Q22 - One child pushed another

[maryadkins]

This is a principle support question, so we want to choose a principle that helps fill the gap.

The core is:

Child A understands the difference between right and wrong.

-->

The push was wrong if Child A intended to injure Child B.

What's the problem with this argument? We're told that Child A knows the difference between right and wrong, but we're not why what Child A did was actually wrong. The assumption is that it is wrong for someone who knows the difference between right and wrong (Child A) to intend to injure someone else. (B) states this.

(A) doesn't support the argument but offers a qualification for it.

(C) is incorrect because it's backwards. We want an answer choice that says it's wrong to intend, not that if it's wrong, it was intentional.

(D) is incorrect because we aren't dealing with whether Child A did or didn't think about if the push would injure or not, but whether he/she intended the injury.

(E) is out of scope. We're concerned with someone who does know the difference between right and wrong, not someone who doesn't.

#officialexplanation

[peg_city]

I'm really not getting why B is right here.....

Thanks

[LSAT-Chang]

Isn't answer choice (A) the reversal of what we want? If we had "an action that is intended to harm another person is wrong IF the person who performed the action understands the difference between right and wrong" -- this would fill our gap since it's connecting the premise to the conclusion, right? But since answer choice (A) has that "only if" statement instead of just the IF, doesn't it reverse the logic?

[maryadkins]

YES! That's another way of thinking about it.

I think of "only if" as a qualification sometimes because what it is essentially doing is limiting the scope of an activity (the sufficient piece), if we aren't talking in conditional logic terms. But you're exactly right. Conditional logic-wise, it's reverse logic.

[jennifer]

are the answers to principal support questions ever in negated form?

[maryadkins]

Do you mean are they "negations" of the actual assumption/principle supporting the argument--like we mean when we "negate" to test answer choices in necessary assumption questions? No, they shouldn't be. Then they'd be contradicting the argument. The right principle answer could certainly be thrown at you in language that uses negative terms, though. But the task is still the same: to find a principle that supports.

For example, say I need a principle to support the following:

Anna's dog bites but Richard's dog doesn't

-->

Anna's dog is scarier than Richard's

A principle might be:

Dogs that bite are scarier than dogs that don't.

Or it could be written:

Dogs that don't bite are not as scary as dogs that do.

Both would be right.

[erikwoodward10]

Like any SA question with conditional reasoning, we have to find an answer choice that takes us to the conclusion... But this is interesting because we have a conditional conclusion. Often we just assume that the conclusion is a NC in the conditional chain, and we find a conditional reasoning statement that links a premise to the conclusion (premise-->conclusion).

But this is an interesting question because the conclusion is a conditional statement. So I guess my question here is, are we just trying to get to the NC of the conditional statement in the conclusion? Or are we trying to get to the entire conditional statement in the conclusion? Is it valid to say, in terms of logic, that B is correct because it takes us to the NC of the conditional statement of the correct answer?

I'll explain with a bit more detail, looking at how I approached the question:

P: Understood difference
C: Intended injure --> wrong

Ok, how can I link the premise to the conclusion? To arrive at the NC of the conclusion (wrong), I could add the premise to the conditional statement in the conclusion as an additional SC. That would look like:

Understood difference + Intended to injure --> Wrong

Which is exactly what answer choice B says.

So now we have:

P: Understood difference
P: Understood difference + intended to injure --> Wrong
--
C: Intended to injure--> wrong

Which makes sense. And is interesting because the conditional nature of the conclusion addresses the fact that the premises don't give us all of the info we need (even with the correct answer we still don't know if there was intent).

Just looking for patters to ID here. Thanks.

[JeffW669]

I had a lot of trouble with this one, and still think A is a better answer than B.

Here's how I interpret the argument:
K: Knowledge of right and wrong
I: Intent to harm
W: Action was wrong
If K, then (if I, then W). AKA if K & I, then W.

Here's how I interpret the answers A and B.
A. If K, then (if I, then W). AKA if K & I, then W. AND if not K, then not W.
B. If K & I, then W.

Now, both A and B as principles completely justify the reasoning in the argument. The issue at hand is that A adds a second element: if not K, then not W. Now, this isn't explicitly stated in the argument. However, the fact that, in the argument, the evaluation of W is withheld until K is established, strongly implies to me that exact element: if not K, then not W. That's why I chose A over B when I took the practice test, and why I still think A is a better answer than B.

Can someone help explain what I'm getting wrong?