Q10 - The only motives that influence

[mcrittell]

Can someone please clarify what the answer choices mean? Haha!

[bbirdwell]

Great question! Understanding answer choices is an especially important skill on flaw questions.

One way to approach them is to understand the argument as well as possible, breaking it into digestible constituent parts, and then playing the "matching game" with the choices. Break each choice into small pieces and check to see whether the pieces match the original argument.

Note that in many cases, checking to see whether the pieces match the argument is much, much simpler than trying to understand what the choices "mean." Understanding what they actually "mean" is difficult if not impossible without a fair amount of mental effort and contortionism. Therefore we should avoid doing that, side-stepping the well-written web of meaninglessness laid by the test-writers, and look for a simpler, and reliable, method.

Here's a play by play of my thought process on this one.

Here's how I think of the argument CORE:
premise:
motive that influence all human action --> arise from self-interest

conclusion:
self-interest is CHIEF influence on human action

The word "only" is always an important word, and often an indicator of conditional relationships, as this one is. The conclusion has the telltale word "chief," which is a logical flaw seen repeatedly on the LSAT, most often as an incorrect choice on inference questions (an argument says "A-->B" and the author concludes that "A is the primary way to B" or "the best way to B").

To me, what's bad about the argument is that the conclusion seems reversed from the logic. Premise says A-->B, conclusion pretty much says B-->A. I'll eliminate choices that don't seem to match up with that.

(A)
First, I check the original argument to see if there actually IS an observation that something is "common to all events." Yes! It's a match with "influence ALL human actions."

Then I check to see if the author denies that this can contribute to a causal explanation. No! The conclusion IS a causal explanation, so the author definitely does not "deny" any causal explanations. Eliminate.

(B)
First, I say to myself "there seems to be an 'occurrence of a particular influence." Then I ask, "Does that influence outweigh all other influence?" Yes! That's what the conclusion says: "chief influence."

At this point, I decide to keep (B) and move on. I note that it seems to *match* the premise/conclusion of the argument very well, especially the conclusion, and I go straight to (C).

(C)
This one needs some serious trimming down. At the heart of it, I see "characteristic of pattern at one time is characteristic of similar patterns, at all times."

Compared to (B), this one is terrible. The argument's not really about time, and the choice doesn't match the conclusion's key element at all ("chief influence). I eliminate and move on.

(D)
Seems like a possible match on first read. I read it again to get a little deeper: "BECAUSE an influence is the PARAMOUNT influence." Wrong! While "paramount influence" matches "chief influence," it uses that part as EVIDENCE (indicated by the word "because"), and it should be the CONCLUSION. It's backwards! Eliminate.

(E)
Eliminate. The author does not undermine the premise, but rather reverses it.

Hope that helps!

[shaynfernandez]

In the Manhattan LR book this was in the Causation Flaws section, is this conditional or causation, or should we consider them in the same light for this particular question?

[gmatalongthewatchtower]

In the Manhattan LR book this was in the Causation Flaws section, is this conditional or causation, or should we consider them in the same light for this particular question?

Ditto with Shayn's question. Can someone please help us?


Thanks

[WaltGrace1983]

In the Manhattan LR book this was in the Causation Flaws section, is this conditional or causation, or should we consider them in the same light for this particular question?

Ditto with Shayn's question. Can someone please help us?


Thanks

Unless I am mistaken (hey I could be!), conditional and causal are two different things.

As you know, conditional is expressing that IF something occurs THEN something else will occur:

Practice → Perfect.
"IF I practice, I will be perfect."
Now this doesn't necessarily mean that practice caused my perfection. It could be that practicing gave me confidence and therefore I am perfect because of that. To assume the opposite of this - that practice caused perfection - is to commit a logical fallacy. This fallacy (I think it is called Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc) is to say that because Y came after X, X caused Y. Let's look at another example...

High ticket sales → Higher revenue this year
"IF the team sells a lot of tickets THEN the team will have a higher revenue than last year"
Does this mean that the ticket sales caused higher revenue. Maybe - but we cannot merely assume that. What if the tickets are actually free and what is really making the money is concession sales?

Many times, conditional and causal are very synonymous but we cannot assume that this is true all the time. A causal relationship *can be* a little bit different. A causal relationship is expressing that X caused Y and it really depends on the nature of the argument to decide if something is causal or conditional.

However, what is important to note is that in (A) - which I am assuming is the tricky answer choice here - there is nothing causal. Motivations or human actions or self interest or anything else here doesn't cause anything. This argument is merely saying: "Human action → Self-interest motivates." Does this mean that human actions cause certain motivations? No. It just means that if something is a human action then it has a certain property. Maybe it is our human nature that causes these motivations (which is probably the case here).

As I said, someone let me know if my understanding is lacking but this is how I interpret the causation/conditional conundrum.

[tommywallach]

Hey Walt,

I don't really see a difference.

If I study, I will get an A.

This is saying that studying causes the A. Could other things also cause an A? Sure! But it's still both conditional and causative. But I'm intrigued to see if you can come up with an example that is conditional without being causative...

-t

[ltownsjr]

Well from what Ive read in my prep book it is different, like WaltGrace said. So for example if you say something like

"when an earthquake happens --- > Someone will get hurt"

Just because an earthquake happens, and people will get hurt, doesn't mean that the earthquake caused the people to get hurt, it only means that at sometime after the sufficient condition has happened will the necessary condition happen. Maybe the earthquake happens then the ground cracks into two, which then causes a person to trip and hurt himself. It wasn't the earthquake that caused the person to get hurt, it was the crack. Maybe you can say that it indirectly caused the person to be hurt, but not directly.

[tommywallach]

If x causes y and y causes z, then x causes z. It's still considered logical causation.

-t

[cyt5015]

All human are mammal; Tom is human, therefore, Tom is a mammal. This is classic conditional logic without causation relation. Causation must have chronologic order but the conditional logic does not have that feature. The cause must occur before the effect in order to establish the causation relation.