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A Running List (Last Updated 7/29/2019)

It’s easy to take another person’s argument as correct and move on. But identifying the possible gaps in their argument is useful. These gaps are potential flaws. And with the help of some testing services, I have identified some below. If you think of another that’s valuable for test-takers or just people in general, please don’t hesitate to send me a message.

Source Arguments

We’ve all met the asshole who thinks another person must be wrong because they have some sort of reputation. There are two ways someone can primarily do this.

• Focusing explicitly on the motives of the source

• Focusing on actions or habits that the source partakes in

For example, Johnny has an iPhone. Therefore, his opinions regarding technology are to be taken seriously. Haha noooo “Therefore, bullshit.”

There’s no guarantee that Johnny knows what he is talking about. The iPhone is a decoy.

Sufficient/Necessary Mix Up

Refer to my previous article for help regarding sufficient and necessary conditions. But there are two primary ways arguments can do this.

• Confusing a necessary condition for a sufficient condition

I like to use a leader example here. We may think that a good leader needs to be organized in some way or another. One may confuse that for meaning that organization helps lead to a good leader but is not necessary. This would be a misinterpretation of what was said.

• Confusing a sufficient condition for a necessary condition.

This is just the reverse of the above example. One may confuse that organization is may know that isn’t necessarily true. It’s A WAY to get there but not THE ONLY way.

Be careful with this kind of flaw, however. It is not always so obvious. And while it can be a tempting answer choice on some, there may be a better one to engage the correct flaw. Read all choices before answering questions with this type of flaw.

Mistaken Cause and Effect

There’s a couple of ways the above mistake can happen.

• The assumption that a causal relationship is there when a specific list of events previously occurred.

No way. Just because Susie fell off her bike the first time she rode it, doesn’t mean the next time she will again. This error is usually obvious. But rare.

• The assumption of a causal relationship is there when a correlation exists

Sometimes, this can help promote a conclusion, but it is rarely the answer. You’ve heard it before, correlation doesn’t mean causation. Happens the most often on the test.

• The assumption of a casual relationship is there despite valid alternate causes existing for both the cause and the effect of the preexisting argument.

It doesn’t make sense to consider only one cause promotes the effect. I think it’s much easier to say that many things contribute to a conclusion rather than to stop at one specific cause.

It’s like if Susie falls off her bike again on trip two. She fell on trip one because she failed to keep her balance. But there are many reasons why she could fall and we shouldn’t assume that she will always fall because she loses her balance. Maybe she forgets the brakes the second time.

• There’s a failure to take into account the cause and effect should be reversed.

Yep. Always consider the reversal. The author of any argument may mistake an effect for a cause in many instances. People also do this in real life.

X->Y could also be Y->X

Straw Man Arguments

People do this all the time. Susie proposes a minor change, but her friends distort that change into much more than it is. Aka blowing an argument out of proportion.

A formal example.

Political Figure X: People making over 20k a year should be subject to a slightly higher tax to help pay for new roads.

Political Figure Y: No. It’s unfair to make everyone pay higher taxes.

The argument initially does not state this. Therefore flaw.

Appeal Fallacies

Three huge ones.

1. Appeal to Authority
2. Appeal to Pop. Opinions
3. Appeal to Emotion

I hate the first one. When a professional baseball player recommends a specific kind of glove or bat, there is not an inherent reason to buy that particular brand. Think of getting sold by an advertisement with these arguments. Just because a reputable person recommends something, does not make the product good.

The second is more about using people in the aggregate. This still does not sell an argument logically. Think again about advertising. Your class uses Five Star notebooks but that does not automatically make or break your potential decision to use One Note instead.

The third is when an author of an argument uses emotionally driven language to sell or persuade.

Survey Errors

A few of the possibilities here.

1. Biased Sample
2. Shitty Questionnaires
3. Inaccurate Information

You can’t (1) have a group of people who are politically charged answer a question about a new zoo in town and expect that to be all that’s required for a conclusion. Sample sizes are to be random and devoted to equal representation of all possible groups in society. You also (2) can have shitty questions. If I ask what your favorite SpongeBob episode was and then say you must like Donald Trump because of your selection, then I’m asking a pretty shitty question for the conclusion I wish to draw. Lastly, (3) you can’t always rely on information from your sample, as they may be untruthful.

The test goes this direction quite a bit. But be careful picking this flaw until all other choices have been considered.

Additional Tips

From Aprofessionalstudent – “Another good tip is to know what type of logical fallacy the argument is using and then anticipate the answer.”

• As pointed out above from a Reddit user, once mastery of the fallacies is there, it becomes easier to anticipate a correct answer by just reading the stimulus. This is largely because the patterns of specific fallacies are really not so different in nature (looking from question to question).

It’s a process. It’s a process. It’s a process.

I remember telling myself that in early undergrad. There really wasn’t a plan in place. I was a loser. There was no adequate grasp of my strengths and weaknesses. Instead there was a “young adult” who was quick to jump the gun on conclusions that were for the most part wrong. For being a kid that was all about “the process,” I was focused on drawing the conclusions instead.

I met the LSAT in my Junior year of college. Again, I mistakenly thought that I was going to have perfect grasp on the matter (aka jumping to radical conclusions). And Holy Shit I was wrong. I think I scored a 135 first time around. There was an immediate doubt in my abilities as a student. Looking at blog articles online, I remember feeling hopeless. Inadequate as you will. I had almost overnight developed a sense of doubt, pushing this conclusion that I was a class A dumb ass.

I couldn’t tell my family at first. There had never been any doubt that I would do well on this test. We jumped the gun on that one. Nobody in my family had ever been to law school, nor had they been to graduate school. And I had made it seem like it’d be a cakewalk to a top 14 school. Big mistake there.

It wasn’t for a while that I told them my score, and the truth behind the fact. Perhaps I never would have told them, but there was a dead giveaway that I was going to go on and keep studying despite the fact that I was in the bottom ten percent of all test takers. But I figured they would have to know that I’d (1) have to retake and (2) need to score considerably better to even get into a law school worth attending.

The process of studying was not what I’d call easy. I remember having trouble at first grasping sufficient/necessary assumptions. Sometimes I still struggle there, but I’m considerably better than I was. The key to achieving adequacy here was looking at arguments through the lens of “what makes an argument lose” and “what helps and argument win.” This was something I learned from a class and it stuck with me.

A necessary assumption is what “needs to be true” for an argument “to be true.” If it is false the argument loses. So in my case, I made the assumption that I could reach the capacity to get into a law school that had decent reputable standing. And I determined that without a good enough LSAT score that was not possible. Therefore, I determined that my admission required a good LSAT score. That was a necessary assumption. If that statement was false, my argument would become invalid.

A sufficient assumption is what helps an argument win. It doesn’t necessarily need to be true for a specific conclusion, but it helps to make that conclusion possible. So for example, I determined that it was sufficient to achieve a good LSAT score in doing a practice test a week, and blind review all answer choices. But that wasn’t necessary, as there are a lot of ways to achieve a good LSAT score. Not just my way.

But even those two concepts took time for me to grasp adequately. And even after gaining sufficient proficiency there, I had a long way to go.

It took a change in thinking about myself and arguments of others. I had to first humble myself in that I wasn’t a prodigy kid and that my argument skills were inadequate. It took the realization that there was more than one way to solve a problem, and that a brand new solution wasn’t always necessary in doing so. It wasn’t until about a year into my studying that changed fully in everyday conversations with others.

Now I am freshly out of that process. I’m the new kid on the block. A 0L. I look to attend Marquette Law School this upcoming fall. I finished the process scoring decent enough to get into a good amount of schools and pick the one that I felt was best based on a variety of factors. I didn’t put up legendary numbers. But instead, decent ones.

I’m here to do what I can to show the process to others, and help out the best I can. I hope to do this through my blog here. Thanks for reading my first blog post. I’m new at this but hope to get better through time.

Brandon Zegiel – University of Illinois Alum – Marquette ’22