PT 59, S3, Q6 A recent magazine editorial criticizes

[aileenann]

In this sort of question, we need to articulate the underlying logic of an argument at its most general and replicate that same broad pattern with an entirely different kind of content. The easiest and most sure way of doing this without getting fooled by tricky right answers is to force yourself to really articulate the logic of the argument.

Here’s let’s start with the first sentence. The author says that a recent article criticizes scientists for not doing a particular thing. Most generally, we can spell this out with:

Group S was recently criticized for not doing X.

The second sentence then goes on to say this is unfair because X is currently impossible:

However, Group S was unfair because X is not possible.

It seems that the assumption underling this argument is that expecting something impossible is unfair. (Notice here how easy it is to pick up on that argument _ that’s because this probably squares with your own sense of justice. That said, you don’t want to rely too much on common sense alone on the LSAT). We need to look for an argument that matches this.

The new argument may not turn on impossibility or unfairness though, so we can even push it a little further if we really want (though it will be harder to fill in four variables now instead of two):

Group S was criticized for not doing X.
However group S was U (unfair) because X is I (impossible).

Moreover, I expect the normative judgment (unfair) to stay relatively the same, as twisting it too much might also eventually make the argument too different for an answer to be the correct one.

One more tip before we get into the answer choices. Sometimes I find that in addition to thinking about the bare bones logic of an answer choice, it can also be helpful to count the number of groups or ideas. In the above argument, I think we’re really talking about two big ideas _ the scientists and what they did. The normative judgments are apart from that. However, if we see an argument that has two groups of people or two things done, etc, we’ll know it doesn’t match onto the logic above.

Now let’s look at our choices:

(A) This answer choice is out for a few reasons. It deviates from the impossibility justification by indicating that what was not done is not impossible but rather simply wasn’t done. This doesn’t match onto our argument. Do not be fooled here by the spurious mention of "recent technology."
(B) This looks like a good argument. There is the unfairness bit, a group of doers (the companies), and a thing not being done (nuclear fusion). The impossibility here is stretched a bit to be impossible in a practicable sense, but that seems close enough to the original. We should, however, still look at the other answers to make sure we’re not missing or underemphasizing something key from the original argument.
(C) This has more than two different ideas in it ( e.g. radiation, food industry, cost of food, remaining edible for longer), so it can’t be our answer. Additionally this is a criticism for doing something rather than not doing something _ also problematic.
(D) This answer choice does not discuss impossibility or anything even remotely similar, so it’s out.
(E) This answer is out for the same reason _ irrelevance is not sufficiently similar to impossibility.

So even with this high level analysis, we are only down to one answer _ that is, (B).
I’d love to hear other thoughts about this problem _ how to do it, or how it might give insights into working through other problems of the same kind.

I’ve also got a challenge question for students out there. Why is it that we wanted to keep in the ideas of impossibility and fairness even when we deleted the scientists and the specific thing the scientists failed to do (calling them S and X instead)? That is, what is logically different about these two groups of words/ideas?