Q15 - The ancient reptile Thrinaxodon, an ancestor

[mshinners]

Question Type:
Determine the Function

Stimulus Breakdown:
A fact about T is stated. Then, the statement in question is brought up before the argument reaches its conclusion (while tacking on another premise at the end).

Answer Anticipation:
Since the statement in question leads right into the conclusion, it's a premise. However, I'm expecting the correct answer to be phrased in a complex manner, so I'm gearing up for that.

Correct answer:
(B)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) It is a premise, but not for the statement in this answer choice (especially since the author thinks T was not cold-blooded).

(B) Bingo, and much more straightforward than I was expecting! This answer is almost tricky in the fact that it straight up states it's a premise for the conclusion. I'd probably be taken aback by that and checked out the other answers before settling on this just to be sure I wasn't missing anything.

(C) It is not a conclusion; there's no evidence for it.

(D) The If/Then nature does mean it could be classified as a hypothesis, but the author doesn't try to show it's false - it supports the T's warm-blooded nature.

(E) It is definitely a premise (it's super hard to start a following sentence with "Therefore" without the preceding sentence serving as a premise).

Takeaway/Pattern:
For Determine the Function questions, sometimes they'll try to trick you with an answer that is almost too straightforward.

#officialexplanation

[andrewgong01]

What would answer choice "E" look like where something is offered as an explanation of the phenomenon described by the conclusion but is not used to provide support for that conclusion.
Would the first sentence be something that "E" describe where it is a fact that is needed but is not directly in support of the argument?

I had trouble between "B" and "E" on the test and went with "E" because I thought "B" was too direct in saying something was simply a premise and that this was a conditional sentence where we are not sure if the whiskers have been established yet and hence it may not have been solid premise as "B" would suggest.

[NatalieC941]

The explanation for eliminating E "(E) It is definitely a premise (it's super hard to start a following sentence with "Therefore" without the preceding sentence serving as a premise)." doesn't convince me in terms of how to discount this answer choice. To me this conditional statement is just more explanation, and I don't understand how it actually lends support to the conclusion.

Can someone perhaps flesh this out a bit?

[andrewgong01]

The explanation for eliminating E "(E) It is definitely a premise (it's super hard to start a following sentence with "Therefore" without the preceding sentence serving as a premise)." doesn't convince me in terms of how to discount this answer choice. To me this conditional statement is just more explanation, and I don't understand how it actually lends support to the conclusion.

Can someone perhaps flesh this out a bit?

I asked this question a while back on this thread above and I think I understand that it now better

The argument's conclusion is : T was warm blooded. Why?

It is because insulation would be useless if it was cold blooded. But where did this idea of insulation come from?

Insulation is an idea that comes from the preceding two sentences where if an animal has whiskers it has body hair, which, in turn, is insulation. Do we know T had whiskers? According to the first sentence, yes the evidence strongly suggests this. In short, the first two sentences basically say that this animal had insulation /body hair . The conditional sentence of IF whiskers then body hair then insulation is the sentence in question the stimulus is testing us on.

The quoted sentence supports the conclusion because without it, the argument makes no sense. Without it, the argument would be saying This animal had whiskers and insulation would be useless if it is cold blooded therefore it was warm blooded. We can see that this argument makes no sense because it jumps from having whiskers to insulation. In some senses, the quoted sentence we are being examined on bridges the gap and acts like an assumption/principle, which in turn, has to act in some way to support the argument, which, in turn, supports the conclusion. Put differently, the quoted sentence is providing support for the conclusion because it makes the argument more believable by telling us the implications of having a whisker, which is it has body hair, a form of insulation. A premise , which is what "B" suggests, is a statement that lends credence to the conclusion and in this case this quoted sentence is indeed lending support to the conclusion as the conclusion depends on this sentence to make sense in fact.

"E" claims that the quoted sentence does not support the conclusion (i.e. the argument). However, if this truly is the case then the quoted sentence is simply background fact where it plays no direct role in supporting the conclusion. I think for "E" the first part of it is fine in that a premise is in some senses providing an explanation for the final claim in an argument (i.e. the conclusion). However, as I posted earlier, it seems very unusual to have to something like this that is explaining the conclusion but does not provide support for the conclusion because what makes a difference between an argument and a claim is that the former combines a premise+ conclusion (i.e. two 'claims') whereas the latter provides just one claim. If we have one claim (the premise) that is explaining another claim (the conclusion) it seems logical that it should also be supporting the conclusion.


Also, i guess the other attractive trap the LSAT could have placed was saying the quoted sentence is an intermediate conclusion; however, the quyoted sentence does not have support (i.e. there is no other sentence that justifies or proves the conditional statement of whisker --> body hair relation exist )

[ohthatpatrick]

Great explanation of how we would justify that the claim in question is part of the support ... it is the starting point of getting to the idea of "insulation", which is crucial to the conclusion.

In terms of trying to think of what (E) would actually sound like, I'm struggling to concoct an example.

First of all, does THIS conclusion describe a phenomenon?

"T was probably warm-blooded".

I could call that a speculation, a hypothesis (in the "a guess" definition of the word, an interpretation, an estimation, etc.

But a phenomenon? A phenomenon is something that happened, an occurrence, an event, a statistic. Something observable.

This is just speculating about a property of an extinct species. The species itself might be called a 'phenomenon' (if we're stretching), but the claim "This species was probably warm-blooded" could not.

And I agree that if a claim offered an explanation of what's described in the conclusion, it seems like it would always qualify as supporting that conclusion.

[DianeW664]

Hey, I keep reading the premise "if thrinaxodon... regulate body temp" as an intermediate conclusion, and chose C because of that. How do I distinguish this premise from an IC and what makes it different than an IC?