How to Weaken Arguments

Lesson 6 of 21, 6m
TO WEAKEN ANY ARGUMENT, YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND ONE THING.
This thing is not tangible nor obvious. It’s instead abstract and subtle – which means it’s hard to
understand.

Here it is: You have to take away the support. What support? The support that the premises give to
the conclusion. Please read that again. I know it sounds very obvious, but please believe me when
I tell you that it is not. And I promise you, the LSAT will get you on this a lot.

The reason is because you aren't used to doing this when you argue. When you argue, your instinct
is to attack your opponent or simply contradict his premises.
For example, your friend claims that (conclusion) Avatar is the most touching movie ever because
(premise) it's got that sad scene where the ship just sank and Kate Winslet is barely floating on that
little piece of wood and Leo lets her stay on while he freezes to death.
What was your reaction just now? Was it something along the lines of "Wtf? Did the dumbass just
confuse Avatar with Titanic?"
How would you respond? Maybe you'd say "Uh, hey man, there was no sad scene with Kate
Winsl.. ah, nevermind. Please just go away."
Your first reaction was simply an attack on your friend. Your second response was simply a
contradiction of his premise and then you asked him to leave.
Try to pay attention to arguments you witness from now on and you will find that so many of them
are low level arguments like this one.

The LSAT isn't interested in arguments like this one.

The LSAT thinks that it's much more interesting to concede to your opponent his premises and
then try to argue that despite your concession, his conclusion still doesn’t follow. In the example
above, you concede to him that his premise was true, in other words, "for the sake of proper
argument" let's say that scene was in Avatar, despite that being a totally unreasonable concession,
your conclusion still doesn't follow.

And that’s exactly what Weakening questions test you on. It most certainly does not want you to
contradict or attack a premise nor does it ask you to simply contradict or deny the conclusion.
Instead, you are asked to deprive the support that the premises give to the conclusion, as if with
magic.

Let me illustrate. Did you watch Dragon Ball growing up? Remember Goku’s Kamehameha? If
not, I'm sorry. For your childhood because you missed out on some good shit.
Now pretend that little Goku is the premise and that car is the conclusion. The Kamehameha beam
(i.e., the blue beam) is the “support.” The thicker the beam, the stronger the support and therefore,
the stronger the argument. Think about it like that.
Accordingly, when you are asked to weaken an argument, you are asked to thin out the beam. But
you can’t touch Goku, nor can you touch the car. Often, you have to fight your urge to attack (or
contradict) the premise or attack (or contradict) the conclusion. You have to find something that

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thins out the Kamehameha beam. You have to find an answer choice that strips the existing
premises of its supportive power. Don’t confuse that with attacking (or contradicting) the
premises. You are not attacking (or contradicting) the premises. With the correct answer choice,
you are demonstrating that despite the premises being true, it is now way less supportive of the
conclusion being true.

SOME SAMPLE QUESTION STEMS

Which one of the following, if true, is the logically strongest counter that Albert can make to
Erin’s argument?
Which one of the following statements, if true, most weakens the argument?
Which one of the following, if true, most weakens the argument?
Which one of the following, if true, most seriously undermines the conclusion drawn in the
argument above?
Which one of the following, if true, would most weaken the argument in the newspaper article?
LET’S REVIEW
Weakening questions ask you to weaken the argument. That means to weaken the relationship
between the premises and conclusion. That relationship is the support relationship. That means
you are to make the premises less supportive of the conclusion.

LSAT GRAMMAR

Does it strike you as weird that we’re going to do a lesson on grammar? This is the LSAT after
all. It’s a test that assumes some college level education and here I am trying to teach you
grammar, which is something I would hope we all learned in grade school.

But, as it turns out, the reason – I’m willing to say the reason – people have such a hard time with
the LSAT is because of its grammar.

When you read a sentence on the LSAT, be it a Logical Reasoning question or Reading
Comprehension passage, and you say to yourself, “What the hell did I just read? What were those
words that I just saw all next to each other?” it’s because you’re not very good at deconstructing
difficult grammar.

With easy grammar, it’s an unconscious thing where you follow the rules to parse out the different
pieces of a sentence and you know how each piece relates to the others. With difficult grammar,
that doesn't happen. On the LSAT, there are a lot of sentences with difficult grammar. That is
why knowing your grammar is so important. It’s the rules of our English language. It’s how you
put pieces together. How you make sense of them. What the relationships are between them.

In this curriculum on grammar, we’re going to learn three things. If you can remember these three
things and get into the habit of doing these three things, then you’ll be fine. Then the hard
sentences, the sentences that initially seemed impenetrable, they will become clear to you. These
are the three things: subject, predicate, details (sometimes also called "modifiers" and "embedded

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clauses"). Train your brain to always focus on these three things and you'll be fine.

Let’s look at an example.

Candidates who can vastly outspend all rivals have an unfair advantage in publicizing their
platforms.

Not a very hard sentence to understand. I bet everyone reading this sentence has already
unconsciously processed those three things: subject, predicate, details. But, let’s take it step by
step and use this easy sentence to illustrate some potentially difficult concepts.

The subject.
What is the subject? The subject is the thing which the sentence is about. It’s the center around
which everything else turns. So, if I ask you, “What is this sentence about?” you would tell me
that this sentence is about “candidates.” You’d be right. This sentence is about candidates. What
does this sentence want to tell us about candidates? To answer that question, we need to look at
the predicate.

The predicate.
What is the predicate? It’s almost always a verb. It tells you something about the subject. Here, we
know that the subject is "candidates." What about the candidate? Well, they "have" something.
They "have" an "advantage."

I skipped over a lot of the other words in the sentence. It's important not to get distracted by those
words. First, you have to figure out what the subject and what the predicate are. All the other
words are just details. It doesn't mean they're not important. They are very, very important. It just
means that they have a tendency to distract you from understanding the basic structure of the
sentence. So, save the details for last.

The details.
Sometimes the details are contained in "modifiers" like adjectives or adverbs and sometimes they
are contained in "embedded clauses."

“Unfair” for example, is a detail. It modifies "advantage" by telling us what kind of “advantage.”
Okay, “unfair advantage.” But, in what? An eating competition? Nope. More details: "in
publicizing their platforms."

What about “who can vastly outspend all rivals?” It’s also detail. Are we talking about the entire
universe of all candidates in this sentence? No. We’re not. We’re only talking about a sub-set of
all candidates. What sub-set? The ones who can vastly outspend all rivals. So it’s an embedded
clause that’s modifying and giving us more details for “candidates.”

So, you can read this sentence in the bare bones form with just the subject and predicate:
“Candidates have an advantage.” Then, you can read it again and fill in all the details: “Candidates
who can vastly outspend all rivals have an unfair advantage in publicizing their platforms.”

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With an easy sentence like this, you’re subconsciously doing the parsing out of the grammar.
What’s the subject, what’s the predicate, what are the details? But, when it comes to harder
sentences – like the ones in the quizzes that follow and the ones on the LSAT – your sub-
conscious might fail you. You might have to bring this out to the surface and train your brain to be
really good at actively doing this.