LSAT 134 – Section 1 – Question 16

LSAT 134 - Section 1 - Question 16

October 2011

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Question QuickView	Type	Tags	Answer Choices	Curve	Question Difficulty	Psg/Game/S Difficulty	Explanation
PT134 S1 Q16	+LR	Flaw or descriptive weakening +Flaw Conditional Reasoning +CondR Fact v. Belief v. Knowledge +FvBvK	A 70% 166 B 3% 157 C 21% 161 D 2% 154 E 4% 158	146 156 165	+Harder	147.067 +SubsectionMedium

The view that every person is concerned exclusively with her or his own self-interest implies that government by consent is impossible. Thus, social theorists who believe that people are concerned only with their self-interest evidently believe that aspiring to democracy is futile, since democracy is not possible in the absence of government by consent.

Summarize Argument

The argument concludes that social theorists who believe that people are only concerned with their self-interest must also believe that democracy is impossible. This is based on two claims: that democracy requires government by consent; and that if people are only concerned with their self-interest, government by consent is impossible.

Identify and Describe Flaw

The argument uses a claimed implication of some theorists’ belief about self-interest to come to a conclusion about what those believe about democracy. This assumes that everyone who has the belief about self-interest must agree with what that implies about democracy. However, it’s still possible that not everyone who has the belief about self-interest will agree that democracy is impossible.

infers merely from the fact of someone’s holding a belief that he or she believes an implication of that belief

The argument infers that everyone who believes that people are only concerned with their self-interest will also believe the supposed implication that government by consent is impossible. This inference has no support other than the mere fact of holding the first belief.

infers that because something is true of a group of people, it is true of each individual member of the group

The argument doesn’t make any inferences about the properties of individual people based on the properties of the groups they belong to.

infers that because something is true of each individual person belonging to a group, it is true of the group as a whole

The argument doesn’t make any inferences about the properties of groups based on the properties of individual people in those groups.

attempts to discredit a theory by discrediting those who espouse that theory

The argument isn’t attempting to discredit any theory. It also never tries to discredit supporters of any theory—in fact, there’s no discussion of people’s character at all.

fails to consider that, even if an argument’s conclusion is false, some of the assumptions used to justify that conclusion may nonetheless be true

The argument doesn’t attempt to claim that any other argument’s conclusion is false.

This is a pretty tough question. Hopefully, you're well trained by now to always separate premises from conclusions.

This passage makes you work for it. The first sentence is a premise:

selfish --> /gov't by consent

The second sentence contains a conclusion followed by "since" and another premise:

/gov't by consent --> /democracy

Forget the conclusion for now. Let's just piece together the premises.

selfish --> /gov't by consent --> /democracy

What conclusion can you validly draw? This one:

selfish --> /democracy

What conclusion do they draw?

B(selfish) --> B(/democracy)

Sort of. They make a small assumption [/democracy --> futile to aspire to democracy]. Anyway, this is a tiny assumption and reasonable too, so let's concede this point.

Besides, they committed a huge logical error.

If I tell you that Tommy is 3 years old and just formed a new belief that this delicious object he's eating is called "banana". Can you conclude that Tommy believes that this object is a fruit? That's reasonable isn't it since banana --> fruit?

Well, that depends on whether Tommy knows that conditional relationship holds. Tommy just learned "banana". Who knows if he understands that "banana" is a sub-set of this other thing called "fruit".

Now imagine things more complex than "banana" and "fruit" and you'll see that this applies to all of us. We don't know all the logical relationships that exist. X --> Y may be true, but if we are unaware of that truth, our knowing X doesn't imply our knowing Y.

Anyway, this is not the first time that you've seen this exact error on the LSAT. Plenty of questions before this one committed similar errors.

LSAT 134 – Section 1 – Question 16

LSAT 134 - Section 1 - Question 16

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LSAT PrepTest 134 Explanations

Section 1 - Logical Reasoning

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Logical Reasoning

Section 4 - Reading Comprehension

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