[Music] 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 elsat logic and argumentation the concepts and skills that we discuss here will apply to the test as a whole both 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 lset this is technically a precursor to the material on logic and arguments but it's a necessary one reading elsat 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 comp licated 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 elet 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 elsat is not about huxter ISM 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 elsat 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 elsat 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 relationship 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 elsat 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 elet 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 then 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 elet 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 elet here's a sample sentence to give you a flavor of what the language is like on the elet although Albert is a clever fellow who created these really interesting YouTube videos about the elet 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 elsat 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 outc are inappropriate 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 other 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 elsat 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 Lite 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 that maybe three or four out of 10 still you can already get a sense of the complexity so much 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 stay 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 elet 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 def 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 is 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 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 athlet 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 blli 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 elsat 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 lset 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 and tolerant 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 claims 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 wearing SHO shoes have to do with what we should order for dinner the information is irrelevant it neither supports the original claim nor it's 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 one 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 one and could figure into an argument for claim one 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 a 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 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 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 provide 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-ir 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 lset 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 lset test 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 or 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 their which is used often on the elsat and is always attached to a conclusion let's consider for 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 elsat and argument analysis will become a lot easier to get you started here's 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 elet 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 week due to the fact that I hurt my foot I have taken every available Els set twice for this reason you should have faith in my elet 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 lset 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 elsat 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 elsat 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 sin 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 elsat 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 many arguments within them and the conclusions of these many 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 inter immediate 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 releases tax returns and a 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 the 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 Johnson 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 sign signal word while the intermediate conclusion did this is an old favorite of the elsat 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 elsat material with the hope that your natural intelligence can then take over it's easy to get into mental ruts on the lset 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 here 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 SE 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 elsat 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 elsat questions is time well spent practicing elsat questions is an effective way of improving your elsat score pause the video for a moment and try the so test on the different statements here can you find the conclusion this way I'll give you a moment all right the conclusion is actually the third sentence time spent practicing lset 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 elet score makes it more likely that you will get into your dream law school so time spent practicing elet questions is time well spent your score could earn you thousands of dollars in scholarship money so time spent practice iing elsat questions is time well spent practicing elsat questions is an effective way of improving your score so time spent practicing lset 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 question 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 elet language support relationships that serve as the backbone of argument 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 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 member of that category to put it more simply we find something out about all men that's claim to 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 one all mammals have body hair at least at some point in their lives claim two 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 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 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 one Socrates is a man claim two if x is a Man X is mortal conclusion Socrates is mortal and our other one claim one if x is a mammal X has body hair at least at some point in its life claim two 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 c circumstance 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 and 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 elsat 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 going to 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 it's 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 L set 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 then blah blah blah once you do that you can represent the relationship like 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 one like this if mammal 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 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 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 all right so tell me how's the weather one thing 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 Contra positive 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 of 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 Contra positive 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 elsat 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 Elsa 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 then 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 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 elet for Universal statements in all their forms including the negative ones and be extra careful with the negative ones especially when drawing out the Contra positive 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 then 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 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 elsat 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 they 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 elsat instead of the sentence I gave before you can enter the factory if you have a goal 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 elsat 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 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 the Contra positive 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 then universals if conditionals and only conditionals if you see any of these things on the L set 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 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 lset that it's with these questions that the test makers are really testing specifically your ability to use if then 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 Contra positive and then finally read the Contra positive 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 patch [Music] same thing pause your video work through things on your own I'll give you a [Music] 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 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 elsat 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 elsat 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 elsat 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 trans in 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 rewatching 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 [Music]