Q18 - The tendency toward overspecialization

[LSAT-Chang]

So since this is a principle example question, the principle that I extracted from the argument was something along the lines of: "in order to understand a certain thing that is more recent, you should have a clear understanding of certain things that influenced the recent thing." So basically the key is about understanding something's influence on something else which would lead to a better understanding.

Would (C) be wrong because just "sharing linguistic ancestry" doesn't tell us whether those shared ones had an influence on the French language per se?

But a question I had with (E) was whether we had to assume that someone being someone's intellectual mentor necessarily means that the former influenced the latter. All I got from (E) was that Plato was Aristotle's intellectual mentor -- but I had to make an assumption myself which was that because Plato is Aristotle's intellectual mentor, Aristotle's philosophy was heavily influenced by Plato's.. but couldn't it be possible that although Plato was Aristotle's intellectual mentor, their philosophy could be completely different -- Aristotle may not agree with Plato's philosophy.. right? Does anyone see my point?

[maryadkins]

Nice thinking! And you're absolutely right about (C).

You're also right about (E)--the correct answer. For it to work, we have to assume that since P was A's mentor, he influenced him. But this isn't a very big assumption. It's an itty bitty one--a "mentor" by definition exists to influence a mentee. So it may be possible that Little A couldn't stand his platonic mentor and refused to be influenced in the slightest by him. But it takes more mental gymnastics to reach that conclusion than the opposite--that A was influenced by P.

(A) says to understand X, we have to understand how IT influences something else. This isn't right. We're looking for something that influenced it.
(B) says nothing about the earlier events having influenced the later events.
(C) also doesn't tell us that the "other languages" influenced the French language.
(D) is out of scope. The wider academic community isn't an earlier influence.