#4 - The case of the French Revolution is typically regarded

[Paul Marsh]

Hi Alyssa! I agree with you, the claim our author is opposing is that the French Revolution is a good example that revolutions can be more beneficial than harmful. The author is not necessarily arguing against the idea that revolutions are more helpful than harmful, but she is primarily disputing the notion that the French Revolution is a good example of that. The "But even..." language suggests that the author probably believes revolutions to be harmful, but this is not the conclusion of her argument (again, her conclusion is just that the French Revolution does a poor job of showing that revolutions are more beneficial than harmful).

You're also right on the money for why answer choice (D) is incorrect. There are several things that make (D) seem like a less than stellar answer choice to me, but one of the major ones is, like you mentioned, the "series of examples" language.

As a general tip: for Method questions like this one, we are focused on the general structure of the argument. Before I move onto the answer choices, I always take a second to pre-phrase by thinking, "Ok, generally what happened in this argument?" There are certain argument structures that pop up again and again on the LSAT, and that you want to be on the lookout for when it comes to Method questions. One common structure is when the author presents two possibilities, rules out one, and thus concludes that the remaining possibility is the right path. Another structure that pops up often is the one we have here, where a commonly held belief is presented and then immediately argued against. When these (or other common structures) appear in a Method question, my pre-phrase is always going to account for them in some way. For this question, I wanted something that mentioned how the argument presents a commonly held belief and then goes on to undermine it. If this crucial part of the structure of the argument wasn't mentioned by an answer choice, then I didn't consider that answer choice very seriously. Pre-phrasing is a very powerful tool for Method questions (and indeed for Logical Reasoning in general), because it forces you to note the important structural parts of the argument before the answer choices have biased you. I'd guess that if you were to think to yourself, "What is this argument doing structurally?", before reading the answer choices, you would not thought, "Well, it's just justifying a view through a series of persuasive examples, of course!". Whereas you likely would have noted something about the author disputing a commonly held belief. Hope that helps!

[AlyssaY]

Hi Alyssa! I agree with you, the claim our author is opposing is that the French Revolution is a good example that revolutions can be more beneficial than harmful. The author is not necessarily arguing against the idea that revolutions are more helpful than harmful, but she is primarily disputing the notion that the French Revolution is a good example of that. The "But even..." language suggests that the author probably believes revolutions to be harmful, but this is not the conclusion of her argument (again, her conclusion is just that the French Revolution does a poor job of showing that revolutions are more beneficial than harmful).

Thanks for your response Paul. Given that the claim the author is opposing is that the French Revolution is a good example, I'm still struggling to see how the author "undermines evidence given in support of that claim". There does not seem to be any support for WHY the French Revolution is typically regarded as a good example. To me, it instead seems like the author undermines the evidence given in support of the claim that societies can benefit from a revolution?

I can see how answer C is the best answer, but since Method questions fall under the First "Prove Family", I applied the Fact Test and thought that this was a partially-correct incorrect answer intentionally trying to trick us with the use of the phrase "evidence given in support of THAT claim".

I like your method (pun intended) of prephrasing these types of questions with an abstract view of the argument strategy. However, if we've used our prephrase to narrow down to two answer choices, in this case C and D, but have issues with the specifics of both answers (for C, "that claim" and D, "series of examples"), is there a general rule of thumb on how to pick?

Thanks!!

[Adam Tyson]

There is, AlyssaY, and it is to apply the "Fact Test" that we apply to Must Be True questions. A Method of Reasoning question is in the same family as Must Be True, and the correct answer will describe things that happened in the stimulus and will NOT describe things that did NOT happen in the stimulus. So in this case, if there is no series of examples, that violates the Fact Test and makes it a wrong answer! Just try matching the abstract description in the answer to the concrete details in the stimulus, and if there is a mismatch the answer is a loser.