the validity of that study into question.

Hope that helps!

[jrc3813]

I have a question about that too. What if a stimulus said: people had more leisure time back in the day, therefore people probably read more then as well. You could attack the reasoning by pointing out that books used to be prohibitively expensive, so despite more free time people probably didn't read more. Maybe they spent their time singing songs instead. But what if an answer choice simply said, "a historical study found that people bought fewer books per capita than today" or something? It doesn't really touch the premise about leisure time, instead it just says the conclusion is not true.

Does something like that ever happen?

[nicholaspavic]

Hi jrc,

There is one small problem, but the answer to your general question is "yes." In other words, there are weakening questions out there which have correct answers that only attack the conclusion. But an answer that only focuses on attacking a conclusion is something fairly rare. In other words, take the conclusion "all dogs go to heaven." To attack that conclusion, an answer choice might show that in fact, one very bad dog went to hell. That so obviously weakens the conclusion, that it's unlikely that you will see such a slam dunk of an answer on the LSAT. Remember, LSAC plays with nuance and degree and so correct answers can often weaken the stimulus by only a little bit, say only 1% (if you want to use numbers). Thanks for the great question and I hope this helps!