Q10 - People often admonish us

[zainrizvi]

Really starting to feel that I'm over thinking some of these early questions.. that being said,

What exactly is the conclusion of this argument? I definitely got the intuition that the author was against us learning the lessons (i.e it just is not practical, doesn't make sense etc). But because it was not explicitly stated I was hesitant to make that leap.

Then I went looking for an explicit conclusion and found "it is nearly impossible to discover its lessons". In hindsight, this looks more like an intermediate conclusion to me. Anyways so then I saw answer choice (B) and I was like ok the author says "NEARLY impossible" so sure, it is compatible with accepting the argument's conclusion as well as denying it.

So really when is that leap from evidence to conclusion valid? Is it only valid here because its question 10, or is it something that I should keep in mind for the whole section. If something is strongly, strongly suggestive of a conclusion - even if its implicit, it probably still is a conclusion.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

This is a very common argument structure on the LSAT. The argument is designed to refute a stated claim. Typically we can identify this structure when we're given an argument along the lines:

"Some people claim that _______. But these people have failed to take notice of ____________ ."

The LSAT likes to use this structure for several reasons. First, the conclusion is often implicit in such a structure. And second, it makes identifying the conclusion more difficult because there are two competing viewpoints.

Notice in the question stem we're asked to identify the role of the claim, "people should learn the lessons of history." This is a recommendation, and recommendations, decisions, hypotheses, and predictions are frequently conclusions. If the author opposed to this view, the conclusion of the argument in a simplistic form is simply that, "people do not need to learn the lessons of history." We can see the turning point of the argument with the word "but" in the first sentence.

So, the claim in the question stem is a claim the argument is designed to argue against - best expressed in answer choice (D).

Let's look at the incorrect answers:

(A) is somewhat close. There is a problem with the initial claim, but the argument is not designed to "resolve" a problem, but rather to refute a claim.
(B) has a very specific meaning in LSAT language. It means that the claim is irrelevant to the argument - meaning it neither supports the conclusion nor undermines it.
(C) is also close, but the argument does not take for granted that the claim is false, but rather offers evidence against the claim.
(E) is illogical, since assumptions are by definition unstated. Regardless, the claim is an opposing viewpoint, not a supporting one as this answer choice would suggest.

Hope that helps!

[coco.wu1993]

I don't quite understand why B is wrong. The statement says we should learn the lessons of history, while the conclusion of the argument is we are nearly impossible to learn the lessons of history. I think should do something is different from capable of doing something on the LSAT, thus the two are compatible. Could anyone please help?

[ohthatpatrick]

I don't think I would say that the conclusion is that it's nearly impossible to learn the lessons of history.

I would be more likely to say the conclusion is "it's absurd to think we should learn the lessons of history".

The author has a two-pronged attack against the claim that we should learn the lessons of history

1. Good luck trying to do so. It's nearly impossible to learn the lessons of history (for instance, what were the lessons of World War I? [rhetorical question ... no one knows the answer])

2. And suppose we DID learn the lessons: then what? What would we do with them? What use would they be? We're probably never going to be able to apply them since we'll never have another WWI.

So the author would essentially say,
CONC:
we shouldn't try to learn the lessons of history

why?
1. it's nearly impossible to do so
2. there's no point in doing so since we couldn't apply what we learned

Although I like your distinction between "should do" and "could do", the author is arguing about both. #1 is addressing whether we could; #2 is addressing whether we should (what use are they?)

Finally, it's possible that (B) could have been a true statement but still not answered the question optimally.

If (B) said
(B) It is compatible with the idea that mustard is yellow

That would be a true statement about the claim that "we should learn the lessons of history". But being a true statement wouldn't make it the correct answer, because it still wouldn't correctly describe how the first claim is the launching point for the author's series of counterpoints.

Hope this helps.