Foundations of LSAT Logic and Argumentation

Welcome back! This is the second video in our eight-part series on the LSAT. In this important early lesson, we will lay down a strong foundation in LSAT logic and argumentation. The concepts and skills that we discuss here will apply to the test as a whole. both to logical reasoning and to reading comprehension. Today we're going to be talking about two major areas. The first is understanding the complex language on the LSAT. This is technically a precursor to the material on logic and arguments, but it's a necessary one. Reading LSAT language can be very difficult, and if you struggle to understand what's even being said, then digging into this logical structure and evaluating the arguments is going to be impossible. So we'll cover this part first. And I'll give you some advice for parsing the complicated language that you're going to be positively swimming in for the next few months. Next, we'll talk about arguments and the hidden logic lying behind what looks like just regular language. At its heart, the LSAT is about understanding arguments. The language on the test is fundamentally persuasive. We'll always want to be asking ourselves, what is the speaker here trying to persuade me of? How are they going about doing this? And how convincing are these attempts? But the persuasion on the LSAT... is not about hucksterism or flashy appeals to emotion. Here, it's about supporting one's conclusions logically, and in this video, I will try to give you a better sense of what that means. But first, I'd like to give you an explicit preview of all of the skills that we're going to be introducing today. Don't worry if it seems like a lot at this point. There's actually some evidence from learning science that a little initial confusion can actually cultivate deeper understanding in the long term. By previewing what you're going to be exposed to later on, you'll be more likely to recognize the ideas when we get to them, and this will help to focus your attention and facilitate memory. When it comes to understanding LSAT language, we'll actually just focus on one major skill, finding claims. Arguments are made up of claims, which are sometimes hard to extract out of the wordy language on the LSAT. We'll use a nifty tool, the bullseye, to focus our attention in the right way while reading in order to understand which claims are being made. As we move on to logic and argumentation, there will be more skills to acquire. The first is recognizing relationships of support that hold between claims. We'll use a tool called the skeptic's perspective, say that five times fast, in order to develop our sense of how some claims on the LSAT serve as support for others, thus persuading you to believe them. The next skill is related to the previous one, but it's so important that it deserves to be singled out. This is the skill of recognizing an argument's conclusion. The conclusion is the bottom line, what the rest of the argument is meant to persuade you of. We'll use two tools, signal words and the SO test, in order to help us locate conclusions on the LSAT. Finally, we'll focus on a cluster of skills related to conditional logic. We'll learn how to build these fun little logic machines, which I call if-thens, and we'll see how using these can clarify important logical relationships in the text. For those of you who are engaged in self-guided study for the LSAT, I strongly recommend that you keep a notebook for this course. You won't have to take too many notes, and I'll even try to help you out by indicating with this symbol when I think there's something particularly important that I think you should write down. But if nothing else, keep a nice, neat, organized list of the skills that I highlight, which I will further emphasize with this symbol when they come up in the lessons. This will keep you focused in your preparation and give you a real path forward. For those of you following the more comprehensive program on the Insight Training platform, you won't need to worry as much about taking notes, because the course of study there is organized largely around these same skills, and there are exercises that help you to develop them and track your skill level for you. Here's that list of skills again, if you want to pause the video and jot them down. And now, enough with the preliminaries. Let's dive right in and talk about the absurdly complex language that you'll encounter on the LSAT. Here's a sample sentence to give you a flavor of what the language is like on the LSAT. Although Albert is a clever fellow who created these really interesting YouTube videos about the LSAT, I don't feel like watching them and would rather go to the beach, which is my favorite place, except for the mall, which is located by my house in the suburbs. Language on the LSAT uses challenging vocabulary in long, complex sentences, often filled with embedded clauses. Here's an example of language that's more typical of what you might actually see on the test. The mayor of our city claims that the city's roads are safe to drive on despite the numerous potholes, and hence that the recent public outcries are... appropriate. He also suggests that, rather than being used for road maintenance, public funds are better directed towards social services such as food banks and daycare centers. But the number of people who can access these services is limited by how easy it is to navigate the city, and since most residents have cars, this means that the extra funding will simply go to waste. The public's criticisms, therefore, are warranted. Notice a couple of features about this paragraph. First, Some statements are nested within others through the use of the word that. The mayor of our city claims that blah blah blah and hence that blah blah blah. He also suggests that blah blah blah. You're going to want to keep an eye out for the word that. It doesn't always function this way, but often it nests a statement within a larger statement. And keeping track of this helps us to understand who is saying what. When it comes to claims made on the LSAT, you always want to be asking, who is the one making the claim? Is it the author of the text, or is it one of the characters featured in the text? The first sentence here has at least three distinct claims. The first is that the city's roads are safe to drive on despite the numerous potholes. The second is that the recent public outcries are inappropriate. And the third... is that the mayor of our city is the one claiming these things. Indeed, this third one is actually the sentence's core. At its heart, this is a sentence about the mayor and what he said. The second thing I'd like you to notice about this paragraph is the sheer amount of detail. It's not just that the roads are safe. It's the city roads that are safe to drive on, despite the numerous potholes. It's not just that public funds should be directed towards social services. but that they should be directed towards social services such as food banks and daycare centers, rather than being used for road maintenance. Frankly, the language on the LSAT gets considerably harder than this, especially since I've chosen this example specifically to avoid particularly abstract subject material. Just wait until you hit a passage about the principles underlying the utilitarian conception of morality. We can consider this passage about public funding to be of maybe medium difficulty, and a low medium at the same time. that, maybe 3 or 4 out of 10. Still, you can already get a sense of the complexity. So much information is packed into so little space. Yet on the test, you may only have a minute or two minutes to read through the passage, read the question that's asked about the passage, and then read the five answer choices, which themselves might be written with similar complexity. Then of course, you have to figure out which answer is correct. This is hard to do, and the real danger is that you might get lost in your initial read-through. By the time you get to the end of a sentence, it can be easy to forget where you started. We need a way of staying focused and extracting information systematically when our regular reading style begins to fail us. Enter the bullseye. This is a tool I've developed that's actually based on what I've noticed about my own reading style while trying to understand complex LSAT language. It's also something I've used in tutoring to help people who struggle to make sense of what they're reading. But first, a quick word of warning. In describing this tool and the associated skill of finding claims within complex language, I'm going to need to talk a little bit about grammar. I promise to keep this to a minimum. But talking about grammar is how we talk more clearly about language itself. And if you're struggling to read complicated passages, then a little bit of attention to grammar can actually help you to break things down, shake things up, and thereby make it possible to improve. Also, This is the only part of the course where we'll really need it, so bear with me for just a few moments. The basic idea of the bullseye is that every sentence has a core or a center, defined by a main subject and a main verb. That is, the person or thing the sentence is primarily about, and what that person or thing is doing. Once we've grabbed hold of the core, and we've locked it into our minds, and we know what we're talking about, we can realize that the rest of the sentence really just provides more information about the core. And we can usually understand this information as answering questions about the core, which, as you will see, is usually quite uninformative on its own. Let's take a very simple example. The brown dog with the shaggy hair chases a ball. What is the main subject of this sentence? What is it primarily about? The subject is the dog. This is a sentence primarily about a dog. And what does the dog do? What's the main verb in the sentence? Well here it's actually the only verb in the sentence. The dog chases. So here's the sentence core. The dog chases. Now, we can understand everything else in the sentence as answering questions about this very simple, rather uninformative core. Which dog are we talking about? The brown one with the shaggy hair. And what is it that the dog is chasing? A ball. Let's try another one. The statue sculpted by Michelangelo is more impressive than the one sculpted by Donatello. Again, what is the main subject? Here, it's actually the first statue mentioned. And what is it that the statue is doing? In this case, it's actually a little tricky. To see it, we have to remember that is is in fact a verb, a sort of action. It refers to a state of being something or being some way. So our core here is actually this. The statue is. And we're definitely going to want more detail than that. Which statue are we talking about? The statue sculpted by Michelangelo. And what are we saying about it? That it's more impressive. More impressive than what? more impressive than the one sculpted by Donatello. Do you agree, by the way? I think they're both pretty impressive. Anyway, these two sentences are not particularly hard to understand. And of course, you wouldn't actually do a bullseye analysis on them in real life. My purpose now is just to demonstrate the usage of this tool with some simple examples so that you can see how it works. Let's try one more. Although talented athletes typically follow a rigorous schedule of exercise in order to maintain their high level of performance, They also need rest so that their muscles can recover. This is also not the hardest sentence to understand, especially since it expresses ideas that probably qualify as common sense. But there's definitely a lot more going on here. First, there are a few different nouns and pronouns. And then, there are quite a few verbs. So what's the core here? Pause the video for a second and challenge yourself to find it. I'll give you a moment. It's actually they need. where of course they refers to the athletes. At its core, this is a sentence about athletes needing something. What do they need? They need rest. Why? They need rest so that their muscles can recover. And is that all the author wants to tell us? Nope. We also need to know that they need rest despite the fact that they typically follow a rigorous schedule of exercise. But it's all fundamentally about the rest. You have to stay rooted in the core of the sentence. One more note about the bullseye. Some sentences have more than one core. Now don't panic! There's a pretty easy way of recognizing this. You may remember that we can link two simple sentences together through the use of a conjunction, typically AND, BUT, or OR. When these words link together what could otherwise be two sentences, they get a comma in front of them, and this indicates that two sentences, each with their own core, are being joined together. So if I have a sentence that says, the brown dog with the shaggy hair chases the ball, and the orange cat sleeps on the couch, I can break that up into two sentences. The brown dog with the shaggy hair chases the ball, and the orange cat sleeps on the couch. And each of these will have its own core. The dog chases, and the cat sleeps. Compare that to a sentence that says, I bought some bread and some cheese. Notice, No comma before the end. I can't break this one up and still have two complete sentences. Some cheese cannot stand alone as its own sentence. So there's just one core. I bought. What did I buy? Well, two things. Some bread and some cheese. When it comes to reading on the LSAT, I suggest starting with your normal, natural style. Just see if you can follow what's going on intuitively. You've been reading for a long time, and we don't want to fix what's not broken. But when the going gets tough, and it will, consider pulling out the bullseye. Focus in on the core of the sentence, and then ask questions to make sense of the information that surrounds it. Let's move on now to discussing logic and argumentation. As I mentioned earlier, the LSAT is all about persuasion, specifically persuasion via arguments. Now, when I say arguments here and going forward, I'm not talking about fights. I'm using arguments in the technical sense of attempts to persuade through the use of logic. Our core concept to begin is going to be that of support. Some statements or claims naturally support others, and they do this because the supporting claim has some relevance or logical connection to the claim being supported. When claim A supports claim B, it serves as a reason to believe claim B. it makes B more likely to be true. For example, consider the following claim. We should order pizza for dinner tonight. And now, consider these other claims. Pizza is delicious. Pizza is affordable. I am lactose intolerant. I am wearing shoes. Which of these claims supports the first one? Is the fact that pizza is delicious a reason to believe that we should order pizza for dinner tonight? Does it make it more likely to be true that we should order pizza for dinner tonight? I think so, yeah. Delicious things are great. Now, of course, it's not a decisive reason. There may be reasons not to order pizza. that override the fact that it's delicious, but it certainly counts in favor of the proposal, and so it offers some level of support. How about the claim that pizza is affordable? Does that support the idea that we should order pizza for dinner tonight? It would seem so. Better to order something affordable than something unaffordable, right? Again, it's not decisive, but it counts in the first claim's favor. Moving on, I am lactose intolerant. Does this serve as a reason to believe that we should order pizza for dinner tonight? I don't think so. As long as you understand a few pieces of basic background information, like the fact that pizza typically has cheese on it, and that lactose intolerant people can't digest cheese well, you can see that this claim actually works against the original one. Rather than supporting it, it actually supports its opposite, the claim that we should not order pizza for dinner tonight. Finally, I am wearing shoes. Does this serve as a reason to believe that we should order pizza for dinner tonight? Without more information, I don't see how it could. What is the fact that I am wearing shoes have to do with what we should order for dinner? The information is irrelevant. It neither supports the original claim, nor its opposite. It just doesn't matter. Once we understand the idea of support, we can understand the idea of an argument. Put simply, an argument is a set of claims, where some claims function to support a main claim or conclusion. We can thus break down any argument into two parts, the conclusion, or bottom line, and the reasons. or the claims given in support of that conclusion. If we rearrange the claims from before, we can construct the following argument. Pizza is delicious, plus pizza is affordable, therefore, we should order pizza for dinner tonight. Here, two claims both independently serve as support for the conclusion, the main thing being argued for, or the bottom line that the author is trying to persuade their reader or listener of. You can think of the support relationship almost literally. as if the reasons are holding up the conclusion like the foundation of a building. Just remember that support is not just about quantity, but also about quality. Even a bunch of points in favor of something can be overridden by a single point against it if that opposing point is important enough. Now, let's consider another argument that's in the neighborhood. I am lactose intolerant, therefore we should not order pizza for dinner tonight. Again, it's an argument. A reason is provided for a conclusion. Of course, it's a different conclusion than the first argument, but once we add that negation in the form of not, we can see that this is no less an argument than the other. Now's a good time to introduce a new tool. If the skill that we're trying to improve is recognizing relationships of support that hold between claims, then we can use what I call the skeptic's perspective. This one is simple. When trying to figure out if a certain claim is receiving support from somewhere else in the passage, ask the question, Why should I believe that? If you ask this about a certain claim, call it claim 1, and there's some other claim nearby, call it claim 2, that serves as a sensible response to that question, then this indicates that claim 2 serves as support for claim 1 and could figure into an argument for claim 1. Let's try it out with our original claims. If we are focused on the claim, we should order pizza for dinner tonight, and we want to figure out whether the other claims serve as support, We can just ask the question. Why should I believe that? Okay. We should order pizza for dinner tonight. Why should I believe that? Well, because pizza is delicious. Oh. Okay, great. That sounds like a reason to order it for dinner. Check. We should order pizza for dinner tonight. Why should I believe that? Well, because pizza is affordable. Oh. Okay, great. I like saving money. That also sounds like a reason. Check. You say we should order pizza for dinner tonight. Why should I believe that? Well, because I'm lactose intolerant. Wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. Not a reason. And finally, you say we should order pizza for dinner tonight. Why should I believe that? Well, because I'm wearing shoes. Again, it's a miss. It doesn't answer the question, so it's not a reason. You can use the skeptic's perspective to search through text and find any relationships of support that might be there. You just point your gaze at any claim that you're interested in, Ask the question and see if there are any claims in the vicinity that answer that question. In the pizza example, the original claim received support from the pizza company. support from some of the other ones, but notice that there were no other relationships of support at play. If I'm considering, say, the claim that pizza is delicious, notice that no other claim here supports that. You say that pizza is delicious. Why should I believe that? Because pizza is affordable? No. Because I am lactose intolerant? No. Because I'm wearing shoes? No. Notice also that the original claim doesn't even answer this question. You say that pizza is delicious. Why should I believe that? Well, you should believe that because we should order pizza for dinner tonight. Well, that doesn't sound right. Hopefully you can hear that this actually gets things backward. In a moment, we'll move on to some more complicated material, and I'll leave it to you to figure out what to eat for dinner tonight. But first, I want to make one additional comment about one of the little arguments that we've put together so far. This is jumping ahead a little, but it's one of those moments of tactical confusion. I want to introduce an idea now, briefly, that we'll come back to in later lessons. Once we analyze and reconstruct arguments, we can evaluate them. And one important way of doing this is to think about what assumptions might be lurking in the background. Let's take a look again at this argument from before. Is the fact that I am lactose intolerant really a reason that we should not order pizza for dinner tonight? It sounds like one, but there's an assumption lurking in the background here. Remember, cheese is the real problem for someone with lactose intolerance. But not every pizza has cheese on it, especially these days. I actually used to live by a pizzeria that only served vegan pies, so there was certainly no cheese there. What this means is that this argument only works if we assume that the pizza in question has cheese on it. Now, by bringing out this assumption, exposing it to light, we're not necessarily trying to challenge the argument, nor are we trying to bolster it. What we're really doing here is just coming to understand this particular support relationship more deeply. The fact that I'm lactose intolerant only provides support for the conclusion that we should not order pizza if that pizza will have cheese on it. Now, we could go on further to explore this issue. We could check the menus of the restaurants we are interested in. And, if they all have cheese, and they all insist on putting it on every one of their pizzas, then yes, we do in fact have a problem. But maybe there are lots of non-dairy options available. And in that case, this argument would be a lot weaker, because there's an obvious response to it. We can just order a pizza without cheese. So now we know what an argument is in its most basic form. It's a set of claims consisting of reasons given in support of a conclusion. When you encounter arguments on the LSAT though, the conclusions are not going to be neatly labeled for you, nor are the supporting claims going to be labeled. You'll have to figure things out for yourself. And that's what it means to say that the LSAT tests your ability to analyze arguments. And that's what we're going to move to now. To begin with, we'll start with the first step to analyzing any argument, finding its conclusion. To develop this crucially important skill, we'll introduce two new tools, each of which will be helpful in different situations. As you may have realized already, the skeptic's perspective can actually help you find an argument's conclusion, because it helps you to see the directions of support. Conclusions are claims that receive support, while reasons are claims that give support. Now, we'll add to this by putting two more tools into your toolkit, signal words and the so test. Let's begin with signal words. There are certain words and phrases that by their very nature indicate argumentative structure, in particular by signaling that a nearby claim is either support or a conclusion. One of the most obvious of these is the word therefore. which is used often on the LSAT and is always attached to a conclusion. Let's consider a simple example. Only members of the family can come inside. You are not a member of the family. Therefore, you cannot come inside. Here's another, where the word is used in a different position. I spent an hour looking for my umbrella, but it didn't end up raining. That effort was therefore a waste. Notice how the mere presence of the word therefore indicates the conclusion of these arguments. Some words are just like that. Once we learn which ones they are, we can recognize them on the LSAT, and argument analysis will become a lot easier. To get you started, here is a list of common signal words or phrases that indicate conclusions. Therefore, so, consequently, thus, and for this reason. And now here they are used in context. Socrates is a man, therefore he is mortal. She is a vegetarian, so she will not eat a cheeseburger. Only girls can play here. Consequently, Steven has to play elsewhere. We never lost a game. We are thus the Best team in history. I have taken every available LSAT twice. For this reason, you should have faith in my LSAT knowledge. Notice how these signal words all indicate conclusions. There are other words that signal support or reasons. Here's a list of some common ones. Because, since, as, due to the fact that, and again, for this reason. Yes, for this reason can point both toward conclusions and toward support. Let's take a look at these reason signaling words in context, and then I'll say more about this one in particular. Here are the reason indicating signal words in context. We can't come to the party because we have to take care of our dog. Since you love pizza so much, you should marry it. We should take the train, as that would be the fastest way to get there. I can't play basketball this weekend due to the fact that I hurt my foot. I have taken every available LSAT twice. For this reason, you should have faith in my LSAT knowledge. Again, notice how the signal words work. Before, they indicated a conclusion. Here, they indicate a reason given for the conclusion. Now, I listed for this reason twice and also used the exact same example in order to make a point that guards against a common mistake people make with signal words. A mistake that the LSAT is designed to punish. It is useful to keep a list of signal words and to understand what it is that they signal. But don't get lazy. Especially don't use shortcuts like, whatever comes after the word therefore is a conclusion. English is structurally quite flexible, and these words can figure into sentences in all different positions. Plus, even if you know what they signal, you still have to stay active and think about what the words themselves say. Think about the phrase for this reason. It says the word reason right there. So we know that supporting language is somewhere nearby, but we still have to ask, what is the reason being specified with this word this? In our example, the reason is that I have taken every available LSAT twice. And what is that being presented as a reason for? Well, it's the statement that you should have faith in my LSAT knowledge. So here, it points backward to some support, but it points forward toward a conclusion. Something similar is actually true of most signal words. They tend to signal both support if you look in one direction and a conclusion if you look in the other. But don't try to come up with a bunch of rules for this. Just know that the signal words signal some important support relationships, and then just read carefully to figure out what's going on. Also, don't just assume that because a signal word is there, it automatically signals support. Sometimes the same words are used in different ways, where they don't signal support relationships at all. For example, consider the word so. Sometimes, this word indicates a conclusion, as in our example, She is a vegetarian, so she will not eat a cheeseburger. Her vegetarianism is a reason that explains why she will not eat a cheeseburger. But sometimes so is used differently, as a sort of amplifier, like in the phrase, Preparing for the LSAT is so exciting. Obviously, when it's used like that, so doesn't indicate any support relationships at all. Another example, since. If I say to you, They have been at my house since Friday. This word is just functioning to indicate a point in time, not a reason. So you've got to stay sharp. Use this list, and even add to it if you find others, but don't let it make you lazy. Now, if you're being careful, examples like the ones we just saw, with so and since, are not hard to catch. But there's a more serious issue that we've got to talk about when it comes to signal words, and this is one that the LSAT will exploit and try to trick you with. Are you ready for it? The same claim can function as a reason in the context of one argument, but a conclusion in the context of another. In other words, some arguments actually have little mini-arguments within them. And the conclusions of these mini-arguments, which we'll call intermediate conclusions, are themselves reasons for the argument's main conclusion. So what's the serious issue? What's the tricky part that we have to look out for on the test? Well, It's that signal words can sometimes signal intermediate conclusions instead of main conclusions. To see this, let's consider the following example. You should not vote for Johnston. He will not release his tax returns, so it is clear that Johnston is a dishonest person. And you should never vote for a dishonest person. Here, we see the word so, and this time, it is in fact a signal word. It's signaling a support. relationship between a reason, the fact that Johnston will not release his tax returns, and a conclusion that Johnston will not release his tax returns. Conclusion. That Johnston is a dishonest person. However, this conclusion is only an intermediate one. Do you see the argument's main conclusion? What is the bottom line that the author is trying to persuade you of? If you don't see how it all fits together yet, I recommend pausing the video and giving it a little extra thought. Okay? Ready? The final conclusion is that you should not vote for Johnston. Let's take a look at a breakdown of this argument as a whole. since it's the most complex we've dealt with so far. We start with the claim that Johnston will not release his tax returns. We conclude, therefore, that Johnston is a dishonest person. This is an intermediate conclusion. We then add to this intermediate conclusion the following claim. You should never vote for a dishonest person. And we conclude on the basis of that, therefore, that you should not vote for Johnston. If we visualize this argument more as a support structure, we actually see that it will look a little different than the simpler ones we saw earlier. Notice that the fact that Johnston will not release his tax returns is being used as support for the idea that Johnston is a dishonest person. That alone justifies calling this latter claim a conclusion. But then this same idea is being used, in conjunction with another, to support the idea that you should not vote for Johnston. But notice, and this is crucial, that the final conclusion didn't have any signal word, while the intermediate conclusion did. This is an old favorite of the LSAT test makers. Time and time again, you'll see these red herrings, signal words that don't actually indicate the argument's main conclusion. So you have to be careful with signal words. They always tell you something. They reliably indicate support and conclusions. But you have to ask yourself, is it an intermediate conclusion that's being signaled, or is it the main conclusion? Now, another related issue is that sometimes there are no signal words at all. How can you find the conclusion of the argument then? As I mentioned before, one way to do that is to use the skeptic's perspective. Focus in on any claim that you want and ask the question, why should I believe that? If there's another claim in the passage that answers that question, then you've probably stumbled upon a conclusion. And if you end up with two conclusions this way, and you need to figure out which is the main conclusion, then you can use the skeptic's perspective again to compare them. Usually, one of the conclusions will give a reason to believe the other. Let's take a look at these two conclusions from the previous argument and use the skeptic's perspective. You should not vote for Johnston. Why should I believe that? Because Johnston is a dishonest person. Okay, yeah, that sounds all right. How about the other way around? Johnston is a dishonest person? Why should I believe that? Because you should not vote for Johnston. No good. Hopefully you can hear that this one doesn't work. The skeptic's perspective helps you by prompting your own intuition. Once you pose the question, why should I believe that, and you try out a possible answer for it, the hope is that you just sort of hear it. Does that sound right to you? This is actually the same way that a lot of the tools in this course work. They switch up the way you encounter LSAT material with the hope that your natural intelligence can then take over. It's easy to get into mental ruts on the LSAT, but these tools structure your thinking to produce better results. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce another tool that is very similar to the skeptic's perspective. This is the SO test, and it's even easier to use. Simply insert the word SO between two claims and see how they sound together. When the first claim is support for the second, the SO test will produce a nice, natural sounding result. Pizza is delicious, so we should order pizza for dinner tonight. If you get the relationship wrong though, it will just sound weird and off. We should order pizza for dinner tonight, so pizza is delicious. Hear how awkward that sounds? The awkwardness you sense is your natural intuition telling you that the support relationship usually indicated by the word so doesn't hold here. Let's go back to Johnston for a minute and try out the so test. Johnston is a dishonest person, so you should not vote for Johnston. Sounds really natural, right? How about the other way? You should not vote for Johnston, so Johnston is a dishonest person. Awkward. The fact that you shouldn't vote for Johnston is not a reason to believe that he's dishonest. Things are backward here. And you can just sort of hear that. This is the magic of the SO test. Now let's try it out on a fresh example. A higher LSAT score makes it more likely that you will get into your dream law school. Your score could even earn you thousands of dollars in scholarship money. Time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent. Practicing LSAT questions is an effective way of improving your LSAT score. Pause the video for a moment and try the SO tests on the different statements here. Can you find the conclusion this way? I'll give you a moment. Alright, the conclusion is actually the third sentence. Time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent. It's a little difficult to see that at first. Maybe you saw it intuitively, but you can also bring it out with the SO test. It turns out that actually every other statement here sounds natural if you put it before this conclusion with the word so. A higher LSAT score makes it more likely that you will get into your dream law school, so time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent. Your score could earn you thousands of dollars in scholarship money, so time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent. is time well spent. Practicing LSAT questions is an effective way of improving your score, so time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent. Reverse any of these though, and it should sound pretty awkward. Notice one other interesting point brought out by this example. Logical sequence, or the support relationships that hold between claims, is independent of textual sequence, that is, the actual order in which the claims are stated. This is an important idea to keep in mind. A conclusion, despite sounding like something that has to conclude things and come last, can actually be the very first sentence of an argument, or it can be the last sentence, or it can be somewhere in the middle. It's only a conclusion in terms of logical sequence. It comes at the end not of a paragraph, but of a chain of support. We're going to have many more opportunities to practice finding the conclusion in upcoming videos. Most LR questions, if you're doing them correctly, actually require you to find the conclusion first before moving on to some secondary task, and there are conclusions in RC passages as well. By practicing this skill over and over, you'll get better at reading for argument, and soon, the support relationships and the logical sequence that they create will start to become clearer to you. So far, we've talked about reading complex LSAT language, support relationships that serve as the backbone of arguments, and how to find an argument's conclusion. Let's move on now to our final topic, conditional logic, and how you can effectively use symbols to represent and understand it. As we have seen throughout, not every argument is a strong one. Sometimes, the supposed reasons simply don't support the conclusion at all due to a lack of relevance. Other times, questionable assumptions are operating behind the scenes. And even when neither of these problems is occurring, it can sometimes feel like arguments are really just a matter of stacking up reasons on one side or the other of some question or proposal. Pizza is delicious. Pizza is affordable. We should order it. Yes, but pizza is unhealthy, and I just had pizza yesterday. We should not order it. Indeed, sometimes it is like this. But other arguments... work a little differently. They end up being a lot tighter because they use something called conditional logic. To begin understanding this interesting topic, let's start with a famous example from philosophy. Claim one, Socrates is a man. Claim two, all men are mortal. Third claim, or conclusion, Socrates is mortal. What's going on here is that a deduction is being made from a universal claim. that is, a claim about all members of some category, on the basis of a claim made about an individual member of that category. To put it more simply, we find something out about all men. That's claim two. We also find out that we're dealing with a particular man, Socrates. That's claim one. And then, we can apply what we know about all men to Socrates. And suddenly, as if through logical magic, we have a new claim. Socrates is mortal. This is a classic example taught in philosophy classrooms everywhere, and Socrates is an intellectual hero of mine. But I've got an even cooler example for you. Claim 1. All mammals have body hair, at least at some point in their lives. Claim 2. Dolphins are mammals. Conclusion. Dolphins have body hair, at least at some point in their lives. This is actually true. Baby dolphins are born with little hairs on their snouts. though they lose them shortly after birth. But some species, like the Amazon River Dolphin, actually keep the hair throughout life. Look! Whiskers. Anyway, back to the argument. Because of the way logic works, the conclusion here has to be true. This is because each of the other claims is true, and the conclusion just follows as a matter of inference. All mammals have body hair. This is definitional, part of what it means to be a mammal. And dolphins are, in fact, mammals. Ask a biologist. So the conclusion just falls right out of that. If we ever found a dolphin, that never had hair, it would mean that we'd have to revise something upstream in the argument. Maybe that dolphin is somehow not a mammal? Or if it is, then I guess it's not true that all mammals have hair. See what I mean by a tighter argument? This isn't a matter of just stacking up reasons, it's a matter of inference made on the basis of universal statements. Because they enable these sorts of inferences, universal statements are extremely logically powerful. But what you might not realize is the relationship that universal statements have to something even more powerful, conditional statements. Every universal statement can be rewritten as a conditional statement, which we will write in the format, if blah blah blah blah, then blah blah blah blah. Let's take another look at these universal statements. One is a statement about all men, and the other is a statement about all mammals. These can be rewritten in the following way. without losing anything. If X is a man, X is mortal. And, if X is a mammal, X has body hair, at least at some point in its life. Here, X is just a variable. It stands for anything at all that you could plug in while still making sense. Now, let's look back at our arguments with our new conditional versions of the claims. Claim 1, Socrates is a man. Claim 2, if X is a man, X is mortal. Conclusion. Socrates is mortal. And our other one? Claim 1, if X is a mammal, X has body hair, at least at some point in its life. Claim 2, dolphins are mammals. Conclusion, dolphins have body hair, at least at some point in their lives. We've translated our universal statements into conditional statements, which provides some sort of condition or circumstance in which something else occurs or is true. Our other claims then tell us that the condition or circumstance is. is in place, and this enables us to move through the conditional from the if part to the then part. Here are some other more mundane examples of conditionals. Notice that sometimes the word then is omitted. If it rains tomorrow, then I will stay inside. If a person is honest, then they do not lie. If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding. If I win the lottery, I will give you half the money. Now, like other statements, conditional statements can be true or false. They're just statements about what happens in some circumstance or condition. Statements like that can certainly be true or false. Consider the following few examples. If a cat has spots, then it can speak English. If something is made of glass, then it is indestructible. If you show up to an official LSAT exam in your pajamas and twirl around three times, then the test administrator will instantly award you with a perfect score. These are all blatantly false. The fact that the last one is about the future doesn't make it any less false. Statements about the future are true or false all the time. And let me assure you, this one is false. It ain't gonna happen. When a conditional is false, it's pretty much useless. We can't actually learn anything at all from it. Importantly, we can't learn anything about, say, its negated version. Don't make this mistake. From the false statement, if a cat has spots, then it can speak English, We can't conclude that if a cat doesn't have spots, then it can't speak English. I mean, look, no cat can speak English, at least not any real ones. But that's not something we know because our original conditional is false. A false conditional pretty much tells us nothing. It's junk. But if the conditional is true, then we can create something truly wonderful. A little logic machine known as the if-then. This will be our final tool for this lesson. It's probably the most challenging to use, but perhaps it's also the most powerful. As with so much else, mastering it will take practice. But there are certain questions on the LSAT that almost can't even be done without it, and yet become almost trivially easy with it. So this is definitely a tool you'll want to spend some time with. To use the if-then, you'll need to translate specially qualified sentences into statements that take the form if blah blah blah Once you do that, you can represent the relationship like this. this, with a little arrow. And once you have things represented this way, you make it very easy to work with what otherwise might be very cumbersome sentences and relationships. The reason is that, as soon as you find out that you have what you need on the left side of the arrow to activate things, you instantly get to conclude what is at the other end. Let's look back at the dolphin argument again. We can symbolically represent claim 1 like this. If then hair. Or, if we want to be even more economical, if m then h. Think of this like a little input-output machine, one that works perfectly. If you put the thing on the left in, you absolutely, every time, get the thing on the right out. So now we have claim two, the fact that dolphins are mammals. This is the input we need for our machine. No longer do we just have a machine that processes M's into H's, but we actually have an M to process. That's the dolphins. Being a mammal is what we needed to get our machine going, and dolphins are mammals. So now the machine is activated, and out the other side we get the property of having hair. Dolphins are mammals, M, so dolphins have hair, H. Here's another example. Every time it rains, Albert goes to the library. Can you see that this is really a conditional statement in disguise? We can rewrite it like this. If it rains, then Albert goes to the library. And then we can make our little if-then machine. If R, then L. And now, suppose one day you're sitting at home, and you look out the window, and you notice that it's raining. With your if-then machine in hand, you're now ready to answer an otherwise unrelated question. Where is Albert? And of course, I'm at the library. Rain goes in, a library comes out. We've got rain, so we've got library. One more example. All chickens were hatched from eggs. We translate it. If X is a chicken, then X was hatched from an egg. Or, if C, then E. Now, say you're walking down the street, if then machine by your side, and you see a chicken. If nothing else... What do you know about it? You know that it was hatched from an egg. I hope you're getting a sense of the basics here, because we're about to turn up the difficulty and see what else our if-then machine can do. Let's go back to the library example and think about it from a different angle. Suppose we've got our if-then machine up and working. If R, then L. It's working perfectly. Now, instead of looking out the window one day, let's say you're in the library. For the purposes of this example, There's only one library in the world, and you're in it. And you look around, and you check all the tables, and you check all the stacks, and you check the bathrooms, and I am nowhere to be found. What do you know now? Take a moment and think about it if you need to. What can you conclude now? Pause the video if you don't see it yet. I'll give you just another moment. Alright, so tell me, how's the weather? One thing's for certain. It's not raining. Even if the library has no windows and you don't check your phone, you know from the fact that I am not there that it must not be raining outside. Because remember, we stipulated that our if-then machine was built on the basis of a true conditional. Ladies and gentlemen, what we've got here is nothing short of a logical revolution. Remember, the if-then machine works perfectly. You put the input in, you get the output out. This is helpful when we have the input, because it allows us to get the output. Remember the dolphins with hair? But the if-then machine is also useful when we fail to see the output, because remember, it works perfectly. If we don't see our output, it means we must not have had our input. This is what's called the contrapositive of a conditional statement. Every if-then machine that you build comes with a second if-then for free. All you have to do is draw out the contrapositive. To do this, you just negate both claims, the one on the left and the one on the right, and then flip them, leaving the arrow in place. This is a simple formula, but it should also be intuitive as well. And I don't want you to get lazy, so think about it again. You didn't get your output, so you must not have had... your input. But that's the same thing as saying that if you don't have your output, then you don't have your input. And that's just another if then. Let's go back and look at some of our examples. If it's raining, then Albert is at the library. If Albert is not at the library, then it is not raining. If X is a chicken, then X was hatched from an egg. If X was not hatched from an egg, then X is not a chicken. If X is a mammal, then X has hair, at least at some point in its life. If X does not have hair, at least at some point in its life, then x is not a mammal. If a person is honest, then they do not lie. If a person does lie, notice that the original claim had a negative, so this is actually its negation, then they are not honest. Now, it's important to remember that the contrapositive is the only thing that you can draw out from a conditional. Before mastering this idea, many people get confused about this. Let's take a look at the chicken example once more. If x is a chicken, then x was hatched from an egg. And the contrapositive? If x was not hatched from an egg, then x is not a chicken. You only get two starting points here. You can start from knowing that x is a chicken, or you can start from knowing that x was not hatched from an egg. Notice that you cannot start, however, from knowing that x was hatched from an egg and conclude that x is a chicken. Maybe x is a duck. Those are hatched from eggs. Similarly, you can't start from knowing that X is not a chicken and conclude that X was not hatched from an egg. Again, what if you have a duck? Not a chicken, but yes, hatched from an egg. Do not make these extremely common mistakes. Just create your if then and then create the contrapositive. Two machines, that's it. On the LSAT, you'll sometimes see questions that feature a number of conditional statements in a row. But what they won't tell you is that the contrapositives of those statements are right there as well, as if invisible. They are implied by the statements that are given. So they're only there if you know to look for them. Yet the question will actually require you to use them to make inferences. To really reach your LSAT potential, you're going to have to gain fluency with the whole set of skills that relate to conditional logic. In the rest of this lesson, I will give you some advice for identifying those statements that can be translated into if-then machines, and then we'll practice together with a bunch of sample problems. There are three main families of statements that can be translated into if-thens. First, there are universals. Second, there are simple conditionals that use the word if. And third, there are trickier conditionals that use the word only. Let's start with universals. Universal statements can be phrased in various ways. Consider the following examples. All dogs go to heaven. Every fish can swim. Any donation would be appreciated. Kind people always say thank you. Whenever there is lightning, there is thunder. We can translate all of these into conditional statements and then into if-then machines. And then we can take the contrapositive. If x is a dog, then x goes to heaven. If D, then H. If not H, then not D. Or, if X does not go to heaven, then X must not be a dog. If X is a fish, then X can swim. If F, then S. If not S, then not F. Or, if X cannot swim, X must not be a fish. If X is a donation, then X would be appreciated. If D, then A. If not A, then not D. Or, if X is something that would not be appreciated, then X must not be a donation. If X is a kind person, then X says thank you. If K, then T. If not T, then not K. Or, if X does not say thank you, then X must not be a kind person. And finally, if there is lightning, then there is thunder. If L, then T. If not T, then not L. Or, if there is no thunder, then there must not have been lightning. So far so good. But things get a little trickier when we realize that there are also negative universal statements. Consider these examples. No fish have hair. None of my friends has a pet. Quitters never win. As long as you're careful and you think about how things would be in conditional form, You should still be okay with these. If x is a fish, x does not have hair. If f, then not. H. And now be careful, look what happens when we negate both sides. We get H, because the double negative just becomes a positive. So if H, then not F. Or you can just do it more intuitively, thinking about the if-then machine. If being a fish leads to not having hair, then having hair leads to not being a fish. Okay, on to the next one. If X is one of my friends. x does not have a pet. If f, then not p. If p, then not f. Or, if x has a pet, then x must not be one of my friends. And finally, if x is a quitter, x does not win. If q, then not w. If w, then not q. Or, if x wins, then x must not be a quitter. Keep an eye out on the LSAT for universal statements in all their forms, including the negative ones. And be extra careful with the negative ones, especially when drawing out the contrapositive. Our next family of statements that can be translated into if-thens are simple conditionals that use the word if. We have already seen conditionals of the form if blah blah blah then blah blah blah. These are the easiest to create if-thens from, because they are pretty much already in the right form. Sometimes, there will be slight variations on this form. For example, in the sentence, Albert is at the library if it is raining. Or, in the sentence, You can enter the factory if you have a golden ticket. Statements like these should be pretty easy to handle. As you can see, they're pretty much already in the original if-then format. This next family of statements, though, can be a little more challenging. Conditionals with only can sometimes require you to use language in a somewhat technical sense that can sound a little unfamiliar to your ear. So let's proceed carefully with this last major concept before getting to some practice. As I've mentioned, some conditional statements use the word only. We actually saw one of these earlier, though we didn't spend too much time on it. That statement was, only members of the family can come inside. This can actually be translated into the if-then format. Do you see how? It may come to you immediately, or you may need to think about it. This is definitely a good time to pause the video and give this one some extra thought. I'll give you a moment. The most natural way to translate this one is probably this. If x is not a member of the family, x cannot come inside. Or more simply, if not f, then not i. And then, just like with any other if-then machine, you can take the contrapositive. If i, then f, which means that if you can come inside, then that means you must be a member of the family. Dealing with only statements has caused countless LSAT test takers to pull out their hair, but I actually think this is because many textbooks and courses over complicate things. I have some advanced content on the difference between if conditionals and only conditionals on the Insight training platform. But I suggest that you dig more deeply into this concept only if you need to. For now, the most important thing to understand is that only indicates the possibility of translating a statement into if-then form. So when you see that word on the test, this should set off your conditional logic alarm. But then, rather than applying some confusing formula or using concepts like necessary and sufficient conditions, just read the statement carefully and ask yourself, How can I say the same thing in if-then form? If you need more help than that, you can cross that bridge when you get there. One more thing to look out for though. Sometimes an only conditional will actually use the word if as well. But I don't want you to worry too much about this. The only is what we're looking out for. It tells us that we're dealing with one of these trickier cases. Nonetheless, here's an example of an only if, so you're prepared if you see something similar. on the LSAT. Instead of the sentence I gave before, you can enter the factory if you have a golden ticket, suppose I said you can enter the factory only if you have a golden ticket. The important difference here is that on the LSAT, when we're being really precise with our logic, the second example does not say that the golden ticket will get you in. Technically, it says that you need a golden ticket, but it's possible that you need other things too. The first one, in contrast, says that your golden ticket is good enough. If you have it, you're in. To make this more intuitive, consider another pair of examples. A car can drive if it has wheels. And a car can drive only if it has wheels. Is it true that a car can drive if it has wheels? It may sound right at first, but let's try building an if-then from it. First, we rearrange the statement. If a car has wheels, then the car can drive. And then we'd shorten it. If w, then d. But that's not right. Merely knowing that a car has wheels does not allow us to conclude that it can drive. What if the car has wheels but no gas? Wheels are needed, but they're not good enough on their own. The second sentence better captures this. A natural translation of that might be, if a car doesn't have wheels, then it cannot drive. Or, if not W, then not D. Now that makes more sense. And then we can draw out the contrapositive, if D, then W, meaning that if a car can drive, that means it must have wheels. Wheels are required for driving even if they aren't good enough to guarantee the ability to drive. So there you have it, three families of statements that qualify for translation into if-thens. Universals, if-conditionals, and only-conditionals. If you see any of these things on the LSAT, again, a little alarm should go off. Conditional logic alert, maybe I should build an if-then machine. Now if you come across maybe one of these statements, It may not be necessary to use this tool, but every now and then, and especially on LR, you'll run into questions that are absolutely loaded with conditional logic, one statement after another. And it's become clear to me, after spending so much time with the LSAT, that it's with these questions that the test makers are really testing specifically your ability to use if-thens. That this is really a skill that law schools want you to have. Look, conditional logic can be hard. In this lesson, I've tried to give you just a basic introduction to it without over-complicating things. Still, it's normal to find this topic a little confusing, especially if this is your first time being exposed to it. My hope is that the challenge to create if-then machines can guide and structure your thinking when you're faced with conditional logic and hopefully make it easier. For now, let's work on your foundation by doing some practice problems together. I'll give you three batches, one at a time. Pause the video and work through the exercises yourself. Start by translating the statement into if-then format if it's not in that format already. Then build your if-then machine. Something arrow something. Take the contrapositive and then finally read the contrapositive out loud to make sure that you understand what it says. Okay, here's the first batch. Pause the video and work through these examples on your own. I'll give you a minute and then I'm just going to reveal all the answers at once. Okay, so here's your chance. Pause the video. Good luck. And we're back. Here come the answers now. Pause the video again and check your work. And now on to the second batch. Same thing. Pause your video, work through things on your own. I'll give you a moment. And here come the answers now. Pause your video, check your work. Of course, that last one is a trick question. I just wanted to make sure you're paying attention. Sometimes we use the word if casually to mean something like whether or not. It actually doesn't indicate conditional logic in these cases. And now on to the final batch. Beware additional tricks, now that you know what I'm capable of. Again, pause your video and work through things on your own. I'll give you a moment. And the answers are coming now. This time, the trick was that third one. Not every statement that uses the word only can be translated into if-then form. That last one, if you watch these videos and you pay attention, then you will learn something, it's not really a trick question. It's just a more challenging one. And it's something that I chose not to cover before. So I wanted to give you just a little taste of how an exercise like this can get harder. Sometimes conditionals include multiple elements and require you to use AND or OR. Frankly, being good at this used to matter a lot more when the LSAT had logic games on it. Now you're much less likely to need this ability, so I consider it another one of those cross that bridge when you get there sort of things. If you come across an example like this later in your practice, let that be an opportunity for growth. For now, just focus on the fundamentals and see how far they will take you. Let's wrap up now. with a summary and some concluding remarks. We began our lesson today by talking about complex LSAT language and how to parse it. We introduced the Bullseye tool in order to help you focus your attention on the sentence core and then understand the rest of the sentence as providing additional detail. This tool will help you develop the skill of finding claims within complicated LSAT passages. This is helpful because claims are the ingredients of arguments. Remember, An argument is a set of claims that consists of reasons that provide support for a conclusion. The conclusion is the main thing that the author or speaker is trying to persuade you of. When discussing arguments, we focused on two related skills, recognizing support relationships and finding the conclusion. And we introduced three tools, the skeptic's perspective, signal words, and the SO test in order to help you develop these skills. in various circumstances. Finally, we talked about conditional logic, which operates in some of the strongest arguments. The skills that we focused on included recognizing the presence of conditional logic, translating sentences into the if-then format, and drawing out the contrapositive. Our main tool was the if-then machine, which, once built, clarifies the logical relationships and allows you to easily make inferences. The material in this lesson was general in nature. It applies all across the test. So hopefully, we set down a strong foundation today. This lesson is probably the densest in the whole series. If this is your first time being exposed to some of these ideas, it's normal for you to feel a little confused. Going back and re-watching any parts that you still feel hazy about can be very clarifying, so feel free to do that. And when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson, lesson three. where we'll start to talk specifically about the logical reasoning section and the types of questions that you'll find there. This will give us a chance to apply what we learned today. I'll see you there.

both to logical reasoning and to reading comprehension. Today we're going to be talking about two major areas. The first is understanding the complex language on the LSAT.

This is technically a precursor to the material on logic and arguments, but it's a necessary one. Reading LSAT language can be very difficult, and if you struggle to understand what's even being said, then digging into this logical structure and evaluating the arguments is going to be impossible. So we'll cover this part first.

And I'll give you some advice for parsing the complicated language that you're going to be positively swimming in for the next few months. Next, we'll talk about arguments and the hidden logic lying behind what looks like just regular language. At its heart, the LSAT is about understanding arguments. The language on the test is fundamentally persuasive. We'll always want to be asking ourselves, what is the speaker here trying to persuade me of?

How are they going about doing this? And how convincing are these attempts? But the persuasion on the LSAT... is not about hucksterism or flashy appeals to emotion.

Here, it's about supporting one's conclusions logically, and in this video, I will try to give you a better sense of what that means. But first, I'd like to give you an explicit preview of all of the skills that we're going to be introducing today. Don't worry if it seems like a lot at this point. There's actually some evidence from learning science that a little initial confusion can actually cultivate deeper understanding in the long term.

By previewing what you're going to be exposed to later on, you'll be more likely to recognize the ideas when we get to them, and this will help to focus your attention and facilitate memory. When it comes to understanding LSAT language, we'll actually just focus on one major skill, finding claims. Arguments are made up of claims, which are sometimes hard to extract out of the wordy language on the LSAT. We'll use a nifty tool, the bullseye, to focus our attention in the right way while reading in order to understand which claims are being made.

As we move on to logic and argumentation, there will be more skills to acquire. The first is recognizing relationships of support that hold between claims. We'll use a tool called the skeptic's perspective, say that five times fast, in order to develop our sense of how some claims on the LSAT serve as support for others, thus persuading you to believe them. The next skill is related to the previous one, but it's so important that it deserves to be singled out. This is the skill of recognizing an argument's conclusion.

The conclusion is the bottom line, what the rest of the argument is meant to persuade you of. We'll use two tools, signal words and the SO test, in order to help us locate conclusions on the LSAT. Finally, we'll focus on a cluster of skills related to conditional logic. We'll learn how to build these fun little logic machines, which I call if-thens, and we'll see how using these can clarify important logical relationships in the text.

For those of you who are engaged in self-guided study for the LSAT, I strongly recommend that you keep a notebook for this course. You won't have to take too many notes, and I'll even try to help you out by indicating with this symbol when I think there's something particularly important that I think you should write down. But if nothing else, keep a nice, neat, organized list of the skills that I highlight, which I will further emphasize with this symbol when they come up in the lessons.

This will keep you focused in your preparation and give you a real path forward. For those of you following the more comprehensive program on the Insight Training platform, you won't need to worry as much about taking notes, because the course of study there is organized largely around these same skills, and there are exercises that help you to develop them and track your skill level for you. Here's that list of skills again, if you want to pause the video and jot them down. And now, enough with the preliminaries. Let's dive right in and talk about the absurdly complex language that you'll encounter on the LSAT.

Here's a sample sentence to give you a flavor of what the language is like on the LSAT. Although Albert is a clever fellow who created these really interesting YouTube videos about the LSAT, I don't feel like watching them and would rather go to the beach, which is my favorite place, except for the mall, which is located by my house in the suburbs. Language on the LSAT uses challenging vocabulary in long, complex sentences, often filled with embedded clauses. Here's an example of language that's more typical of what you might actually see on the test.

The mayor of our city claims that the city's roads are safe to drive on despite the numerous potholes, and hence that the recent public outcries are... appropriate. He also suggests that, rather than being used for road maintenance, public funds are better directed towards social services such as food banks and daycare centers.

But the number of people who can access these services is limited by how easy it is to navigate the city, and since most residents have cars, this means that the extra funding will simply go to waste. The public's criticisms, therefore, are warranted. Notice a couple of features about this paragraph.

First, Some statements are nested within others through the use of the word that. The mayor of our city claims that blah blah blah and hence that blah blah blah. He also suggests that blah blah blah.

You're going to want to keep an eye out for the word that. It doesn't always function this way, but often it nests a statement within a larger statement. And keeping track of this helps us to understand who is saying what. When it comes to claims made on the LSAT, you always want to be asking, who is the one making the claim? Is it the author of the text, or is it one of the characters featured in the text?

The first sentence here has at least three distinct claims. The first is that the city's roads are safe to drive on despite the numerous potholes. The second is that the recent public outcries are inappropriate. And the third... is that the mayor of our city is the one claiming these things.

Indeed, this third one is actually the sentence's core. At its heart, this is a sentence about the mayor and what he said. The second thing I'd like you to notice about this paragraph is the sheer amount of detail.

It's not just that the roads are safe. It's the city roads that are safe to drive on, despite the numerous potholes. It's not just that public funds should be directed towards social services. but that they should be directed towards social services such as food banks and daycare centers, rather than being used for road maintenance.

Frankly, the language on the LSAT gets considerably harder than this, especially since I've chosen this example specifically to avoid particularly abstract subject material. Just wait until you hit a passage about the principles underlying the utilitarian conception of morality. We can consider this passage about public funding to be of maybe medium difficulty, and a low medium at the same time. that, maybe 3 or 4 out of 10. Still, you can already get a sense of the complexity. So much information is packed into so little space.

Yet on the test, you may only have a minute or two minutes to read through the passage, read the question that's asked about the passage, and then read the five answer choices, which themselves might be written with similar complexity. Then of course, you have to figure out which answer is correct. This is hard to do, and the real danger is that you might get lost in your initial read-through. By the time you get to the end of a sentence, it can be easy to forget where you started. We need a way of staying focused and extracting information systematically when our regular reading style begins to fail us.

Enter the bullseye. This is a tool I've developed that's actually based on what I've noticed about my own reading style while trying to understand complex LSAT language. It's also something I've used in tutoring to help people who struggle to make sense of what they're reading.

But first, a quick word of warning. In describing this tool and the associated skill of finding claims within complex language, I'm going to need to talk a little bit about grammar. I promise to keep this to a minimum.

But talking about grammar is how we talk more clearly about language itself. And if you're struggling to read complicated passages, then a little bit of attention to grammar can actually help you to break things down, shake things up, and thereby make it possible to improve. Also, This is the only part of the course where we'll really need it, so bear with me for just a few moments.

The basic idea of the bullseye is that every sentence has a core or a center, defined by a main subject and a main verb. That is, the person or thing the sentence is primarily about, and what that person or thing is doing. Once we've grabbed hold of the core, and we've locked it into our minds, and we know what we're talking about, we can realize that the rest of the sentence really just provides more information about the core.

And we can usually understand this information as answering questions about the core, which, as you will see, is usually quite uninformative on its own. Let's take a very simple example. The brown dog with the shaggy hair chases a ball. What is the main subject of this sentence? What is it primarily about?

The subject is the dog. This is a sentence primarily about a dog. And what does the dog do? What's the main verb in the sentence? Well here it's actually the only verb in the sentence.

The dog chases. So here's the sentence core. The dog chases.

Now, we can understand everything else in the sentence as answering questions about this very simple, rather uninformative core. Which dog are we talking about? The brown one with the shaggy hair. And what is it that the dog is chasing? A ball.

Let's try another one. The statue sculpted by Michelangelo is more impressive than the one sculpted by Donatello. Again, what is the main subject?

Here, it's actually the first statue mentioned. And what is it that the statue is doing? In this case, it's actually a little tricky. To see it, we have to remember that is is in fact a verb, a sort of action. It refers to a state of being something or being some way.

So our core here is actually this. The statue is. And we're definitely going to want more detail than that. Which statue are we talking about?

The statue sculpted by Michelangelo. And what are we saying about it? That it's more impressive. More impressive than what? more impressive than the one sculpted by Donatello.

Do you agree, by the way? I think they're both pretty impressive. Anyway, these two sentences are not particularly hard to understand. And of course, you wouldn't actually do a bullseye analysis on them in real life.

My purpose now is just to demonstrate the usage of this tool with some simple examples so that you can see how it works. Let's try one more. Although talented athletes typically follow a rigorous schedule of exercise in order to maintain their high level of performance, They also need rest so that their muscles can recover.

This is also not the hardest sentence to understand, especially since it expresses ideas that probably qualify as common sense. But there's definitely a lot more going on here. First, there are a few different nouns and pronouns.

And then, there are quite a few verbs. So what's the core here? Pause the video for a second and challenge yourself to find it. I'll give you a moment. It's actually they need.

where of course they refers to the athletes. At its core, this is a sentence about athletes needing something. What do they need? They need rest. Why?

They need rest so that their muscles can recover. And is that all the author wants to tell us? Nope.

We also need to know that they need rest despite the fact that they typically follow a rigorous schedule of exercise. But it's all fundamentally about the rest. You have to stay rooted in the core of the sentence. One more note about the bullseye.

Some sentences have more than one core. Now don't panic! There's a pretty easy way of recognizing this.

You may remember that we can link two simple sentences together through the use of a conjunction, typically AND, BUT, or OR. When these words link together what could otherwise be two sentences, they get a comma in front of them, and this indicates that two sentences, each with their own core, are being joined together. So if I have a sentence that says, the brown dog with the shaggy hair chases the ball, and the orange cat sleeps on the couch, I can break that up into two sentences. The brown dog with the shaggy hair chases the ball, and the orange cat sleeps on the couch.

And each of these will have its own core. The dog chases, and the cat sleeps. Compare that to a sentence that says, I bought some bread and some cheese. Notice, No comma before the end. I can't break this one up and still have two complete sentences.

Some cheese cannot stand alone as its own sentence. So there's just one core. I bought. What did I buy?

Well, two things. Some bread and some cheese. When it comes to reading on the LSAT, I suggest starting with your normal, natural style.

Just see if you can follow what's going on intuitively. You've been reading for a long time, and we don't want to fix what's not broken. But when the going gets tough, and it will, consider pulling out the bullseye.

Focus in on the core of the sentence, and then ask questions to make sense of the information that surrounds it. Let's move on now to discussing logic and argumentation. As I mentioned earlier, the LSAT is all about persuasion, specifically persuasion via arguments.

Now, when I say arguments here and going forward, I'm not talking about fights. I'm using arguments in the technical sense of attempts to persuade through the use of logic. Our core concept to begin is going to be that of support. Some statements or claims naturally support others, and they do this because the supporting claim has some relevance or logical connection to the claim being supported. When claim A supports claim B, it serves as a reason to believe claim B.

it makes B more likely to be true. For example, consider the following claim. We should order pizza for dinner tonight. And now, consider these other claims. Pizza is delicious.

Pizza is affordable. I am lactose intolerant. I am wearing shoes. Which of these claims supports the first one? Is the fact that pizza is delicious a reason to believe that we should order pizza for dinner tonight?

Does it make it more likely to be true that we should order pizza for dinner tonight? I think so, yeah. Delicious things are great. Now, of course, it's not a decisive reason. There may be reasons not to order pizza.

that override the fact that it's delicious, but it certainly counts in favor of the proposal, and so it offers some level of support. How about the claim that pizza is affordable? Does that support the idea that we should order pizza for dinner tonight?

It would seem so. Better to order something affordable than something unaffordable, right? Again, it's not decisive, but it counts in the first claim's favor.

Moving on, I am lactose intolerant. Does this serve as a reason to believe that we should order pizza for dinner tonight? I don't think so.

As long as you understand a few pieces of basic background information, like the fact that pizza typically has cheese on it, and that lactose intolerant people can't digest cheese well, you can see that this claim actually works against the original one. Rather than supporting it, it actually supports its opposite, the claim that we should not order pizza for dinner tonight. Finally, I am wearing shoes.

Does this serve as a reason to believe that we should order pizza for dinner tonight? Without more information, I don't see how it could. What is the fact that I am wearing shoes have to do with what we should order for dinner? The information is irrelevant.

It neither supports the original claim, nor its opposite. It just doesn't matter. Once we understand the idea of support, we can understand the idea of an argument.

Put simply, an argument is a set of claims, where some claims function to support a main claim or conclusion. We can thus break down any argument into two parts, the conclusion, or bottom line, and the reasons. or the claims given in support of that conclusion.

If we rearrange the claims from before, we can construct the following argument. Pizza is delicious, plus pizza is affordable, therefore, we should order pizza for dinner tonight. Here, two claims both independently serve as support for the conclusion, the main thing being argued for, or the bottom line that the author is trying to persuade their reader or listener of.

You can think of the support relationship almost literally. as if the reasons are holding up the conclusion like the foundation of a building. Just remember that support is not just about quantity, but also about quality.

Even a bunch of points in favor of something can be overridden by a single point against it if that opposing point is important enough. Now, let's consider another argument that's in the neighborhood. I am lactose intolerant, therefore we should not order pizza for dinner tonight.

Again, it's an argument. A reason is provided for a conclusion. Of course, it's a different conclusion than the first argument, but once we add that negation in the form of not, we can see that this is no less an argument than the other. Now's a good time to introduce a new tool.

If the skill that we're trying to improve is recognizing relationships of support that hold between claims, then we can use what I call the skeptic's perspective. This one is simple. When trying to figure out if a certain claim is receiving support from somewhere else in the passage, ask the question, Why should I believe that?

If you ask this about a certain claim, call it claim 1, and there's some other claim nearby, call it claim 2, that serves as a sensible response to that question, then this indicates that claim 2 serves as support for claim 1 and could figure into an argument for claim 1. Let's try it out with our original claims. If we are focused on the claim, we should order pizza for dinner tonight, and we want to figure out whether the other claims serve as support, We can just ask the question. Why should I believe that?

Okay. We should order pizza for dinner tonight. Why should I believe that? Well, because pizza is delicious.

Oh. Okay, great. That sounds like a reason to order it for dinner.

Check. We should order pizza for dinner tonight. Why should I believe that?

Well, because pizza is affordable. Oh. Okay, great.

I like saving money. That also sounds like a reason. Check.

You say we should order pizza for dinner tonight. Why should I believe that? Well, because I'm lactose intolerant. Wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. Not a reason.

And finally, you say we should order pizza for dinner tonight. Why should I believe that? Well, because I'm wearing shoes. Again, it's a miss. It doesn't answer the question, so it's not a reason.

You can use the skeptic's perspective to search through text and find any relationships of support that might be there. You just point your gaze at any claim that you're interested in, Ask the question and see if there are any claims in the vicinity that answer that question. In the pizza example, the original claim received support from the pizza company. support from some of the other ones, but notice that there were no other relationships of support at play. If I'm considering, say, the claim that pizza is delicious, notice that no other claim here supports that.

You say that pizza is delicious. Why should I believe that? Because pizza is affordable?

No. Because I am lactose intolerant? No. Because I'm wearing shoes?

No. Notice also that the original claim doesn't even answer this question. You say that pizza is delicious.

Why should I believe that? Well, you should believe that because we should order pizza for dinner tonight. Well, that doesn't sound right.

Hopefully you can hear that this actually gets things backward. In a moment, we'll move on to some more complicated material, and I'll leave it to you to figure out what to eat for dinner tonight. But first, I want to make one additional comment about one of the little arguments that we've put together so far. This is jumping ahead a little, but it's one of those moments of tactical confusion.

I want to introduce an idea now, briefly, that we'll come back to in later lessons. Once we analyze and reconstruct arguments, we can evaluate them. And one important way of doing this is to think about what assumptions might be lurking in the background.

Let's take a look again at this argument from before. Is the fact that I am lactose intolerant really a reason that we should not order pizza for dinner tonight? It sounds like one, but there's an assumption lurking in the background here. Remember, cheese is the real problem for someone with lactose intolerance. But not every pizza has cheese on it, especially these days.

I actually used to live by a pizzeria that only served vegan pies, so there was certainly no cheese there. What this means is that this argument only works if we assume that the pizza in question has cheese on it. Now, by bringing out this assumption, exposing it to light, we're not necessarily trying to challenge the argument, nor are we trying to bolster it.

What we're really doing here is just coming to understand this particular support relationship more deeply. The fact that I'm lactose intolerant only provides support for the conclusion that we should not order pizza if that pizza will have cheese on it. Now, we could go on further to explore this issue.

We could check the menus of the restaurants we are interested in. And, if they all have cheese, and they all insist on putting it on every one of their pizzas, then yes, we do in fact have a problem. But maybe there are lots of non-dairy options available.

And in that case, this argument would be a lot weaker, because there's an obvious response to it. We can just order a pizza without cheese. So now we know what an argument is in its most basic form.

It's a set of claims consisting of reasons given in support of a conclusion. When you encounter arguments on the LSAT though, the conclusions are not going to be neatly labeled for you, nor are the supporting claims going to be labeled. You'll have to figure things out for yourself. And that's what it means to say that the LSAT tests your ability to analyze arguments.

And that's what we're going to move to now. To begin with, we'll start with the first step to analyzing any argument, finding its conclusion. To develop this crucially important skill, we'll introduce two new tools, each of which will be helpful in different situations. As you may have realized already, the skeptic's perspective can actually help you find an argument's conclusion, because it helps you to see the directions of support. Conclusions are claims that receive support, while reasons are claims that give support.

Now, we'll add to this by putting two more tools into your toolkit, signal words and the so test. Let's begin with signal words. There are certain words and phrases that by their very nature indicate argumentative structure, in particular by signaling that a nearby claim is either support or a conclusion. One of the most obvious of these is the word therefore. which is used often on the LSAT and is always attached to a conclusion.

Let's consider a simple example. Only members of the family can come inside. You are not a member of the family.

Therefore, you cannot come inside. Here's another, where the word is used in a different position. I spent an hour looking for my umbrella, but it didn't end up raining.

That effort was therefore a waste. Notice how the mere presence of the word therefore indicates the conclusion of these arguments. Some words are just like that. Once we learn which ones they are, we can recognize them on the LSAT, and argument analysis will become a lot easier. To get you started, here is a list of common signal words or phrases that indicate conclusions.

Therefore, so, consequently, thus, and for this reason. And now here they are used in context. Socrates is a man, therefore he is mortal. She is a vegetarian, so she will not eat a cheeseburger.

Only girls can play here. Consequently, Steven has to play elsewhere. We never lost a game.

We are thus the Best team in history. I have taken every available LSAT twice. For this reason, you should have faith in my LSAT knowledge.

Notice how these signal words all indicate conclusions. There are other words that signal support or reasons. Here's a list of some common ones. Because, since, as, due to the fact that, and again, for this reason.

Yes, for this reason can point both toward conclusions and toward support. Let's take a look at these reason signaling words in context, and then I'll say more about this one in particular. Here are the reason indicating signal words in context. We can't come to the party because we have to take care of our dog.

Since you love pizza so much, you should marry it. We should take the train, as that would be the fastest way to get there. I can't play basketball this weekend due to the fact that I hurt my foot. I have taken every available LSAT twice. For this reason, you should have faith in my LSAT knowledge.

Again, notice how the signal words work. Before, they indicated a conclusion. Here, they indicate a reason given for the conclusion.

Now, I listed for this reason twice and also used the exact same example in order to make a point that guards against a common mistake people make with signal words. A mistake that the LSAT is designed to punish. It is useful to keep a list of signal words and to understand what it is that they signal.

But don't get lazy. Especially don't use shortcuts like, whatever comes after the word therefore is a conclusion. English is structurally quite flexible, and these words can figure into sentences in all different positions. Plus, even if you know what they signal, you still have to stay active and think about what the words themselves say.

Think about the phrase for this reason. It says the word reason right there. So we know that supporting language is somewhere nearby, but we still have to ask, what is the reason being specified with this word this? In our example, the reason is that I have taken every available LSAT twice. And what is that being presented as a reason for?

Well, it's the statement that you should have faith in my LSAT knowledge. So here, it points backward to some support, but it points forward toward a conclusion. Something similar is actually true of most signal words. They tend to signal both support if you look in one direction and a conclusion if you look in the other. But don't try to come up with a bunch of rules for this.

Just know that the signal words signal some important support relationships, and then just read carefully to figure out what's going on. Also, don't just assume that because a signal word is there, it automatically signals support. Sometimes the same words are used in different ways, where they don't signal support relationships at all.

For example, consider the word so. Sometimes, this word indicates a conclusion, as in our example, She is a vegetarian, so she will not eat a cheeseburger. Her vegetarianism is a reason that explains why she will not eat a cheeseburger. But sometimes so is used differently, as a sort of amplifier, like in the phrase, Preparing for the LSAT is so exciting.

Obviously, when it's used like that, so doesn't indicate any support relationships at all. Another example, since. If I say to you, They have been at my house since Friday. This word is just functioning to indicate a point in time, not a reason. So you've got to stay sharp.

Use this list, and even add to it if you find others, but don't let it make you lazy. Now, if you're being careful, examples like the ones we just saw, with so and since, are not hard to catch. But there's a more serious issue that we've got to talk about when it comes to signal words, and this is one that the LSAT will exploit and try to trick you with.

Are you ready for it? The same claim can function as a reason in the context of one argument, but a conclusion in the context of another. In other words, some arguments actually have little mini-arguments within them. And the conclusions of these mini-arguments, which we'll call intermediate conclusions, are themselves reasons for the argument's main conclusion.

So what's the serious issue? What's the tricky part that we have to look out for on the test? Well, It's that signal words can sometimes signal intermediate conclusions instead of main conclusions. To see this, let's consider the following example.

You should not vote for Johnston. He will not release his tax returns, so it is clear that Johnston is a dishonest person. And you should never vote for a dishonest person. Here, we see the word so, and this time, it is in fact a signal word. It's signaling a support.

relationship between a reason, the fact that Johnston will not release his tax returns, and a conclusion that Johnston will not release his tax returns. Conclusion. That Johnston is a dishonest person.

However, this conclusion is only an intermediate one. Do you see the argument's main conclusion? What is the bottom line that the author is trying to persuade you of? If you don't see how it all fits together yet, I recommend pausing the video and giving it a little extra thought. Okay?

Ready? The final conclusion is that you should not vote for Johnston. Let's take a look at a breakdown of this argument as a whole.

since it's the most complex we've dealt with so far. We start with the claim that Johnston will not release his tax returns. We conclude, therefore, that Johnston is a dishonest person.

This is an intermediate conclusion. We then add to this intermediate conclusion the following claim. You should never vote for a dishonest person. And we conclude on the basis of that, therefore, that you should not vote for Johnston. If we visualize this argument more as a support structure, we actually see that it will look a little different than the simpler ones we saw earlier.

Notice that the fact that Johnston will not release his tax returns is being used as support for the idea that Johnston is a dishonest person. That alone justifies calling this latter claim a conclusion. But then this same idea is being used, in conjunction with another, to support the idea that you should not vote for Johnston.

But notice, and this is crucial, that the final conclusion didn't have any signal word, while the intermediate conclusion did. This is an old favorite of the LSAT test makers. Time and time again, you'll see these red herrings, signal words that don't actually indicate the argument's main conclusion.

So you have to be careful with signal words. They always tell you something. They reliably indicate support and conclusions.

But you have to ask yourself, is it an intermediate conclusion that's being signaled, or is it the main conclusion? Now, another related issue is that sometimes there are no signal words at all. How can you find the conclusion of the argument then?

As I mentioned before, one way to do that is to use the skeptic's perspective. Focus in on any claim that you want and ask the question, why should I believe that? If there's another claim in the passage that answers that question, then you've probably stumbled upon a conclusion. And if you end up with two conclusions this way, and you need to figure out which is the main conclusion, then you can use the skeptic's perspective again to compare them. Usually, one of the conclusions will give a reason to believe the other.

Let's take a look at these two conclusions from the previous argument and use the skeptic's perspective. You should not vote for Johnston. Why should I believe that?

Because Johnston is a dishonest person. Okay, yeah, that sounds all right. How about the other way around?

Johnston is a dishonest person? Why should I believe that? Because you should not vote for Johnston. No good. Hopefully you can hear that this one doesn't work.

The skeptic's perspective helps you by prompting your own intuition. Once you pose the question, why should I believe that, and you try out a possible answer for it, the hope is that you just sort of hear it. Does that sound right to you? This is actually the same way that a lot of the tools in this course work.

They switch up the way you encounter LSAT material with the hope that your natural intelligence can then take over. It's easy to get into mental ruts on the LSAT, but these tools structure your thinking to produce better results. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce another tool that is very similar to the skeptic's perspective. This is the SO test, and it's even easier to use.

Simply insert the word SO between two claims and see how they sound together. When the first claim is support for the second, the SO test will produce a nice, natural sounding result. Pizza is delicious, so we should order pizza for dinner tonight.

If you get the relationship wrong though, it will just sound weird and off. We should order pizza for dinner tonight, so pizza is delicious. Hear how awkward that sounds?

The awkwardness you sense is your natural intuition telling you that the support relationship usually indicated by the word so doesn't hold here. Let's go back to Johnston for a minute and try out the so test. Johnston is a dishonest person, so you should not vote for Johnston. Sounds really natural, right?

How about the other way? You should not vote for Johnston, so Johnston is a dishonest person. Awkward. The fact that you shouldn't vote for Johnston is not a reason to believe that he's dishonest. Things are backward here.

And you can just sort of hear that. This is the magic of the SO test. Now let's try it out on a fresh example.

A higher LSAT score makes it more likely that you will get into your dream law school. Your score could even earn you thousands of dollars in scholarship money. Time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent.

Practicing LSAT questions is an effective way of improving your LSAT score. Pause the video for a moment and try the SO tests on the different statements here. Can you find the conclusion this way?

I'll give you a moment. Alright, the conclusion is actually the third sentence. Time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent. It's a little difficult to see that at first.

Maybe you saw it intuitively, but you can also bring it out with the SO test. It turns out that actually every other statement here sounds natural if you put it before this conclusion with the word so. A higher LSAT score makes it more likely that you will get into your dream law school, so time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent.

Your score could earn you thousands of dollars in scholarship money, so time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent. is time well spent. Practicing LSAT questions is an effective way of improving your score, so time spent practicing LSAT questions is time well spent. Reverse any of these though, and it should sound pretty awkward.

Notice one other interesting point brought out by this example. Logical sequence, or the support relationships that hold between claims, is independent of textual sequence, that is, the actual order in which the claims are stated. This is an important idea to keep in mind. A conclusion, despite sounding like something that has to conclude things and come last, can actually be the very first sentence of an argument, or it can be the last sentence, or it can be somewhere in the middle.

It's only a conclusion in terms of logical sequence. It comes at the end not of a paragraph, but of a chain of support. We're going to have many more opportunities to practice finding the conclusion in upcoming videos.

Most LR questions, if you're doing them correctly, actually require you to find the conclusion first before moving on to some secondary task, and there are conclusions in RC passages as well. By practicing this skill over and over, you'll get better at reading for argument, and soon, the support relationships and the logical sequence that they create will start to become clearer to you. So far, we've talked about reading complex LSAT language, support relationships that serve as the backbone of arguments, and how to find an argument's conclusion. Let's move on now to our final topic, conditional logic, and how you can effectively use symbols to represent and understand it. As we have seen throughout, not every argument is a strong one.

Sometimes, the supposed reasons simply don't support the conclusion at all due to a lack of relevance. Other times, questionable assumptions are operating behind the scenes. And even when neither of these problems is occurring, it can sometimes feel like arguments are really just a matter of stacking up reasons on one side or the other of some question or proposal.

Pizza is delicious. Pizza is affordable. We should order it. Yes, but pizza is unhealthy, and I just had pizza yesterday. We should not order it.

Indeed, sometimes it is like this. But other arguments... work a little differently. They end up being a lot tighter because they use something called conditional logic. To begin understanding this interesting topic, let's start with a famous example from philosophy.

Claim one, Socrates is a man. Claim two, all men are mortal. Third claim, or conclusion, Socrates is mortal.

What's going on here is that a deduction is being made from a universal claim. that is, a claim about all members of some category, on the basis of a claim made about an individual member of that category. To put it more simply, we find something out about all men. That's claim two.

We also find out that we're dealing with a particular man, Socrates. That's claim one. And then, we can apply what we know about all men to Socrates.

And suddenly, as if through logical magic, we have a new claim. Socrates is mortal. This is a classic example taught in philosophy classrooms everywhere, and Socrates is an intellectual hero of mine.

But I've got an even cooler example for you. Claim 1. All mammals have body hair, at least at some point in their lives. Claim 2. Dolphins are mammals.

Conclusion. Dolphins have body hair, at least at some point in their lives. This is actually true.

Baby dolphins are born with little hairs on their snouts. though they lose them shortly after birth. But some species, like the Amazon River Dolphin, actually keep the hair throughout life.

Look! Whiskers. Anyway, back to the argument.

Because of the way logic works, the conclusion here has to be true. This is because each of the other claims is true, and the conclusion just follows as a matter of inference. All mammals have body hair.

This is definitional, part of what it means to be a mammal. And dolphins are, in fact, mammals. Ask a biologist.

So the conclusion just falls right out of that. If we ever found a dolphin, that never had hair, it would mean that we'd have to revise something upstream in the argument. Maybe that dolphin is somehow not a mammal? Or if it is, then I guess it's not true that all mammals have hair. See what I mean by a tighter argument?

This isn't a matter of just stacking up reasons, it's a matter of inference made on the basis of universal statements. Because they enable these sorts of inferences, universal statements are extremely logically powerful. But what you might not realize is the relationship that universal statements have to something even more powerful, conditional statements.

Every universal statement can be rewritten as a conditional statement, which we will write in the format, if blah blah blah blah, then blah blah blah blah. Let's take another look at these universal statements. One is a statement about all men, and the other is a statement about all mammals.

These can be rewritten in the following way. without losing anything. If X is a man, X is mortal. And, if X is a mammal, X has body hair, at least at some point in its life. Here, X is just a variable.

It stands for anything at all that you could plug in while still making sense. Now, let's look back at our arguments with our new conditional versions of the claims. Claim 1, Socrates is a man. Claim 2, if X is a man, X is mortal.

Conclusion. Socrates is mortal. And our other one? Claim 1, if X is a mammal, X has body hair, at least at some point in its life.

Claim 2, dolphins are mammals. Conclusion, dolphins have body hair, at least at some point in their lives. We've translated our universal statements into conditional statements, which provides some sort of condition or circumstance in which something else occurs or is true. Our other claims then tell us that the condition or circumstance is. is in place, and this enables us to move through the conditional from the if part to the then part. Here are some other more mundane examples of conditionals.

Notice that sometimes the word then is omitted. If it rains tomorrow, then I will stay inside. If a person is honest, then they do not lie.

If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding. If I win the lottery, I will give you half the money. Now, like other statements, conditional statements can be true or false.

They're just statements about what happens in some circumstance or condition. Statements like that can certainly be true or false. Consider the following few examples. If a cat has spots, then it can speak English.

If something is made of glass, then it is indestructible. If you show up to an official LSAT exam in your pajamas and twirl around three times, then the test administrator will instantly award you with a perfect score. These are all blatantly false.

The fact that the last one is about the future doesn't make it any less false. Statements about the future are true or false all the time. And let me assure you, this one is false. It ain't gonna happen. When a conditional is false, it's pretty much useless.

We can't actually learn anything at all from it. Importantly, we can't learn anything about, say, its negated version. Don't make this mistake. From the false statement, if a cat has spots, then it can speak English, We can't conclude that if a cat doesn't have spots, then it can't speak English.

I mean, look, no cat can speak English, at least not any real ones. But that's not something we know because our original conditional is false. A false conditional pretty much tells us nothing.

It's junk. But if the conditional is true, then we can create something truly wonderful. A little logic machine known as the if-then. This will be our final tool for this lesson.

It's probably the most challenging to use, but perhaps it's also the most powerful. As with so much else, mastering it will take practice. But there are certain questions on the LSAT that almost can't even be done without it, and yet become almost trivially easy with it. So this is definitely a tool you'll want to spend some time with.

To use the if-then, you'll need to translate specially qualified sentences into statements that take the form if blah blah blah Once you do that, you can represent the relationship like this. this, with a little arrow. And once you have things represented this way, you make it very easy to work with what otherwise might be very cumbersome sentences and relationships.

The reason is that, as soon as you find out that you have what you need on the left side of the arrow to activate things, you instantly get to conclude what is at the other end. Let's look back at the dolphin argument again. We can symbolically represent claim 1 like this.

If then hair. Or, if we want to be even more economical, if m then h. Think of this like a little input-output machine, one that works perfectly.

If you put the thing on the left in, you absolutely, every time, get the thing on the right out. So now we have claim two, the fact that dolphins are mammals. This is the input we need for our machine. No longer do we just have a machine that processes M's into H's, but we actually have an M to process.

That's the dolphins. Being a mammal is what we needed to get our machine going, and dolphins are mammals. So now the machine is activated, and out the other side we get the property of having hair.

Dolphins are mammals, M, so dolphins have hair, H. Here's another example. Every time it rains, Albert goes to the library. Can you see that this is really a conditional statement in disguise? We can rewrite it like this.

If it rains, then Albert goes to the library. And then we can make our little if-then machine. If R, then L.

And now, suppose one day you're sitting at home, and you look out the window, and you notice that it's raining. With your if-then machine in hand, you're now ready to answer an otherwise unrelated question. Where is Albert? And of course, I'm at the library. Rain goes in, a library comes out.

We've got rain, so we've got library. One more example. All chickens were hatched from eggs. We translate it.

If X is a chicken, then X was hatched from an egg. Or, if C, then E. Now, say you're walking down the street, if then machine by your side, and you see a chicken. If nothing else...

What do you know about it? You know that it was hatched from an egg. I hope you're getting a sense of the basics here, because we're about to turn up the difficulty and see what else our if-then machine can do.

Let's go back to the library example and think about it from a different angle. Suppose we've got our if-then machine up and working. If R, then L.

It's working perfectly. Now, instead of looking out the window one day, let's say you're in the library. For the purposes of this example, There's only one library in the world, and you're in it. And you look around, and you check all the tables, and you check all the stacks, and you check the bathrooms, and I am nowhere to be found.

What do you know now? Take a moment and think about it if you need to. What can you conclude now?

Pause the video if you don't see it yet. I'll give you just another moment. Alright, so tell me, how's the weather? One thing's for certain.

It's not raining. Even if the library has no windows and you don't check your phone, you know from the fact that I am not there that it must not be raining outside. Because remember, we stipulated that our if-then machine was built on the basis of a true conditional. Ladies and gentlemen, what we've got here is nothing short of a logical revolution.

Remember, the if-then machine works perfectly. You put the input in, you get the output out. This is helpful when we have the input, because it allows us to get the output. Remember the dolphins with hair? But the if-then machine is also useful when we fail to see the output, because remember, it works perfectly.

If we don't see our output, it means we must not have had our input. This is what's called the contrapositive of a conditional statement. Every if-then machine that you build comes with a second if-then for free.

All you have to do is draw out the contrapositive. To do this, you just negate both claims, the one on the left and the one on the right, and then flip them, leaving the arrow in place. This is a simple formula, but it should also be intuitive as well. And I don't want you to get lazy, so think about it again. You didn't get your output, so you must not have had...

your input. But that's the same thing as saying that if you don't have your output, then you don't have your input. And that's just another if then. Let's go back and look at some of our examples. If it's raining, then Albert is at the library.

If Albert is not at the library, then it is not raining. If X is a chicken, then X was hatched from an egg. If X was not hatched from an egg, then X is not a chicken.

If X is a mammal, then X has hair, at least at some point in its life. If X does not have hair, at least at some point in its life, then x is not a mammal. If a person is honest, then they do not lie.

If a person does lie, notice that the original claim had a negative, so this is actually its negation, then they are not honest. Now, it's important to remember that the contrapositive is the only thing that you can draw out from a conditional. Before mastering this idea, many people get confused about this. Let's take a look at the chicken example once more.

If x is a chicken, then x was hatched from an egg. And the contrapositive? If x was not hatched from an egg, then x is not a chicken. You only get two starting points here.

You can start from knowing that x is a chicken, or you can start from knowing that x was not hatched from an egg. Notice that you cannot start, however, from knowing that x was hatched from an egg and conclude that x is a chicken. Maybe x is a duck.

Those are hatched from eggs. Similarly, you can't start from knowing that X is not a chicken and conclude that X was not hatched from an egg. Again, what if you have a duck? Not a chicken, but yes, hatched from an egg.

Do not make these extremely common mistakes. Just create your if then and then create the contrapositive. Two machines, that's it. On the LSAT, you'll sometimes see questions that feature a number of conditional statements in a row. But what they won't tell you is that the contrapositives of those statements are right there as well, as if invisible.

They are implied by the statements that are given. So they're only there if you know to look for them. Yet the question will actually require you to use them to make inferences. To really reach your LSAT potential, you're going to have to gain fluency with the whole set of skills that relate to conditional logic.

In the rest of this lesson, I will give you some advice for identifying those statements that can be translated into if-then machines, and then we'll practice together with a bunch of sample problems. There are three main families of statements that can be translated into if-thens. First, there are universals. Second, there are simple conditionals that use the word if. And third, there are trickier conditionals that use the word only.

Let's start with universals. Universal statements can be phrased in various ways. Consider the following examples.

All dogs go to heaven. Every fish can swim. Any donation would be appreciated. Kind people always say thank you. Whenever there is lightning, there is thunder.

We can translate all of these into conditional statements and then into if-then machines. And then we can take the contrapositive. If x is a dog, then x goes to heaven. If D, then H. If not H, then not D.

Or, if X does not go to heaven, then X must not be a dog. If X is a fish, then X can swim. If F, then S. If not S, then not F. Or, if X cannot swim, X must not be a fish.

If X is a donation, then X would be appreciated. If D, then A. If not A, then not D.

Or, if X is something that would not be appreciated, then X must not be a donation. If X is a kind person, then X says thank you. If K, then T. If not T, then not K.

Or, if X does not say thank you, then X must not be a kind person. And finally, if there is lightning, then there is thunder. If L, then T.

If not T, then not L. Or, if there is no thunder, then there must not have been lightning. So far so good.

But things get a little trickier when we realize that there are also negative universal statements. Consider these examples. No fish have hair.

None of my friends has a pet. Quitters never win. As long as you're careful and you think about how things would be in conditional form, You should still be okay with these. If x is a fish, x does not have hair.

If f, then not. H. And now be careful, look what happens when we negate both sides. We get H, because the double negative just becomes a positive. So if H, then not F.

Or you can just do it more intuitively, thinking about the if-then machine. If being a fish leads to not having hair, then having hair leads to not being a fish. Okay, on to the next one.

If X is one of my friends. x does not have a pet. If f, then not p.

If p, then not f. Or, if x has a pet, then x must not be one of my friends. And finally, if x is a quitter, x does not win.

If q, then not w. If w, then not q. Or, if x wins, then x must not be a quitter. Keep an eye out on the LSAT for universal statements in all their forms, including the negative ones. And be extra careful with the negative ones, especially when drawing out the contrapositive.

Our next family of statements that can be translated into if-thens are simple conditionals that use the word if. We have already seen conditionals of the form if blah blah blah then blah blah blah. These are the easiest to create if-thens from, because they are pretty much already in the right form.

Sometimes, there will be slight variations on this form. For example, in the sentence, Albert is at the library if it is raining. Or, in the sentence, You can enter the factory if you have a golden ticket. Statements like these should be pretty easy to handle. As you can see, they're pretty much already in the original if-then format.

This next family of statements, though, can be a little more challenging. Conditionals with only can sometimes require you to use language in a somewhat technical sense that can sound a little unfamiliar to your ear. So let's proceed carefully with this last major concept before getting to some practice. As I've mentioned, some conditional statements use the word only.

We actually saw one of these earlier, though we didn't spend too much time on it. That statement was, only members of the family can come inside. This can actually be translated into the if-then format. Do you see how? It may come to you immediately, or you may need to think about it.

This is definitely a good time to pause the video and give this one some extra thought. I'll give you a moment. The most natural way to translate this one is probably this.

If x is not a member of the family, x cannot come inside. Or more simply, if not f, then not i. And then, just like with any other if-then machine, you can take the contrapositive.

If i, then f, which means that if you can come inside, then that means you must be a member of the family. Dealing with only statements has caused countless LSAT test takers to pull out their hair, but I actually think this is because many textbooks and courses over complicate things. I have some advanced content on the difference between if conditionals and only conditionals on the Insight training platform.

But I suggest that you dig more deeply into this concept only if you need to. For now, the most important thing to understand is that only indicates the possibility of translating a statement into if-then form. So when you see that word on the test, this should set off your conditional logic alarm.

But then, rather than applying some confusing formula or using concepts like necessary and sufficient conditions, just read the statement carefully and ask yourself, How can I say the same thing in if-then form? If you need more help than that, you can cross that bridge when you get there. One more thing to look out for though. Sometimes an only conditional will actually use the word if as well. But I don't want you to worry too much about this.

The only is what we're looking out for. It tells us that we're dealing with one of these trickier cases. Nonetheless, here's an example of an only if, so you're prepared if you see something similar.

on the LSAT. Instead of the sentence I gave before, you can enter the factory if you have a golden ticket, suppose I said you can enter the factory only if you have a golden ticket. The important difference here is that on the LSAT, when we're being really precise with our logic, the second example does not say that the golden ticket will get you in.

Technically, it says that you need a golden ticket, but it's possible that you need other things too. The first one, in contrast, says that your golden ticket is good enough. If you have it, you're in. To make this more intuitive, consider another pair of examples.

A car can drive if it has wheels. And a car can drive only if it has wheels. Is it true that a car can drive if it has wheels?

It may sound right at first, but let's try building an if-then from it. First, we rearrange the statement. If a car has wheels, then the car can drive. And then we'd shorten it. If w, then d.

But that's not right. Merely knowing that a car has wheels does not allow us to conclude that it can drive. What if the car has wheels but no gas? Wheels are needed, but they're not good enough on their own.

The second sentence better captures this. A natural translation of that might be, if a car doesn't have wheels, then it cannot drive. Or, if not W, then not D.

Now that makes more sense. And then we can draw out the contrapositive, if D, then W, meaning that if a car can drive, that means it must have wheels. Wheels are required for driving even if they aren't good enough to guarantee the ability to drive. So there you have it, three families of statements that qualify for translation into if-thens.

Universals, if-conditionals, and only-conditionals. If you see any of these things on the LSAT, again, a little alarm should go off. Conditional logic alert, maybe I should build an if-then machine.

Now if you come across maybe one of these statements, It may not be necessary to use this tool, but every now and then, and especially on LR, you'll run into questions that are absolutely loaded with conditional logic, one statement after another. And it's become clear to me, after spending so much time with the LSAT, that it's with these questions that the test makers are really testing specifically your ability to use if-thens. That this is really a skill that law schools want you to have. Look, conditional logic can be hard.

In this lesson, I've tried to give you just a basic introduction to it without over-complicating things. Still, it's normal to find this topic a little confusing, especially if this is your first time being exposed to it. My hope is that the challenge to create if-then machines can guide and structure your thinking when you're faced with conditional logic and hopefully make it easier.

For now, let's work on your foundation by doing some practice problems together. I'll give you three batches, one at a time. Pause the video and work through the exercises yourself.

Start by translating the statement into if-then format if it's not in that format already. Then build your if-then machine. Something arrow something.

Take the contrapositive and then finally read the contrapositive out loud to make sure that you understand what it says. Okay, here's the first batch. Pause the video and work through these examples on your own. I'll give you a minute and then I'm just going to reveal all the answers at once. Okay, so here's your chance.

Pause the video. Good luck. And we're back. Here come the answers now.

Pause the video again and check your work. And now on to the second batch. Same thing. Pause your video, work through things on your own. I'll give you a moment.

And here come the answers now. Pause your video, check your work. Of course, that last one is a trick question.

I just wanted to make sure you're paying attention. Sometimes we use the word if casually to mean something like whether or not. It actually doesn't indicate conditional logic in these cases. And now on to the final batch. Beware additional tricks, now that you know what I'm capable of.

Again, pause your video and work through things on your own. I'll give you a moment. And the answers are coming now. This time, the trick was that third one. Not every statement that uses the word only can be translated into if-then form.

That last one, if you watch these videos and you pay attention, then you will learn something, it's not really a trick question. It's just a more challenging one. And it's something that I chose not to cover before. So I wanted to give you just a little taste of how an exercise like this can get harder. Sometimes conditionals include multiple elements and require you to use AND or OR.

Frankly, being good at this used to matter a lot more when the LSAT had logic games on it. Now you're much less likely to need this ability, so I consider it another one of those cross that bridge when you get there sort of things. If you come across an example like this later in your practice, let that be an opportunity for growth.

For now, just focus on the fundamentals and see how far they will take you. Let's wrap up now. with a summary and some concluding remarks. We began our lesson today by talking about complex LSAT language and how to parse it.

We introduced the Bullseye tool in order to help you focus your attention on the sentence core and then understand the rest of the sentence as providing additional detail. This tool will help you develop the skill of finding claims within complicated LSAT passages. This is helpful because claims are the ingredients of arguments.

Remember, An argument is a set of claims that consists of reasons that provide support for a conclusion. The conclusion is the main thing that the author or speaker is trying to persuade you of. When discussing arguments, we focused on two related skills, recognizing support relationships and finding the conclusion. And we introduced three tools, the skeptic's perspective, signal words, and the SO test in order to help you develop these skills. in various circumstances.

Finally, we talked about conditional logic, which operates in some of the strongest arguments. The skills that we focused on included recognizing the presence of conditional logic, translating sentences into the if-then format, and drawing out the contrapositive. Our main tool was the if-then machine, which, once built, clarifies the logical relationships and allows you to easily make inferences. The material in this lesson was general in nature.

It applies all across the test. So hopefully, we set down a strong foundation today. This lesson is probably the densest in the whole series. If this is your first time being exposed to some of these ideas, it's normal for you to feel a little confused. Going back and re-watching any parts that you still feel hazy about can be very clarifying, so feel free to do that.

And when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson, lesson three. where we'll start to talk specifically about the logical reasoning section and the types of questions that you'll find there. This will give us a chance to apply what we learned today.

I'll see you there.

Transcript for:Foundations of LSAT Logic and Argumentation

Transcript for:
Foundations of LSAT Logic and Argumentation