For those interested in attending Law School, you have undoubtedly heard of the dreaded Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). You’ve probably heard nightmares about the test as the thing that stand between you and getting admitted into a top ten law school.
I’m here to tell you not to worry about the test.
But, that doesn’t mean you should study. You definitely should – you might even consider an LSAT Tutor where you live. But, the fact is that the LSAT is meant to test things that you can’t really cram for – things that you are meant to already know – such as how to think, how to use logic, and how to consider a situation under time constraints. Those things are, in large part, learned over time.
LSAT Logic Games
For example, let’s take the LSAT Logic Games – the part that scares most law school applicants. This portion of the test is foreign to most people. But, if you really think about it, you have used elements that are tested in the LSAT Logic Games section: namely, Logic.
Yes, there I said. Logic. You have used logic in your life.
But, the logic tested on the LSAT Logic Games section is different. It’s formal logic, using the rules of deductive logic. Likely, you’ve used logic from your gut – your gut hunch, but not formal logic.
The good news is this: you can learn formal deductive logic so you can do well on the LSAT Logic Games section.
Below are a few PDF downloads to help you get started. In the meantime, if you have a chance to study deductive logic at your college or university – I suggest you do so immediately. The class is typically offered in the Philosophy department.
Here is the content of a typical class on Deductive Logic:
Logic is the study of what makes an inference, in a certain limited sense, “good”, “valid”, or “correct”. Logic, as the great logician (and founder of modern logic) Gottlob Frege convincingly argued, is not a branch of psychology: It does not concern itself with how people do in fact reason, with what sorts of arguments they find compelling, nor even with whether a given argument in fact shows its conclusion to be true. Logic is, instead, a normative discipline: It is about one important constraint on what it is to reason or argue correctly. Logic is concerned with how people ought to reason, that is, with what rules they ought to follow when they do reason; it concerns itself with whether, if one accepts the assumptions someone is making, one must also (on pain of irrationality) either accept the conclusion for which s’he is arguing or else give up one of one’s assumption.
One should not, however, expect this to be a course in reasoning or argument. Logic studies the principles of valid argument abstractly: While the course should teach you something about distinguishing valid from invalid arguments—and, like any good course, should teach you something beyond its specific subject-matter, something which will help you with other courses (and in your life after all the courses are over)—this course is not designed to help you write or reason better. What the course will do is introduce the fundamental concepts of modern matheamatical logic.
We shall seek to characterize valid arguments of two different types. In order to do so, however, we shall have to introduce a great deal of special symbolism: We wish to consider, not specific arguments, but kinds of arguments; and we want to see, for example, what is common to the good, or ‘valid’, arguments, “John is at home; so either he is at home or at the zoo” and “Tom is a professor; so he is either a professor or a fireman”.
As part of our study of logic, we will develop a formal system in which to prove that various arguments are, indeed, valid. Much of this middle part of the course will be something like a high school geometry class, as we shall be learning to do proofs in this system, just as one learns, in high school, to do proofs in axiomatic geometry.
Finally, we shall turn our attention upon the formal system itself and study it. We shall ask such questions as: Is it possible to prove, in this system, that any given valid argument really is valid? Or are there some valid arguments whose validity can not be demonstrated in this system? Is there some kind of way to decide or to calculate whether an argument is valid?
Do great on the LSAT – you can do it!