Q10 - Producer: It has been argued that,

[donghai819]

Can any of our teachers elaborate this one? I read it many times but still can't find the gap.

[ohthatpatrick]

Sure thing!

Question type: Sufficient Assumption

Task: Which answer, if added to the evidence, allows us to mathematically derive the conclusion.

ARGUMENT CORE

conc - Boycotting advertisers of violent/bad-value shows is censorship.
why?
evid - Boycotting such advertisers leads to them canceling their ads, leading to some shows going off the air, leading to a restriction of shows the public can watch.

ANALYSIS

The best place to start on any Sufficient Assumption question is the conclusion. Ask yourself, "Which words/ideas here are NEW (i.e. they were never defined/mentioned in the evidence) and which are FAMILIAR?"

If there is any NEW idea, such as "censorship" in this conclusion, then that term MUST be defined in the correct answer. Any answer that doesn't define censorship is automatically worthless to this argument.

(If there are no new ideas in the conclusion, then the missing link is something internal to the evidence.)

The FAMILIAR part of the conclusion is "boycotting the advertisers of objectionable shows". The evidence DID discuss that idea.

So all we have to do is take whatever the evidence told us about "boycotting the advertisers of objectionable shows" and find an answer that links that type of information to the term "censorship".

The evidence said that boycotting the advertisers of objectionable shows:
- would lead to canceling ads
- would lead to shows going off the air
- would lead to a restriction of the shows the public can watch

Any of these three ideas could create a correct answer.
"If something leads to canceling ads, then that thing is censorship."
"If something leads to shows going off the air, then that thing is censorship."
"If something leads to a restriction of the shows the public can watch, then that thing is censorship."

Even though all three could be the answer, we would be savvy to expect that the last one will be the answer.

First of all "restriction of shows the public can watch" is the closest synonym for "censorship". Secondly, that idea is the END of the chain, and LSAT generally only tests the end of the chain.

ANSWER CHOICES

This is actually one of those Sufficient Assumption questions where knowing the "NEW guy in the conclusion" suffices to get the job done.

The only answer that says "if such-and-such applies, then you are censorship" is (E). As it turns out, it used the 3rd idea, as we suspected.

(A) is the only other answer worth considering, but the rule it gives says
"if there's a restriction of shows, then it's either govt. censorship or boycotting."

Not only is the "or" consequence not good enough -- we're also not trying to prove "govt. censorship", but rather something more like "consumer censorship".

The other three choices are worthless because none of them define "censorship".

The correct answer is (E).

Hope this helps.

[donghai819]

Thanks, Patrick. This is very helpful.

I have one question. I noticed that, especially in SA and Principle questions, whenever we have a causal argument core, the correct answer is often easily predictable; that is, the conditional version consists of the cause as the sufficient part and the effect as the necessary one. For the sake of serving future readers, in case they don't know what I am talking about, I'd like to include an example here:

If we have a core like: Sarah likes apple, for she eats apple every morning.

For the sufficient assumption we are expected to have something like "if Sarah eats apple every morning, then Sarah likes it."

My question is what the rational behind this is?

[ohthatpatrick]

You’re definitely onto something about SA and Principle questions, but it has nothing to do with causality specifically.

In fact, in the example you gave, we would say
the fact that Sarah likes apples CAUSES her to eat an apple every morning (EFFECT).

If we were to make CAUSE sufficient and EFFECT necessary, then this one would look like
Like Apples --> Eat them every morning

But you weren’t wrong about your sufficient assumption.

Sufficient assumption isn’t about cause and effect. It’s about premise and conclusion.

And in your argument the CONC was “Sarah likes apple” and the PREM was “Eats them every morning”.

So you were correct in how you arranged it. But you were correct because the PREM goes on the sufficient side and the CONC goes on the necessary.

The reason (rationale) you’re noticing that answers on SA and Principle are highly predictable is simply because that’s our task!

The question stems are literally asking us,
Which answer choice is a bridge from the premise to the conclusion?

When you’re dealing with arguments that have gaps / missing links, that are vulnerable to objections, there are two different types of LSAT ideas:
- Idea Math (missing links between ideas already mentioned)
- New Objections (bring in ideas that haven’t been mentioned)

Consider this argument:
Bob applied to Harvard. Thus, Bob wants to go to a good school.

Idea Math (connecting the ideas that were mentioned):
1. Harvard is a good school
2. Applying somewhere means you WANT to go there

New Objections (bringing up new ideas that haven’t been considered)
1. What if Bob’s parents forced him to apply?
2. What if he only applied to see if he could get in (for bragging rights)?
3. What if he applied only because his girlfriend is going there, not because he cares about the quality of school
etc.

Idea Math is always finite. There might be only one or two ideas that need to be linked.

New Objections are usually infinite. You can come up with storylines all day (if you’re dealing with Alternate Explanations)

So when you're doing Flaw, Nec Assump, Str, and Weaken, you see a mix of answer choices that are "connect the dots" idea math and a other correct answers that bring up totally new ideas. It's possible to specifically predict idea math answers, but the new ideas ones are fuzzier. You'll think, for example, "I need some OTHER way to interpret that statistic", but not know/care precisely what that is.

But SA and Princ are pretty exclusively Idea Math. So when you're pre-phrasing SA and Princ, you're just designing an If/Then that takes you from Prem to Conc.

And if you're doing it right, you usually can predict the correct answer.

[donghai819]

Thank you very much for this thorough explanation, Patrick. It clears a lot confusions up!