Q20 - A philosophical paradox is a particularly baffling

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Inference (must be true)

Stimulus Breakdown:
READ PRIMARILY FOR Conditional and Causal (SECONDARILY for Comparisons / Quantitative stuff).

CAUSAL - the fact that the logic seems sound but the conclusion seems counterintuitive is what makes paradoxes baffling.

CONDITIONAL - Solve paradox --> accept conc or reject a premise or reject the logic

Answer Anticipation:
It's hard for me to guess where this might be headed. Since correct answers on Inference combine multiple facts, I'm trying to think about how we could combine the rule in the last sentence with stuff we heard in the first two. The overlap I see is that two statements are talking about whether the conclusion is true/false and whether the logic follows. Our intuition tells us that the conclusion is off, but the logic is good.

Two of the three ways to resolve a paradox would involve going against our intuitions (the conclusion is right ... the logic is bad). So I think the correct answer might deal with something like that ... maybe, "If the premises are all true, then solving a paradox would involve going against your intuitions."

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) At first I thought this was wrong, because I thought "the premises are true" was not part of what our intuition told us. But when I went to check on that wording, I saw that it DOES say "[our intuitions] tells us that the conclusion follows logically from TRUE premises." So, YES, this works! Our intuitions say "conclusion wrong / premises true / logic valid", and the three ways to solve a paradox are "conclusion right / at least one premise false / logic invalid".

(B) No, we can't make such a restrictive rule. It's possible that the premises are true and the conclusion is true, since resolving the paradox could just mean that the conclusion doesn't follow logically from the premises.

(C) Unknown comparison. We have no info about how number of premises affects degree of baffling.

(D) Extreme. We can't say two different people are likely to use two different approaches. We know nothing about which of the three methods is the most likely / most used.

(E) No, we can acknowledge that a conclusion is false but still solve a paradox via one of the other two methods (reject a premise or reject the logic).

Takeaway/Pattern: When we read Inference, we're looking to synthesize multiple claims together. One big hint that there may be a potential synthesis between two ideas is when they have overlapping information. The 2nd and 3rd sentence both dealt with "truth of conclusion / truth of premises / validity of logic". That overlap allowed for us to pull together "whether or not intuitive" from 2nd with "whether or not solving the paradox" from 3rd.

#officialexplanation

[IsaacD10]

I chose B on this one though I absolutely felt like it was wrong. The reason was I had one big issue with A.

Answer A says solving a philosophical paradox requires accepting something that intuitively seems INCORRECT. The stimulus says that our intuition suggests that the conclusion is false (or incorrect), but it also says that our intuition suggests the premises are true and follow logically (or are correct). So according to the stimulus, our intuition suggests only one thing is INCORRECT (the conclusion) and two things are CORRECT (the logic and the truth of the premises). So either rejecting the truth of a premise or logic of the argument would lead us to reject something our intuition says is CORRECT. If the answer had said solving a paradox requires rejecting our intuition, I would have picked it immediately.

Can you help me out with this Patrick? LSAT trains us to pay SUPER close attention to language and it really annoys me when they play fast and loose with it themselves.