- Wed Jul 12, 2023 12:27 pm
#102358
Hi rlouis,
In the argument itself, we have a premise that basically states, "if we cancel now, all the money that has already been spent (which is more than half) will be wasted."
You are correct that in this conditional statement, the sufficient condition is "cancel now" as indicated by the word "if."
We are not done, however. The very next step is to take the contrapositive. If you're not familiar with contrapositives, they are discussed under conditional reasoning in lesson 2 of The PowerScore LSAT Course and in chapter 6 of The Logical Reasoning Bible.
It is generally a good habit to always take the contrapositive, but in this argument we are definitely going to use it. How can we tell that the argument will use the contrapositive? Because the conclusion of the argument is that canceling would be a mistake, which is another way of saying we should not cancel the project. The only way to "get to" the conclusion of not canceling using this conditional statement is via the contrapositive.
When taking the contrapositive, you reverse and negate the terms. Here, the contrapositive would be:
"If we don't want to waste all the money that has already been spent (which is more than half), then we should not cancel the project."
Here, in order to get us to our conclusion that we should not cancel, we'd like to find an answer that satisfies the sufficient condition of our contrapositive (i.e. we don't want to waste all the money that has already been spent).
Now to be tricky, the correct answer doesn't specifically mention not wasting money, which would have been nice, but Answer B does get us to the conclusion that we should complete the project (meaning not cancel it) since it mentions spending more than half of the total cost, which happened in this argument.
In the argument itself, we have a premise that basically states, "if we cancel now, all the money that has already been spent (which is more than half) will be wasted."
You are correct that in this conditional statement, the sufficient condition is "cancel now" as indicated by the word "if."
We are not done, however. The very next step is to take the contrapositive. If you're not familiar with contrapositives, they are discussed under conditional reasoning in lesson 2 of The PowerScore LSAT Course and in chapter 6 of The Logical Reasoning Bible.
It is generally a good habit to always take the contrapositive, but in this argument we are definitely going to use it. How can we tell that the argument will use the contrapositive? Because the conclusion of the argument is that canceling would be a mistake, which is another way of saying we should not cancel the project. The only way to "get to" the conclusion of not canceling using this conditional statement is via the contrapositive.
When taking the contrapositive, you reverse and negate the terms. Here, the contrapositive would be:
"If we don't want to waste all the money that has already been spent (which is more than half), then we should not cancel the project."
Here, in order to get us to our conclusion that we should not cancel, we'd like to find an answer that satisfies the sufficient condition of our contrapositive (i.e. we don't want to waste all the money that has already been spent).
Now to be tricky, the correct answer doesn't specifically mention not wasting money, which would have been nice, but Answer B does get us to the conclusion that we should complete the project (meaning not cancel it) since it mentions spending more than half of the total cost, which happened in this argument.