#10 - To be great, an artwork must express a deep emotion

[toddburtron@gmail.com]

I am studying for my second go at LSAT. After reading the posts I am still struggling to best isolate the S&N conditions in order to diagram -it just isn't intuitive for me.

What is more confusing is I immediately eliminated D as a contender due to reading computers within the answer. I considered this as outside/new information and marked it as a loser given this is MBT problem.

Help me?

[evelineliu]

Hi Todd,

The stimulus has two formal logic sentences:

• If great art --> express deep emotion

• If express deep emotion --> creator capable of experiencing deep emotion

By combining the two, we have:

• If great art --> express deep emotion --> creator capable of experiencing deep emotion

The contrapositive of the chain is this:

• If creator NOT capable of experience deep emotion --> NOT great art

(D) matches the contrapositive. Computers are not out of scope because the formal logic applies to all creators of art (people, computers, dogs, etc.). Any creator of art incapable of experience deep emotion will not create great art.

Best,
Eveline

[Tara F]

Why are we "Combining the first statement with the contrapositive of the second to arrive at"?
and wouldn't that be:
NOTGA--NOTDE--CE--AEE?

not great Art--Not deep expression--Capable ExpressingE---AExpress Emotion?
(sorry I don't know the keys for symbols)

[Luke Haqq]

Hi Tara F!

Happy to address the diagramming in this question.

Why are we "Combining the first statement with the contrapositive of the second to arrive at"?

One general reason is that this is a must be true question. Sometimes the correct answer choice might directly follow and be immediately apparent from statements or conditional reasoning in the stimulus. But often the correct answer choice might only be obvious after one has worked with the conditional reasoning to find inferences, which might require chaining statements together or taking contrapositives.

Here, we have the first statement, "To be great, an artwork must express a deep emotion, such as sorrow or love." This can be diagrammed as:

GA EDE

The second sentence, "But an artwork cannot express an emotion that the artwork’s creator is incapable of experiencing," can be diagrammed as:

CDE EDE

That is, if the artwork's creator is not capable of experiencing deep emotion, then the artwork cannot express deep emotion. The contrapositive of this is:

EDE CDE

With these variables, a reason to add the first statement with the contrapositive of the second is that this allows us to form a chain:

GA EDE CDE

We can then infer from this chain that:

GA CDE

We also know the contrapositive of this is true, or:

CDE GA

That is, if the artwork's creator is not capable of deep emotion, then it cannot be great artwork. This is reflected in answer choice (D).