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Anyone have any good strategies on these bad boys? The Powerscore method is fine until you reach a convoluted stimulus where you don't know what conditional statements to diagram. The kind of stimuli that are a paragraph long with tons of terms and not many clear conditional statements.

Example:

PT 37, Section 4 #20

It's a tough justify question that basically plays out like an assumption question since you don't need to/can't(?) break it down into conditionals.

Anyone por favor?

D is the most popular answer

I don't have PT 37 with me but I know what sort of questions you're talking about and I don't even attempt to diagram them. I just P.O.E the shit out of them and usually make an educated guess between 2 or 3 answers. They're usually at the end when I'm hurting for time. I know this is a shitty approach but I really don't know what else to do because diagramming would take way too long.

sophia.olive wrote:D is the most popular answer

Legit help would be nice.

naterj wrote:I don't have PT 37 with me but I know what sort of questions you're talking about and I don't even attempt to diagram them. I just P.O.E the shit out of them and usually make an educated guess between 2 or 3 answers. They're usually at the end when I'm hurting for time. I know this is a shitty approach but I really don't know what else to do because diagramming would take way too long.

That's exactly where I am, and I think it's a crappy approach that makes us feel crappy, haha. There must be a way to tackle them.

They even seem awkward to approach as standard necessary assumption questions. Hmmm...

Hey Anaconda,

I know the stimuli you're talking about. Although they can be convoluted, they almost always can be diagrammed. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen one that's impossible to diagram.

For example, from PT37 LR2 Q20:

The stimulus can be thought of as 2 conditional statements (although 1 is really just a statement) and can be diagrammed as follows:

Desire for praise -> desire for other's favorable opinions (you can treat this as a conditional if you'd like)
Deserve praise -> actions motivated by desire to help others
The second statement's contrapositive: -actions motivated by desire to help others -> -deserve praise

The conclusion is that desire for praise -> -deserve praise, the obvious missing link being "actions motivated by desire to help others".

Thus A fills the chain by creating this statement: desire for praise -> desire for favorable opinion -> -motivated by desire to help others -> -deserve praise.

I think one good strategy is to not "variable-ize" the different parts of the conditional statements (like make them A, B, C, etc). This can convolute the statements even further. Instead, try using acronyms or brief words to symbolize the relationships. Like Desire P -> Desire for OFO, Deserve P -> AM by D2HO or something.

Another strategy is to really look at the conclusion and figure out where the terms mentioned in the conclusion come from (are they from the premises or do they include new information?). If there's new information, look for answers that can link that information back to premises to make the conclusion follow. If they're from the premises, then look for a solution that links two premises together. This should narrow down the answers to around 2 contenders.

A last thing to realize is that these sorts of tough justify questions will almost always work with contrapositives. So be sure to consider the contrapositives of your diagrammed statements.