Hi All:
Can someone please help explain this question? I think that I got caught up in the language. Thank you!
PT 28, Section 3, Question 18 Forum
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Atlas LSAT Teacher
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Re: PT 28, Section 3, Question 18
Sure.
This argument boils down to this: We should judge a person's aesthetic judgments based on how much those judgments keep him or her alive. Why? Because the human brain evolved to keep us alive, and so our aesthetic judgment (our ability to decide if things are pretty) evolved because of some past environment in which we lived.
This would be like saying this:
Cars were developed to make it easier for folks in cities to have an easy way to travel (since horses are difficult to maintain in a city), so when you're deciding on which car to buy, you must make your choose the car that makes it easiest for you to travel.
What's the gap? In both of them, there's an assumption that we should evaluate something based on the reason that that thing developed. Perhaps we should now evaluate cars based on their fuel efficiency (or, ability to brake
), and for aesthetic judgments, maybe we should evaluate them based on whether they are developed based on an established system. If (C) were added to the argument, it would be a tighter argument, as that large assumption would become a premise. If we negate (C), we find the argument not making much sense.
(A) is too extreme -- do we need ALL human adaptations to be like that?
(B) is out of scope.
(D) is out of scope -- our ability to determine whether a judgment is true or false is irrelevant.
(E) is out of scope -- proliferation of the species?
By the way, there's another assumption in this argument: that aesthetic judgments originate in the brain!
I hope that helps.
This argument boils down to this: We should judge a person's aesthetic judgments based on how much those judgments keep him or her alive. Why? Because the human brain evolved to keep us alive, and so our aesthetic judgment (our ability to decide if things are pretty) evolved because of some past environment in which we lived.
This would be like saying this:
Cars were developed to make it easier for folks in cities to have an easy way to travel (since horses are difficult to maintain in a city), so when you're deciding on which car to buy, you must make your choose the car that makes it easiest for you to travel.
What's the gap? In both of them, there's an assumption that we should evaluate something based on the reason that that thing developed. Perhaps we should now evaluate cars based on their fuel efficiency (or, ability to brake
), and for aesthetic judgments, maybe we should evaluate them based on whether they are developed based on an established system. If (C) were added to the argument, it would be a tighter argument, as that large assumption would become a premise. If we negate (C), we find the argument not making much sense. (A) is too extreme -- do we need ALL human adaptations to be like that?
(B) is out of scope.
(D) is out of scope -- our ability to determine whether a judgment is true or false is irrelevant.
(E) is out of scope -- proliferation of the species?
By the way, there's another assumption in this argument: that aesthetic judgments originate in the brain!
I hope that helps.
