Q26

[jpchris3]

Hi,

I'm having some difficulty eliminating B. If the speakers do not accept that the synonyms for "ball" and "red" express these concepts as elegantly, then it suggests that perhaps the only reason why the synonyms for the two words are not preferable is because there is already an agreed-upon convention.

[ohthatpatrick]

You definitely raise an interesting point.

I don't know if you've read much Plato, but he would tend to agree that our ability to judge synonyms to "ball" and "red" as inferior expressions implies that we have some internal concept of what "ball" and "red" should mean.

However, that doesn't have to be a relativistic, agreed-upon convention we humans created with each other. It could be an actual innate concept (or as Plato thought, an eternal, transcendent concept).

Let's table the philosophic talk for a sec, though, and talk about the more clear-cut LSAT reasons why (A) is superior to (B).

First, for this question, I would remind myself what buzz words are used to describe the point of view in lines 21-24:
relationship between language and thing is purely a matter of agreed-upon conventions, making knowledge tenuous, relative, and inexact.

(A) certainly reinforces the "agreed-upon conventions" line, since (A) is saying that English speakers "have accepted" this relationship.

You were potentially seeing reinforcement for "agreed-upon conventions" in (B), but you were seeing it as an indirect inference. At the outset, I was suggesting that we don't have to infer the existence of an agreed-upon convention in order to believe what (B) is saying. But I think it would be more helpful for you to say to yourself, "Do I prefer an answer like (A) that explicitly reinforces 'agreed-upon convention' or an answer like (B) that only indirectly could reinforce 'agreed-upon convention'?"

The other REAL important reason I would not like (B) is that it uses "elegance" as a criterion. That was a buzz-word associated with the OTHER group of linguists, the "essentialists".

This is a situation in which knowing how the LSAT test writers concoct wrong answers gives you more confidence in avoiding certain answers: because this passage was about two different points of view (language has an essential relationship vs. language has a tenuous, agreed-upon relationship), and because this question is asking about the latter point of view, we can expect that we will have trap answers that refer to the former point of view.

And, in fact, (B), (C), (D), and (E) all relate more to the former point of view.

Hope this helps.