Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT108 S1 P4 Q23 Explanation

What is Language

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsStrengthenScience

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Passage

What it means to “explain” something in science often comes down to the application of mathematics. Some thinkers hold that mathematics is a kind of language—a systematic contrivance of signs, the criteria for the authority of which are internal coherence, elegance, and depth. The application of such a highly artificial system to as other language does, to accurately describe the functioning of some aspect of the world.

At the center of the issue of scientific knowledge can thus be found questions about the relationship between language and what it refers to. A discussion about the role played by language in the pursuit of knowledge has been going on among linguists for several decades. The debate centers around whether language things is purely a matter of agreed-upon conventions, making knowledge tenuous, relative, and inexact.

Lately the latter theory has been gaining wider acceptance. According to linguists who support this theory, the way language is used varies depending upon changes in accepted practices and theories among those who work in a particular discipline. These linguists argue that, in the pursuit of knowledge, a statement is true only process in question, to be held as true until another, more compelling analogy takes its place.

In pursuing the implications of this theory, linguists have reached the point at which they must ask: If words or sentences do not correspond in an essential way to life or to our ideas about life, then just what are they capable of telling us about the world? In science and mathematics, acquisition of scientific knowledge? But this question has yet to be significantly addressed in the sciences.

What this question is testing

Strengthen

Your task

Find the choice that makes the argument's conclusion more likely to be true.

Common trap

Answers that are consistent with the argument but add no real support, or that strengthen a claim the argument doesn't make.

Winning move

Locate the gap between evidence and conclusion, then pick the choice that closes it.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
23.

Which one of the following statements, if true, lends the most support to the view that language has an essential correspondence to

Answer choices

  1. Correct69% picked this

    The categories of physical objects employed by one language correspond remarkably to the categories employed by another language that

    Why this is right

    This is supporting that language is a more universal, solid, reliable commodity. People who developed language separately (they each invented their own words to correspond to things) ended up making remarkably similar categories of objects. That makes it sound like there's something fundamental / inherent / innate about how we're generating language to correspond with things. If language had some relative, inexact, purely customary relationship to things, then we'd expect different languages to be very different, since they're not tethered to the common things being described in any essential way. But if isolated cultures are using language in similar ways to describe the same things, then it seems like certain things have some essence about them that corresponds to certain language.

    Skill tested: Strengthen · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  2. Too Weak: derives from the first5% picked this

    The categories of physical objects employed by one language correspond remarkably to the categories employed by another language

    This one is decent, but since the two languages are connected (one derives from the other), it's less compelling that similarities between them are essential to the things the languages describe. The people who think language is a random, arbitrary, culture-by-culture decision with no fixed connection to things, would say, "Of course the 2nd culture had similar language. That's not because language has an essential connection to things. It's because the 2nd culture derived its language from the 1st culture, so they were just using very similar, but nonetheless random / arbitrary, language."

  3. No Impact: same language12% picked this

    The categories of physical objects employed by speakers of a language correspond remarkably to the categories employed by other

    The fact that speakers of the same language have similar categories for physical objects isn't really going to help us choose a side in the debate. We know that speakers of the same language will have similar words / thoughts / categories, but is that because those words have an essential connection to things or just because these speakers are both making use of the same random, arbitrary, agreed-upon conventions of their language?

  4. No Impact: sentence structure2% picked this

    The sentence structures of languages in scientifically sophisticated societies vary little from

    This is somewhat tempting because it's also pointing to something universal across many languages. However, "sentence structure" is drifting from what the debate is all about. We're supposed to be figuring out whether "language corresponds in some essential way to objects and behavior". Sentence structure is more about grammar and logic, but this debate is about words and what objects they refer to. Sentence structure doesn't have that sort of property of a symbol and the thing it refers to. Sentence structure is more the rules for how you can organize symbols within a given language to output grammatically complete ideas. But it doesn't relate to the topic of whether the words that get chosen to put into a given sentence structure are words that have some essential or merely agreed-upon connection to an object or action.

  5. No Impact: believe13% picked this

    Native speakers of many languages believe that the categories of physical objects employed by their language correspond to natural categories

    LSAT does not have much respect for "beliefs", when we're trying to ascertain actual factual truth. The fact that native speakers believe their language corresponds in an essential way is very weak support for the idea that it really does correspond in an essential way. We can say that speakers of many languages think that there is an afterlife. That's not evidence supporting that there actually is an afterlife. That's just an opinion.

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