brains wrote:
E says that one need not know what something is before one name it.. This basically means that People can name it before even utilising the same object. The argument is about as ancient people mistakenly were believed to have not known what moral rights were despite that they were using it probably. Now to know the assumption , it basically is saying that naming something before knowing does not have to be the case.
E suits it. How come E is not the answer?
Hello,
brains. I have been waiting for a slower day to respond to your post, and now I have one. (In the U.S., Labor Day for a tutor often translates as a day to labor, since so many
other people have time off.) I agree with what
richirish has written above, especially regarding pre-thinking. Neither do I employ the oft-used negation technique for all assumption questions. Rather, I look to follow the chain of logic and make sure I stick to the
exact argument/conclusion the passage outlines. This passage is easy enough, but LSAT answer choices have a way of twisting up the information into knots and confusing the test-taker, so how about we lay everything bare?
Akela wrote:
It is a mistake to conclude, as some have, that ancient people did not know what moral rights were simply because no known ancient language has an expression correctly translatable as “a moral right.” This would be like saying that a person who discovers a wild fruit tree and returns repeatedly to harvest from it and study it has no idea what the fruit is until naming it or learning its name.
Which one of the following is an assumption required by the argument?
The
argument is given right away. According to the author, the mistake is to conclude that just because ancient people apparently did not have an expression for something—
"a moral right"—they
did not know what moral rights were.
Sentence two launches into an analogy. Notice the perfectly parallel argument. Using my shell of a sentence from before, the mistake is to conclude that just because a person does not have an expression for something—here, fruit from a wild fruit tree—such a person
has no idea what the fruit is.
Why did the author jump from morals to fruit to make a point?
This lies at the heart of the assumption that we need to put a finger on. With that said, we can assess the answer choices.
Akela wrote:
(A) To know the name of something is to know what that thing is.
This is a reversal of the argument being made, which twice allows us to deduce that it is very much possible to know the nature of something without affixing a name to it. Hence, this cannot be a necessary assumption. Keep looking.
Akela wrote:
(B) People who first discover what something is know it better than do people who merely know the name of the thing.
The point of the analogy is not to gauge who possesses the most knowledge. If the discovery were all that counted, then why would it matter that the person return
repeatedly to harvest from [a wild fruit tree] and study it? It is safe to say that this is
not a required assumption.
Akela wrote:
(C) The name or expression that is used to identify something cannot provide any information about the nature of the thing that is identified.
This is a classic overstatement. The author never argues that names do not provide information about something, let alone
any information, just that people can be aware of something without attaching a name to that thing. Once again, we cannot find any justification for asserting that this is a required assumption.
Akela wrote:
(D) A person who repeatedly harvests from a wild fruit tree and studies it has some idea of what the fruit is even before knowing a name for the fruit.
This is the point of the analogy and argument behind it. We have answered our earlier question about why the author chose to illustrate the argument about "a moral right" by using fruit. Such a person
has some idea of what that fruit may be, even without a name, just as ancient people could have had some idea of what a moral right was, despite its apparent exclusion from the languages of the time. This is our answer. Without this assumption, the analogy falls apart and, by extension, the argument attached to it.
Akela wrote:
(E) One need not know what something is before one can name it.
This answer lifts the right language of the passage but mixes up the
need not part. To be clear, the answer would be fine if it read,
one need not name something to know what it is. As written, however, we evidently need to consider when it is appropriate to name something, and this is not a concern brought up in the passage. The order of the words, plus the out-of-line
before, makes all the difference. Like the other wayward answer choices, this one misses the mark and cannot be a necessary assumption for the argument to work.
I hope that helps. I would be happy to discuss the question further if anyone has any questions.
- Andrew
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