Q9 - Scientific and technological discoveries

[ottoman]

I choose A over C. I know that A is not a perfect answer. But I thought C is conclusion redundancy. Could you explain the reasons C is not conclusion redundancy?

Thanks!

[ohthatpatrick]

(C) definitely does sound a lot like the conclusion, but they are two distinct claims.

The conclusion is about predictions regarding the condition of societies in which scientific and technological discovery is particularly frequent.

(C) is about predictions regarding scientific and technological discoveries, or their effects.

The conclusion is saying that predicting how a society will be is tough, while (C) is saying that predicting what discoveries will be made (and what their effects will be) is tough.

The former is broader than the latter, even though we kinda assume that the latter statement is the whole reason for the former statement.

If say "candies that possess particularly large amounts of ingredient X are particularly fattening", it implies that "ingredient X is fattening", even though it never actually says that.

That's what's happening here. When scientific/technological discovery is particularly frequent, the predictions about that society supposedly become particularly untrustworthy.

We must be assuming that the scientific/technological discoveries make it harder to have accurate predictions.

(C) is just explicitly saying what was already implied (and sometimes that's the name of the game with Necessary Assumption).

You can see how if we negated (C), we would get "forecasts of scientific/technological discoveries and their effects are entirely reliable". This would massively weaken the conclusion.

With (A), meanwhile, the issue of harmful consequences is totally out of scope.

Nothing the author is arguing takes into account positive or negative terms. The argument is neutrally saying that discoveries have considerable effects, so society's with a lot of discoveries are harder to predict.

The effects could be all good, all bad, or anything in between. It wouldn't effect the core of the author's argument.

His point is just that because there are a lot of effects, it's hard to make predictions.

[WaltGrace1983]

Patrick's analysis is great! I am going to add to it because this argument, in my opinion, was super weird and figuring out in my own words helped a lot! Maybe it will help someone else to have more interpretations as well. Since this is a necessary assumption question, let's find the core and stick to it!

S&T discoveries have "considerable effects" on a society's development
→
Predictions about certain societies - the societies in which S&T discoveries are frequent - are particularly untrustworthy

So what is this argument saying? At first, I had a hard time mapping it out because the LSAT doesn't always like to be clear and concise . However, I will map out what the argument is saying by using the USA as an example of a society:
(1) S&T discoveries affect how society's develop
(2) People may make predictions about how society's develop
(3) However, we cannot make trustworthy predictions about how societies, such as the USA for example, develop
(4) Why? Because the USA has frequent S&T discoveries and this will change how the society's develop.

I'll provide another example. Let's say that you were making prediction in 1992, this prediction being about how the USA is going to develop. You had no idea that internet, smart-phones, Facebook, etc. would exist at that time so you said that all Americans would live in a society in which everyone is always outside, living off of the land, and getting information via newspaper. How wrong would you be? Very wrong. Why? Because the development of these things - these discoveries - such as Facebook, the internet, etc. completely changed the way American society developed.

(A) We don't care about the "harmful consequences" of predictions - we are talking about the predictions themselves!

(B) The development of a society doesn't need S&T. All the argument tells us is that S&T has a considerable effect on society. In other words, S&T → considerable effect not societal development → S&T

(D) Like (B), we don't care about the societies themselves - we care abut the predictions.

(E) We don't care about how difficult it is to predict, we care about the nature of those predictions.

This is why (C) is the correct answer. It talks about the nature of the predictions - these predictions are unreliable. What if they were reliable? What if people could tell what society was going to discover and how it would affect it? If that was the case then we couldn't conclude that these predictions are not trustworthy.