Q23 - Commentator: Human behavior cannot

[ksemenya87]

For some reason I am just not seeing the explanation B gives in the stimulus. Can someone please point this out or explain this to me.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Sure.

The argument concludes that human behavior cannot be fully understood. It's evidence for this is that some human action cannot be truly comprehended.

The argument assumes what it sets out to conclude. We call this circular reasoning. And this flaw is best described in answer choice (B).

(A) is not true. There is no analogy, just an example.
(C) is not true. There is no discussion of a claim not proven false. Although this may be a tempting answer because it does describe a flaw that appears frequently on the test and is tough to see.
(D) is true, but is not a flaw. The speaker doesn't need to indicate such a thing.
(E) is not true. This is not assumed in the argument.

Does that clear this one up?

[LSAT-Chang]

Hey Matt,
I had a very hard time with this question because I didn't seem to spot the flaw. Could you delve deeper with where you see circular reasoning in the argument?

When I first read this, I thought the flaw had to do something with concluding from a "some" statement. The author is concluding that all human behaviors cannot be fully understood w/out inquiring into nonphysical aspects of persons and the evidence he provides just deals with "some" particular human action -- so it could be the case that there are other ones aside from the "some" (since we don't know if it is 1 or ALL human actions) in which human behavior CAN be fully understood without inquiring into the nonphysical aspects of persons. Another flaw I thought might be at play here was "appeal to opinion" -- I thought the author's claim about "suppose that we had blah blah blah" and "even with all that we would obviously still NOT truly comprehend the action or know why it occured" seemed quite weak in general, since I felt like the author was just relying on his own evidence. But I wasn't sure if what I spotted was circular reasoning. I mean, I feel like most flaw questions would do what this argument is doing: the evidence used to support the conclusion assumes the conclusion is true (I mean I honestly thought it was like a DUH thing).. so I don't really get this.

Also, I was able to eliminate (A) because I also saw that there was no analogy, and I left (B) because I didn't know if that was what the author was doing, and I eliminated (C) because there is nothing like "no evidence that it is false therefore must be true" going on in the argument, and I circled (D) because of the explanation I cited above in regards to how there could be other than the "some" evidence given by the author that could possibly show that human behavior CAN be fully understood without inquiring into nonphysical aspects of persons, and I left (E) because I didn't know if the author was assuming that or not (since there are so many assumptions the author can make). So could you kindly delve a little deeper as well with answer choices (B), (D) and a little bit of (E)?

[goriano]

I'm still not seeing how the argument relies on circular reasoning.

The argument concludes that human behavior cannot be fully understood. It's evidence for this is that some human action cannot be truly comprehended.

I can see how the quoted part makes it obvious circular reasoning is involved, but the argument seems more complex than that. The argument as saying that since we can't fully understand human behavior using PHYSICAL aspects, we must look into the NONPHYSICAL aspects. So, does that mean that whenever you have an argument such as "Because X can't fully explain Y, thus, in order to fully understand Y we need to look into ~X" it will be circular? Please elaborate on this!

The flaws that I spotted were:
(1) Why do we need to look into the negation of physical aspects? Maybe there is a third dimension not accounted for, or maybe we may not be able to understand human behavior at all.
(2) The commentator stated that "suppose that we had a complete SCIENTIFIC account of the physical aspects." But what if there are NON-SCIENTIFIC accounts of physical aspects that could fully explain human behavior? This train of though led me to pick (E) and feel [fairly] confident in the answer choice.

Thoughts?

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

So, does that mean that whenever you have an argument such as "Because X can't fully explain Y, thus, in order to fully understand Y we need to look into ~X" it will be circular?

That is correct. The generic outline of an argument above is circular in that the conclusion is presupposed in the evidence.

(1) Why do we need to look into the negation of physical aspects? Maybe there is a third dimension not accounted for, or maybe we may not be able to understand human behavior at all.

No such 3rd dimension exists... Everything must either be physical or nonphysical. Anything that does not fit into the "physical" category is by definition "nonphysical."

(2) The commentator stated that "suppose that we had a complete SCIENTIFIC account of the physical aspects." But what if there are NON-SCIENTIFIC accounts of physical aspects that could fully explain human behavior? This train of though led me to pick (E) and feel [fairly] confident in the answer choice.

Notice that the argument says right up front, "suppose" this were true for "some particular human action." This is not the conclusion reached, but the evidence used to establish the conclusion. All evidence in an argument is simply assumed to be true anyway. We evaluate the merits of reaching a conclusion on the stated evidence - not in assessing whether the evidence is or is not the case. Even then, this answer choice is too strong. Where does the argument assume this is the case for "any" physical phenomenon?

Does that address your questions? Let me know if you still need some more help on this one!

[shirando21]

do we have other similar arguments of this type of flaw in preptests?

[wj097]

So, does that mean that whenever you have an argument such as "Because X can't fully explain Y, thus, in order to fully understand Y we need to look into ~X" it will be circular?

That is correct. The generic outline of an argument above is circular in that the conclusion is presupposed in the evidence.

(1) Why do we need to look into the negation of physical aspects? Maybe there is a third dimension not accounted for, or maybe we may not be able to understand human behavior at all.

No such 3rd dimension exists... Everything must either be physical or nonphysical. Anything that does not fit into the "physical" category is by definition "nonphysical."

(2) The commentator stated that "suppose that we had a complete SCIENTIFIC account of the physical aspects." But what if there are NON-SCIENTIFIC accounts of physical aspects that could fully explain human behavior? This train of though led me to pick (E) and feel [fairly] confident in the answer choice.

Notice that the argument says right up front, "suppose" this were true for "some particular human action." This is not the conclusion reached, but the evidence used to establish the conclusion. All evidence in an argument is simply assumed to be true anyway. We evaluate the merits of reaching a conclusion on the stated evidence - not in assessing whether the evidence is or is not the case. Even then, this answer choice is too strong. Where does the argument assume this is the case for "any" physical phenomenon?

Does that address your questions? Let me know if you still need some more help on this one!

I agree half from each of above explanations (i.e., disagree other halves).

- I also think (agreeing with goriano's point) that this argument presupposes, w/o justification SCIENTIFIC ACCOUNT to completely explain physical aspect of a PARTICULAR human behavior. We are not questioning whether we have/don't have complete scientific account but rather whether that complete scientific knowledge can explain all aspect of the physical aspects of that particular human action. And it follows that if we are not certain that scientific account can alone explain all physical aspects of some particular human action, then it does not sound logical to conclude that we need to inquire into non-physical aspects, let alone those physical aspects that we are yet to fully understand.

-However, (E) doesn't seem to address the above flaw (now agreeing with mattsherman's point of view), since its addressing ANY physical phenomenon, not some.

[austindyoung]

Premise: Fully understand human behavior ----> NonPhysical

Conclusion: Have Physical----> Still not Fully understand human behavior


The Conclusion is the contrapositive of the conditional premise given. That is why the reasoning is circular.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Nice Austin, exactly right!

[austindyoung]

Thank you Matt! I'm prepping to take the LSAT in June and the MLSAT LR book has made all the difference and I'm going to go over that session again!

[deedubbew]

I feel that Austin has the premise and conclusion mixed up? The conclusion is "Human behavior cannot be fully understood without inquiring into nonphysical aspects of persons." The premise is the rest of the stimulus. The scope of the premise is only a scientific account. However, the conclusion is broader and encompasses all physical (or everything not included in "nonphysical") aspects. It appears to be a scope shift. How do we know that scientific accounts provide a complete inquiry into all physical aspects?

EDIT I Just realized that the key here is the word "inquiring." The scope of the conclusion is not about all physical aspects, which is clearly confusing many students on this thread. The scientific account is an inquiry and so it matches the scope of the conclusion. If the scope of the premise was broader and made the claim that we can know all physical aspects, then the argument would have a different kind of fallacy: it would either "presume/take for granted" that an inquiry is the only way or "fail to take into account" a possibility that will break the argument. And now, Austin's example of contrapositive statements works, though it still think the conclusion and premises are mixed up. However, it's easy to not see the contrapositive statement when it seems like there is a scope shift, especially on time restraint. The key to recognizing the trick in this question is to notice the word "suppose"! The premise itself is an assumption that has no evidence or support. IF the word "suppose" and "inquiry" were taken out, then E would indeed be the correct answer.

[lunazhuyu]

austin thank you for your post! pretty concise and clear.

But I just want to say that you probably got the premise and conclusion opposite, for the latter, the have physical knowledge → not fully understand, is served as evidence in the question stem.

[TJG209]

For my quick two cents, i noticed when i read the stimulus that the conclusion wants to us to believe that we cannot understand human behaviour without delving into nonphysical aspects of humans.

So then we should have some evidence showing how nonphysical aspects can help explain human behaviour. But what they give us instead is just examples of physical aspects of human behaviour...

so basically it says, hey, here are physical aspects of human behaviour, but this isn't what we need to fully understand human behaviour. what we need is nonphysical evidence.
...

K? so then where are the nonphyscial examples?

Oh! well. ok. so we cant understand human behaviour through just physical examples, we need nonphysical ones too right? because with just physical examples, we still dont fully understand human behaviour (and btw, here are some examples of physical aspects...)
...
and around and around this person tries to argue.

This isn't exactly how circular arguments work, but I've had a hard time grasping circular arguments in my head, even though they are quite simple when they are boiled down. So this is how my thought process sort of went with this question. The author never really addressed the point in his conclusion with any evidence for the nonphysical, and in not doing so, just sets out premises that presume the conclusion is already true.