#21 - A society in which there are many crimes, such as

[Juanq42]

Hello,

So for the beginning of the stimulus, I was able to filter out the additional info from the only premise mentioned:
"a society that has no laws (L) has no crimes (C)"

NOT L NOT C
C L

However, I complicated my understanding of the argument by attempting to diagram the author's claim near the end...
"A lawless society (LS) would, therefore, be a crime-less society (CLS)."

LS CLS
NOT CLS NOT LS

While I realize now that none of the answer choices needed this info to be drawn out, I would like to have someone help review my inferences that I think may be possible and clarify my misunderstandings. Can I safely infer -

Since a society that has no laws has no crimes... THEN a (non-crime-less) society that has crime would also be a (non-law-less) society that has laws.

I had in mind that this would have led me to the right answer, but I managed to confuse myself and chose A in a hurry. After thinking about what I intended to diagram, does my logical reasoning support the selection of the right answer D?


Hope this helps others and thanks in advance for the help!

[Zach Foreman]

So, your main problem was that you diagramed "a society that has no laws" differently than "a lawless society". They clearly mean the same thing, but you diagrammed one as "NOT L" and the other as "LS".
You confused yourself even further when you negated your "lawless" and "crime less" terms. But, even then, your diagramming should have gotten you the right answer.

a (non-crime-less) society that has crime would also be a (non-law-less) society that has laws.

In other words (after getting rid of the double negatives): C L, which is exactly what you got before.
If crime, then law. And that is exactly what D is saying "A society that has some crimes has some laws."
I would try to avoid diagramming terms with -less or un- in the positive. That is I would diagram "lawless" as NOT L and "unfunny" as NOT F.

[thecmancan]

This is another very interesting question.

I learned from here that the test makers really did a doozy here.

I think many have applied SOME quantifier and MANY quantifier onto the incorrect subject.

For instance, some laws are just. This implies that out of the set of all the laws in the universe, at least 1 is just.

In this question however, the subject of the sentence is the society as modified by having some crimes.

The subject is NOT crimes, nor laws! The number of crimes, whether it's over the threshold of many is irrelevant!

What do we know about a society with "many" crimes? Well the stimulus only says those can't be called lawless. Plus we know NOTHING about societies with many laws.

The ONLY guarantee we have is "if there exists a set of SOCIETIES that has crime, then that society must have law(s).

We don't know if all the crimes in that society has a corresponding law,

We don't know how many crimes there are, if it's a lot, a little. We don't know how many laws they have on the books.


So let me just insert this: SOME can be translated or thought of as NOT NONE. So put it this way:

If there exists a set of societies that has NOT NONE crime, then that society must have NOT NONE law(s).

It could be 1, it could be 300 million laws like the English seemed to have.


So A and B are clearly wrong and can be thrown away.

C is also clearly a bad "negation" and can be tossed.

E is where people get confused. But we don't know this. A society with 3 billion crimes can have 3 laws on the books. People can just violate the same 3 laws over and over and over. So we have ZERO information proving "many". There could be just 1 crime committed against 1 BILLION laws. How can we say that 1 is many and 1 BILLION is many?

Plus, while it is true that MANY seem to be more than SOME and less than MOST; there are only 2 "certainties" really:

1. NONE
2. NOT NONE

So when dealing with a MUST be true, many, most, a lot, too many, few, almost all are just wishy-washing and not nearly as certain as

1. NONE
2. NOT NONE (or some)

[Lockhart4]

I found this question to be a bit tricky because I failed to identify which was sufficient and which was necessary. Can you help me understand how to better identify those two on this problem?

Initially I had:

no C ---> no L

I got this wrong.

But when I switched it around to:

no L ---> no C

Once I made the switch the answer jumped out at me clear as day, which was great. However, I still can't seem to identify the indicators for the order on this problem.

Thanks for your help in advance.

[KelseyWoods]

Hi Lockhart4!

Good question! The conditional statement here doesn't give us any straightforward conditional indicators. So, instead, we have to think about the relationship between the conditions. Sometimes it helps to rephrase it as an "if...then..." statement, but being careful not to change the meaning of the original statement when we do this.

So let's look at the original statement: "A society that has no laws has no crimes."

Is that statement really saying:
A) If a society has no laws, then it has no crimes.
Or:
B) If a society has no crimes, then it has no laws.

The phrasing of the original statement matches option A)--a society that has no laws has no crimes, so if a society has no laws, then it has no crimes. Thus, "no laws" is the sufficient condition and "no crimes" is the necessary condition.

Another way to think about it would be to replace that "A" with an "Any." "A society that has no laws has no crimes" really means the same thing as "Any society that has no laws has no crimes." "Any" is a sufficient indicator term and so it would indicate that "no laws" is the sufficient condition."

Make sure to take your time to carefully consider the relationship between the conditions when you encounter a conditional statement that doesn't have clear indicator language. As you've discovered, it makes a big difference in terms of answering the question correctly!

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey

[Lockhart4]

I diagramed this question backwards.

noC ---> noL

When trying to find the necessary condition I didn't see any indicators so I found myself asking which would be necessary in this situation and determined that no laws would. Can you help me by pointing out what indicated no laws was the sufficient and no crime was the necessary? Thanks.

[Lockhart4]

Sorry! I just saw your response from last time. That helped! Thank you very much.

I diagramed this question backwards.

noC ---> noL

When trying to find the necessary condition I didn't see any indicators so I found myself asking which would be necessary in this situation and determined that no laws would. Can you help me by pointing out what indicated no laws was the sufficient and no crime was the necessary? Thanks.