#3 - Doris: I’ve noticed that everyone involved in student

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below! Thank you!

[LSAT2018]

I just wanted to clarify a few things with the stimulus:
Student Government → Outspoken
Outspoken → Student Government

Does Doris commit a Mistaken Reversal here? Or would Doris' statments be acceptable because it doesn't involve conditional reasoning, but causal reasoning instead? So it would be better to diagram the stimulus this way:
Cause → Effect
Student Government → Outspoken (Doris)
Outspoken → Student Government (Zack)

[nihals23]

I sort of understood the question asked and was able to get it right using causal reasoning. Nevertheless I got lucky with this one. I was confused between C and E and chose C. Could you please give an explanation as to how to go about with questions like these?

[Malila Robinson]

Hi LSAT 2018 & Nihals23,
This is confusing because it has causal reasoning, which is the focus. But it also has conditional reasoning.
Doris: (Cause) student govt. (Effect) outspoken students. So, (If) want outspoken students --> (Then)) student govt.
Zack: (Cause) Outspoken students (Effect) Student govt. So, (cause) student govt. (effect) Does not make outspoken students

The issue between them is whether student govt. causes outspoken students. Doris would say yes, and Zack would say no.
That leads to C as the correct answer.

Answer E is conditional and brings in new info (in bold) and would be diagrammed as (If) become more outspoken --> (then) student govt. This answer is incorrect because it brings an additional degree of outspokenness (more outspoken) than was included in the original statement, and it focuses on the conditional rather than the causal.
Hope that helps!
Malila

[luna2021]

Hi,

would be it correct to say both Doris and Zack has neither agree nor disagree on both A and B (=no opinion given)?
Hence, eliminate based on this reasoning?

Thank you.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Absolutely right, Luna! Excellent. For answer choices (A) and (B) we do not have enough information to know what either speaker would say regarding that statement. Therefore they both have to be incorrect answer choices.

Great work!

[fortunateking]

I wonder why (E) is incorrect?
Doris says, if we want students to be more outspoken, we should encourage them to become involved in student government. That seems to be perfect conditional language and can be diagrammed as:
we want students to be more outspoken → we encourage them to become involved in student government
On the other hand, Zack disagrees that encourage student to become involved in student government will do anything to make them more outspoken.
So (E) seems perfect to me as Doris thinks that if student are to be more outspoken they should be involved in student government, while Zack denies that.
Please let me know where I go wrong.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi fortunateking,

Answer E is conditional and involves the word "unless," which can be a bit tricky to diagram.

PowerScore has a simple method of correctly diagramming "unless" conditional statements that we call "The Unless Equation."

Basically, whatever term is modified by the word "unless" becomes the necessary condition. Then, the remaining term is negated and becomes the sufficient. You need to negate the remaining term before making it the sufficient so that your diagram properly reflects what the sentence is saying in English. (Basically, the word "unless" has a built in negative that needs to be accounted for in the diagram.)

"The Unless Equation" is discussed in more detail in lesson 2 of The PowerScore LSAT Course and in chapter 6 of "The Logical Reasoning Bible."

Here, the diagram for Answer E would be:

SBMO -> BISG

(meaning if students become more outspoken, then they become involved in student government)

The contrapositive would be:

Not BISG -> Not SBMO

(meaning if students do not become involved in student government, then they will not become more outspoken)

The contrapositive is probably easier to see why this Answer is wrong. Neither Doris nor Zack is discussing what happens when students aren't in student government. In other words, even Doris is not claiming that the only way to become more outspoken is to be in the student government.