weaken question and "correlation then causation"

[frenchvanillabosco]

This question is probably really dumb but I am really getting myself confused.

I think it's true that when we weaken a question that mistakenly arrives at a causation conclusion based on correlation, we can:
1) weaken by introducing another cause
2) weaken by reversing the causation
3) show that either one occurs without the other

However, if we say that obesity and heart disease are strongly correlated, and so obesity causes heart disease.
And we weaken by saying that 99% of the heart disease is not caused by obesity, but by, like smoking. How does this weaken the statement? Could it still be true that obesity causes 1% of the heart disease and smoking causes 99%?

And when we weaken, do we have to be very absolute with the facts? Like can we just say that eating fried food is correlated with obesity and heart disease or do we have to point out that eating fried food causes both obesity and heart disease?

Thanks!

[frenchvanillabosco]

bump

[tommywallach]

Hey French Vanilla,

You're gonna hate this, but I would encourage you NOT to think about issues like this in the abstract, but ONLY in relation to actual LSAT questions. I say that because people often get into big hypotheticals about how rules might be made, but it really doesn't matter except insofar as to how it relates to questions. So if there are causation/correlation questions you're seeing that play off this confusion, let's discuss this further within the threads for those questions, because the general conversation isn't that useful.

That said, I will answer your FIRST question (the second one doesn't make sense to me, because we aren't doing anything with facts--we are responding to whatever was stated in the text). No, it does not inherently weaken "X causes Y" to say that "SOMETIMES Z causes Y." Both could be true.

-t