Weaken | LSAT Logical Reasoning 

Thank you Stephanie!! We'll keep making more!

You all probably dont care but does someone know of a tool to get back into an Instagram account? I was stupid lost the login password. I appreciate any tricks you can offer me!

@Luca Tripp instablaster :)

@Lachlan Jaziel Thanks so much for your reply. I got to the site on google and I'm trying it out now. Looks like it's gonna take a while so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.

Great catch Derrell, thank you!

So glad you're enjoying them. We have a lot more coming to our RU-vid channel over the next 8 weeks. We have one on Most Supported questions going up today. There are tons more at lsatlab.com available for free if you can't till they go live on RU-vid.

Nice Gregory, that's exactly right!

Any answer that weakens the argument is incorrect in this EXCEPT question. Answer choice (D) weakens the argument by calling into question how dangerous irradiated foods are by comparing the level of dangerous chemicals in irradiated foods with the level of such chemicals that naturally occur in foods. If the amount of dangerous chemicals in irradiated foods is less, then maybe they're not so bad after all. While it doesn't destroy the argument, it does make the conclusion a little less likely to be true given the evidence.

I finally get it. It says “many causes” but not all therefore it is harmful in some ways but not cancer and serious health problems. So it supports the conclusion that there is a good reason to avoid irradiated foods. I would definitely miss this one and pick D. But now I will pay more attention when I do weakening questions.

@@DOoD0oHua1, you might be a little confused in how you're talking about (B). The correct answer on weaken EXCEPT doesn't need to strengthen the argument at all. It just has to not-weaken. If there were an answer that said "Mustard is yellow" or "Baseball is a slow sport" those would both be correct answers to question 2. They *don't* weaken the argument. To weaken the argument, we're looking for answers that allow us to disagree with "good reason to avoid irradiated food". We want to eliminate the four answers that help us argue "it's fine to eat irradiated food. you don't need to avoid it" The closest (B) would come to doing that would be saying, "It's fine to eat irradiated food. You don't need to avoid it. Sure it might spawn radiolytic products that can cause cancer, but hey you can get cancer a lot of different ways. Why bother trying to avoid getting it via irradiated food when you'll probably get cancer anyway from some other source!" That's definitely not a common sense logic we use in real life: "You might as well smoke cigarettes. Yes, they can cause cancer, but so can other stuff, so what's the point in trying to avoid cancer?" (D), meanwhile, allows us to say "It's fine to eat irradiated food. You don't need to avoid it. Sure, it has some harmful chemical residues in it, but the amount of harmful chemical residues in irradiated foods is less than the amount that occurs naturally in most kinds of food." This isn't just saying, "You're bound to get harmful chemical residues in your food no matter what, so you might as well eat irradiated foods". It actually is saying that irradiated foods are BETTER than most other kinds of food when it comes to chemical residues.

That's right. We're typically told to undermine the argument or the reasoning, which means we should focus on how the evidence relates to the conclusion. Occasionally we'll be asked to weaken the conclusion. In those cases we can attack the conclusion directly.

Great question! Not exactly. "Provides the least support for..." would be more like Strengthens, EXCEPT. So four answers will provide some support for the argument or statement, the correct answer will not.

@@LSATLab yes i came across a question with that and was wrong because it was supposed to be a weaken queation

You're just trying to weaken the author's case, in any conceivable way. The common categories of weakening would be 1. making the evidence less relevant or trustworthy 2. weakening the connection between the evidence and the conclusion 3. making the conclusion seem less plausible 4. suggesting an alternate explanation or framing for the evidence Only about 1-2% of correct answers weaken by directly attacking the credibility of the evidence. Only about 10-15% of correct answers weaken by just attacking the plausibility of the conclusion. The vast majority respond to the evidence, showing that the evidence isn't relevant to the conclusion, is compatible with the conclusion being false, or can be explained in some way other than how the conclusion is explaining it.

Since the conclusion said "airlines are overconcerned about business travelers, they should instead focus on leisure travelers", then we as the defense attorney would be arguing, "Wrong -- it's correct how much they're focusing on business travelers, relative to leisure travelers".

So out of the four categories you just mentioned which is the best method to use? Or all of them get used at one point

@@mairobertson9349 Yup, they all get used at some point, but as I said before a couple of those categories only account for around 15% of answers total. The most generic advice for Weaken is to just head to the answers thinking, "GIVEN THAT [evidence], HOW CAN I ARGUE [anti-conclusion]" So if the argument were, "Bob never gives his wife flowers on their anniversary. Thus, he is a bad husband." You'd go to the answers thinking, "GIVEN THAT bob doesn't give his wife flowers on their anniversary, HOW CAN I STILL ARGUE that he's a *good* husband?" Or alternatively, you can think about how to respond to the evidence by framing it this way, "GIVEN THAT I'M ARGUING that bob is a good husband, HOW CAN I EXPLAIN THAT he doesn't give his wife flowers on their anniversary?" In general answers either have to respond to the evidence or outweigh the evidence. We can either try to make it seem like it's not a bad thing that he doesn't give his wife flowers, or we can accept that it's a bad thing but outweigh it with other considerations that make it seem more like he's a good husband.

Thank you!

Hi Ilsa, overlapping sets is how the math adds up. Arguments can utilize more than one type of reasoning structure.

@@LSATLab Oh okay that makes sense. Thank you for the videos!

Hey Mohammad, not sure what exactly you mean by pdf files. Can you elaborate? Are you saying that the text in the videos is too small?

LSAT Lab yes The text is too small Thank you for your kind

@@mohammadnaghshineh9311 One more follow up. Are you referencing the text of the actual LSAT questions specifically? Or is it a general issue that affects other segments of text as well? Thank you so much for the feedback, I'd like to make this video series as helpful as possible for as many people as possible.

LSAT Lab I am interested in mathematical Logic I enjoy these videos Thank you

Thanks. What do you mean by "a bad example", out of curiosity? Too hard / too easy? Not representative of this question type?

@@LSATLab I would say not representative of this question especially for folks that are identifying these types of questions as their weak spots on the lsat such as myself …. Maybe easier question would have been better to kind of help link the analysis points /break downs first and then this question could have been a follow up ? Otherwise I do enjoy your channel and information for lsat thank you ☺️

@@martini87c , thanks for the feedback!

It's against the SUPPORT relationship between the conclusion and premises/evidence.

What I've gathered is, it's important to look at it like because of the causation type weakening questions