Q14 - Newspaper subscriber: Arnot's editorial argues

[ohthatpatrick]

To play the LSAT game of "analyze the REASONING / ARGUMENT",
we play by a very specific set of rules:

accept the truth of the Evidence, but figure out why that still doesn't justify the Conclusion.

The evidence:
Arnot's argument depended on a dubious assumption.

The conclusion:
Arnot's conclusion was false.

So the thinking game is
"GIVEN THAT Arnot's argument depended on a dubious assumption,
HOW COULD I STILL ARGUE Arnot's conclusion was true?"

(A) describes how we would win that conversation. We can say, "A conclusion can be a correct claim, even if the argument made on its behalf was faulty."

Here's an example:
CONC: There are fewer atoms of of oxygen in water than there are atoms of hydrogen.
EVID: The molecular formula for water is H3O.

My evidence is wrong, but my conclusion is still correct.

If the thinking game is
"GIVEN THAT Arnot's argument depended on a dubious assumption,
HOW COULD I STILL ARGUE Arnot's conclusion was true?"

then the line of objection you're making is
"Nuh-uh. His argument didn't depend on a dubious assumption."

But we're never allowed to make the objection of
"Nuh-uh. Your premise is wrong."

We're only ever making the objection of
"Even if your premise is valid, I still don't have to arrive at your conclusion."

Hope this helps.

[EricO736]

Hello,

I came up with my own example to replicate the flaw found in this question.

A part of me thinks I’m right but another part thinks I’m dead wrong.

I’d love to run it through you. Hopefully, this helps other LSAT test takers on here!

Anyhow, here goes:

===

Let’s say, Stephen, an e-commerce entrepreneur says to his friend, Tom “With a strong team in place, we can build a billion-dollar company.” Tom replies “That won’t work. You need a lot of money to build a team."

Tom raises a valid objection just as our newspaper subscriber did.

But the right way to have gone about it was to have shown why a strong team in place won’t guarantee a billion-dollar company. Sure a strong team could help but there are other factors to consider.

Like having enough money to build a team, as Tom said.

Although it’s a valid objection, he mistakenly uses it as proof to say Stephen is wrong. At best, it would've weakened Stephen’s argument but not proven it’s false.

For all we know, maybe Stephen is a trust fund baby and has a lot of moolah to build a team or maybe he doesn’t, but that’s alright, he can outsource work to other countries like the Philippines where he can hire top talent for cheap.

The point is…

Tom could be right, maybe a strong team in place won’t build a billion-dollar company but not for the reason he’s given.

[Laura Damone]

I think your example is pretty close, nice work! I would make a couple of tweaks though.

First, your objection doesn't state that the initial argument rests on an assumption. I would make that explicit. Second, instead of saying "that won't work," I would say "your conclusion is false." In order to replicate this flaw, we need to call out the initial argument's assumption and say that, because of the assumption, the argument's conclusion must be a false statement. That' will make it a cleaner example of the Unproven vs. Untrue flaw.