Top Law Schools

Why can (E) not be seen as the contrapositive of the logic chain in the stimulus?

The chain can be constructed as follows (from mshermn at Manhattan LSAT, which I made some minor adjustments):

lack of thorough news coverage or secret political process --> isolate politicians from electorate ---> small chance of official response to resident participation ---> discourages participation in local politics

Choice (E): If resident participation in local politics were not discouraged, this would cause local politicians to be less isolated from their electorate.

We can see that the last item in our chain is "discourages participation in local politics" and if we negate that, we can then go down the chain and negate the items that come before them. So you can negate the item "isolate politicians from electorate."

That appears to be what (E) states except for the word "cause." I presume that this is what makes choice (E) incorrect.

I agree that (D) is a correct answer, I just want to know how to get rid of (E).

Bump

Bump

I think there are two ways to think about it'. For one, you can't create a contrapositive based on statements about what tends to lead to what.

Let's assume that If John is drunk, he tends to slur. Can we say, John is not slurring, so he is not drunk? No.

Even if (E) were a contrapositive, it wouldn't be a causal relationship. Just because something is the contrapositive, doesn't mean it causes something else to happen. For example:

If Lucy is drunk, she dances. Does not dancing cause her not to be drunk? No.

When I took this practice test I had it narrowed down to D and E. I picked D because E is a much stronger claim than D. This in itself makes E less likely to be the most strongly supported, as weaker claims are easier to support. If you really have no idea, pick the weaker claim. However, Noah has provided above the correct way to work through this problem.

Manhattan LSAT Noah wrote:I think there are two ways to think about it'. For one, you can't create a contrapositive based on statements about what tends to lead to what.

Let's assume that If John is drunk, he tends to slur. Can we say, John is not slurring, so he is not drunk? No.

I agree with this. The word tends implies that the logical statement isn't always true.