Why should I break down arguments in LR

[Nikki Siclunov]

The following is a response to a privately received question:

On page 24 of the LRB it states that recognizing argument elements is critical. i don't understand how this helps in finding correct or incorrect answers when you can read the question and come up with the answer without all this analysis. Please help me understand this. I feel i am missing something applying this knowledge to answering the LSAT questions.

At the most basic level, every argument is comprised of premise(s) and a conclusion. There are additional elements to keep in mind (subsidiary conclusions, possible counterarguments, assumptions, etc.) but pretty much every argument out there boils down to a main point, which is supported - successfully or not - by a set of premises that function as evidence for the conclusion. You cannot answer virtually any question on the test unless you understand what these elements are, and how they relate to each other. Let me give you a few examples:

• 1. Main Point questions require you to identify the conclusion. Without differentiating the conclusion from the premises, such a question would be impossible to solve.
  
  2. Strengthen and Weaken questions ask you to strengthen/weaken the conclusion of the argument - not its premises! Without a solid understanding of 1) what that conclusion is and 2) how well it is supported by the evidence given, you’d be unable to solve either of these questions.
  
  3. Assumption questions require identifying an implicit premise upon which the conclusion depends. Once again, the conclusion is critical to isolating that implicit premises, because the correct answer choice - when negated - must weaken the conclusion.
  
  4. In Method and Method-AP questions, preliminary analysis of the argument is central to identifying the most precise description of how that argument proceeds. If you can’t distinguish the functional role of each statement in the stimulus, a Method question would be virtually impossible to solve.

As you can see, coming up with the right answer virtually requires deconstructing the argument from a structural standpoint. I’m not advocating spending 2-3 minutes doing this; in fact, if your accuracy is already high, it is entirely possible that you’re performing this analysis without even realizing it. If not, you should probably slow down and focus on the following key questions: What is the author driving at? What evidence is he/she using to persuade me? Are there any counterarguments presented, and if not, can you come up with one? Critical reading is key, but you can only do that once you know what it is that you need to be critical of, i.e. if you know the conclusion of the argument!

[EsquireGirl]

Hi there,
I am reading the LR Bible ch.14 dealing with premise and conclusion. What is a simple way to definitively know which is a premise and which is a conclusion. Especially when there can be premise/sub conclusions?
Thanks

[Alex Bodaken]

EsquireGirl,

Thanks for the question, which is a really important one! To directly answer your question: a premise is a statement that supports a conclusion - so the way to know whether a sentence is a premise or a conclusion is to know if the statement is supporting another or being supported by another. The classic PowerScore example is "All humans are mortal. Socrates is human. So Socrates is mortal." In that stimulus, the first two sentences support the last, and so they are premises; the last sentence is the conclusion.

But of course, as you note, very few (perhaps no) LSAT stimuli are that simple, and we start to get into things like subconclusions. A subconclusion is a statement that is both supported by a different premise and, in turn, is used to support an additional conclusion. While all of that is hopefully helpful, what I can't do is give you a "simple" or "definitive" way to know (based on, say, a key word) what is a premise and what is a conclusion - in your LSAT Bible you have premise and conclusion indicators, and those are very helpful, but can get challenging when subconclusions come into play (they will sometimes have both premise and conclusion indicator words, but not always). What's key is to focus on what is supporting, and what is being supported, and to turn that knowledge into identification of premises and conclusions.

Hope that helps!
Alex