Q11 - Lance: If experience teaches us nothing

[ohthatpatrick]

It's a totally fair question without a great answer. Lance doesn't actually present an argument. His sentence is his conclusion. We have to surmise that from the way Frank says "What you conclude".

And Lance's statement is NOT a real conditional; it's just an expression.

In fact, common sense tells us that experience DOES teach us many other things besides Lance's dubious platitude.

It would be a crazy world in which the trigger "experience teaches us nothing else" got satisfied. (for example, you wouldn't understand the meaning of this sentence).

When people say, "If you watch nothing else this year, watch 'Breaking Bad'.", they aren't actually giving you a conditional statement. They're just imploring you to watch 'Breaking Bad'. They're emphasizing that it's SUCH required viewing that it would be the #1 priority if you were to watch nothing else (so it must be the #1 priority even if you DO watch something else).

Similarly, Lance's 'conditional' could be rephrased as "the MINIMUM we learn from experience is that every general rule has at least one exception."

Anyway, if you're focused on Lance, you're focused on the wrong thing for this question. We want to characterize what Frank did.

He looked at the rule discussed "every general rule has at least one exception" and cleverly noticed that THIS rule itself is a general rule, therefore it would have to have an exception.

That forces us into a contradiction:
"Every general rule has an exception"
and yet, the exception to THAT general rule would be
"a general rule without an exception"

This is what (B) is saying. The word 'conclusion' here is dumb, because it could just as easily have been 'claim' or 'rule' or 'statement'. But the gist of the answer choice makes sense. Lance's rule ends up contradicting itself.

=== other answers ===

(A) This is one way to describe a Circular Argument. Another way is to say "the conclusion is merely a restatement of the premise". Frank would have needed to say something like "You haven't offered any evidence to convince me of that conclusion. You merely restated the conclusion in different words."

(C) Frank definitely didn't prove that exceptions are impossible for general rules. He's merely pointing out a clever logical implication of the rule Lance says that actually undermines the rule itself.

(D) Frank doesn't even discuss experience. And establishing the opposite of Lance's conclusion is the same as what (C) is saying.

(E) Frank doesn't discuss any real cases.


#officialexplanation

[LSAT-Chang]

What could possibly be wrong with (D)? Is it because it is not necessarily the "opposite" of what Lance concludes since Frank is just saying that there is "at least one general rule that has no exceptions" not the OPPOSITE of "every general rule has at least one exception"? How would you word the opposite of that sentence? Would it be "NOT every general rule has at least one excpetion" or "every general rule DOES NOT have at least one exception"??

[ohthatpatrick]

Great question.

The distinction between "negation" and "opposite" is sometimes helpful to remember.

Consider: "John is the best tennis player I know"

The negation is just saying that the original statement is not true.
Negation: "John is NOT the best tennis player I know"

The opposite is a little more up for interpretation because you could latch onto different aspects of the sentence and make them opposite.

Opposite 1: John is the WORST tennis player I know
Opposite 2: John is the best tennis player I DON'T know

Either way, the opposite is big leap from the original statement. Negations are just arguing that a certain claim was false. Opposites sort of change the claim so drastically that you're not even arguing the same point anymore.

In this question, you were asking what would be the opposite of "every general rule has at least one exception"

Your first option was the correct negation: "not every rule has at least one exception"

Your second option sounded like AN opposite: "every general rule DOES NOT have at least one exception"

Do you feel like Frank was trying to prove (establish) that either one of these ideas is true?

I think Frank was just trying to show Lance the logical problem with what Lance was saying.

Frank says "IF we assume [Lance's conclusion] is true", then we stumble into a contradiction.

So Frank isn't trying to establish anything other than the fact that Lance's logic doesn't make sense.

One final way to discard (D) is that Frank never once mentions "what experience teaches us". If anything, Frank was establishing that "logical implications of Frank's conclusion show us that his conclusion is flawed".

Hope this helps.

[jm.kahn]

How can we establish from Lance's statement "Experience teaches us that every general rule has at least one exception" is Lance's conclusion?

Lance's statement seems to use conditional language "if experience teaches us nothing else, then....." We are not given anything that'd suggest that the sufficient condition of this conditional "experience teaches us nothing else" is true.

Does the question assume that everyone will interpret the if part as an expression? How to differentiate between language that is conditional then what is an expression?