Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Easy

PT115 S1 P3 Q15 Explanation

Haraway’s Primate Visions

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

TopicsInferenceScience

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Passage

Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions is the most ambitious book on the history of science yet written from a feminist perspective, embracing not only the scientific construction of gender but also the interplay of race, class, and colonial and postcolonial culture with the “Western” construction of the very concept of nature itself. Primatology for scientists’ conscious and unconscious projections of their beliefs about nature and culture.

Haraway’s most radical departure is to challenge the traditional disjunction between the active knower (scientist/historian) and the passive object (nature/history). In Haraway’s view, the desire to understand nature, whether in order to tame it or to preserve it as a place of wild innocence, is based on a troublingly masculinist and colonialist agents cannot be reduced to a single, coherent reality—there are necessarily only multiple, interlinked, partial realities.

This iconoclastic view is reflected in Haraway’s unorthodox writing style. Haraway does not weave the many different elements of her work into one unified, overarching Story of Primatology; they remain distinct voices that will not succumb to a master narrative. This fragmented approach to historiography is familiar enough in historiographical theorizing but history, whether strictly narrative or narrative with emphasis on a causal argument.

Haraway is equally innovative in the way she incorporates broad cultural issues into her analysis. Despite decades of rhetoric from historians of science about the need to unite issues deemed “internal” to science (scientific theory and practice) and those considered “external” to it (social issues, structures, and beliefs), that dichotomy has proven one must shed a great many assumptions about what properly belongs to the study of science.

What this question is testing

Inference

Your task

Find what must be true based on what the passage or stimulus states.

Common trap

Answers that are plausible or likely but not actually guaranteed by the text.

Winning move

Keep only the choice the statements fully support — eliminate anything that requires an extra assumption.

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

The question
15.

The passage suggests which one of the following about the traditional scientific

Answer choices

  1. Irrelevant Distinction: taming > preserving6% picked this

    Scientists have traditionally preferred to tame nature rather than to

    Both "taming nature and preserving it as a place of wild innocence" were characterizations of the traditional approach. This answer is making it seem like the traditional approach was one, not the other.

  2. Opposite4% picked this

    Scientists have traditionally sought to counter the masculinist and colonialist aspects

    The 2nd paragraph is telling us that Haraway thinks the traditional way has been based on a troublingly masculinist and colonialist view of nature. This answer is saying that the traditional approach has been to counter that stuff.

  3. Unsupported Comparison: more active3% picked this

    Scientists have traditionally assumed that primates were more active participants in the creation of knowledge than were other

    The 2nd paragraph isn't about 'primates' at all, so the fact that this answer is emphasizing primates should scare us off. This is taking a word that was used in an absolute sense (the scientist/historian is the active knower) and inventing some unsupported comparison by switching that familiar-sounding word into a Relative comparison ("primates are more active").

  4. Too Strong: endeavored to conceal3% picked this

    Scientists have traditionally endeavored to conceal the role of government officials and laborers in the

    The fact that Haraway proposes (end of 2nd P) an approach that recognizes government officials and laborers certainly allows us to infer that the traditional approach did not recognize them as contributing to our knowledge. But it's way more accusatory and sinister than that to say that the traditional approach endeavored to conceal their role. The traditional approach might have just failed to appreciate their role, not gone out of their way to hide their role.

  5. Correct85% picked this

    Scientists have traditionally regarded nature as something separate

    Why this is right

    This hews most closely to our Support Window. We're told that the traditional approach is a "disjunction between the active scientist knower and the passive natural object .... it's based on a view of nature as an entity distinct from us".

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

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