Q9 - Joshi is clearly letting campaign contributions

[rohanw2000]

Could someone clarify what the cause and the effect are as indicated by answer (D)?

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Hey rohanw2000, sorry for the delayed response. We just transitioned how we assign posts on the LSAT Forums to provide for faster response times going forward.

The argument asserts that the financial support causes Joshi to vote in favor of things that benefit property developers. However, as answer choice (D) points out, it could easily be true that Joshi voting in ways that benefited property developers caused the property developers to offer him financial support.

Incorrect Answers
(A) misstates the evidence. Do we know which of the premises came first?
(B) brings up a familiar issue, but we don't see terms indicating necessity or sufficiency: required, depends on, ensures, only if, etc.
(C) is out of scope. There are no moral judgments in this argument.
(E) describes the wrong flaw. This argument isn't circular, since the conclusion goes way beyond (causation) what the evidence suggests or states (correlation).

[LukeM22]

I'm going to play devil's advocate here, because I picked B and and can't find reason to eliminate it.

In order for us to conclude that contributions--> voting directionality, both the campaign contributions from the developers and the pro-developer voting record are NECESSARY PHENOMENA for this to be even a discussion. If we were to negate either of those two premises, the argument is out-- it'd be very difficult for us to conclude that contributions have influence if there are no contributions, and it'd be very difficult to conclude that those contributions are the reason for the voting record in that direction... if it isn't in that direction. As such, I interpreted the stimulus as assuming that the necessity of those phenomena for this contribution-->voting record relationship to be sufficient proof of it. How is this wrong?

[ohthatpatrick]

You're making it seem like (B) says, "the author assumes that campaign contributions occurred and the author assumes that pro-developer voting occurred".

(B) doesn't say anything like that.

If you've never seen Necessary vs. Sufficient wording on Flaw before, it might be hard to judge what this is saying. In our books/classes, we label it the Conditional Logic flaw.

When you have a conditional statement,
A --> B
the left side is called the Sufficient condition and the right side is called the Necessary condition.

If I make an argument that says,
"You can only get into Harvard if you score above a 155 on the LSAT. Betty scored above a 155 on the LSAT, so she will clearly get into Harvard."
then I have committed the flaw in (B).

I had a conditional statement that reads
Get into Harvard --> 155+ on LSAT

Then my Premise -> Conclusion move looks like
Betty: 155+ on LSAT ---> Betty: Get into Harvard


Author botched Conditional Logic = Author committed the Nec vs. Suff flaw.
Apparently, in reasoning BACKWARDS through that conditional, I confused the right side with the left side (confused the necessary with the sufficient).

In order to commit the Nec vs. Suff flaw (aka "The Conditional Logic Flaw"), there must be conditional logic in the premises. So the easiest way to disqualify these answers quickly is to just ask yourself, "Are there any conditional statements in the premises?"

Nope. Both premises are quantitative comparisons.

If we don't know the quick "Nec vs. Suff --> Conditional Logic Flaw --> WAS there conditional logic?" process, then we're just reading the answer and asking ourselves if it's an accurate description of the argument.

When you read (B), just pause after the first bit and ask yourself, in this argument did the author ever identify "one thing's being necessary for another to occur"?

Does any claim the author made sound anything like "In order for X to occur, Y is necessary"?

No, so we don't even have to keep reading. This answer can't be right if it's mis-describing the argument.