What's wrong with this sentence? Forum

[perfunctory]

Studying for the LSAT has made me paranoid about everything I hear. Yesterday I heard something like "I don't buy that a lot of people who have trouble with the MCAT have no trouble with the DAT and get accepted to dental schools. I know plenty of dental students who would have gotten into medical school if they wanted it so don't think dental students are people who couldn't get into med school."

What's the lsat logical error here?

[Clyde Frog]

Studying for the LSAT has made me paranoid about everything I hear. Yesterday I heard something like "I don't buy that a lot of people who have trouble with the MCAT have no trouble with the DAT and get accepted to dental schools. I know plenty of dental students who would have gotten into medical school if they wanted it so don't think dental students are people who couldn't get into med school."

What's the lsat logical error here?

Sounds to me like the dental students who could've gotten into medical school picked a whole bouquet of oopsidaisies.

[zeglo]

.

[moorelsat]

If I may, let me rephrase your argument a bit to capture the sentiment of it. As zeglo pointed out, "a lot" = "some" but I think the analysis becomes more interesting if you gloss over the weak quantifiers.

So let's rephrase it more simply to:

"I don't buy that people who can't get into med school have no problem with getting into dental school."

In other words, you don't buy the conditional: "If you struggle with med school, you can still get into dental school."

So you are basically trying to prove this false: Struggle Med School --> Can Get into Dental School.


To refute a conditional statement, you need to show that the necessary condition is NOT necessary even if the sufficient condition is met: Struggle Med School + NOT Get into Dental School. In other words, you'd want to find an example of someone who couldn't cut Med School and ALSO failed to get into dental school.

(If that's not clear, take a simpler conditional: "All blondes are dumb." Blonde --> Dumb. How do you disprove this? You find a smart blonde. Blonde + NOT Dumb).

The evidence the argument gives (people who DID get into dental school and who WOULD have gotten into med school) is the exact opposite of what we want.

Hope that helps.

[somethingElse]

It's just using one set of people to refute an argument about a different set of people. Basically the evidence is irrelevant.

[raven1231]

grammar?