Disclaimer: This post requires a basic understanding of conditional statements. To learn more about the fundamentals of conditional reasoning, click here.
Many LSAT students confuse conditional statements with causal ones. They assume that a conditional statement implies a causal relationship. But while the two are not mutually exclusive, conditionality alone does not imply causality. Not fully understanding this distinction can lead to confusion with many questions that involve one of these two concepts in Logical Reasoning, such as Flaw or Strengthen questions. Here are the main distinctions you need to be aware of to be successful at the LSAT.
Difference #1: Causal Statements Include an Action
To determine whether a statement is causal or conditional on the LSAT, first isolate the two events that happened in a statement. Then, ask yourself if one event is doing something to another. Let's consider the following two statements as examples:
Example 1: "Everyone who took Medicine X felt drowsy"
There are two events here--people took Medicine X and they felt drowsy. But there is no explicit term that shows Medicine X had any effect on drowsiness. You may be thinking to yourself that medicine tends to make people drowsy, but remember that we cannot bring in outside knowledge on the LSAT. Maybe the people who took Medicine X also did not get much sleep the night before. There are plenty of other reasons why these people may have felt drowsy.
So, since this statement doesn't explicitly state that one event did something to another, this is purely a conditional statement. We can logically infer that Medicine X and drowsiness are correlated, meaning they coexist. But nothing more.
Example 2: "Drinking coffee increases stress levels"
Like the first example, we have two things happening--drinking coffee and stress. The difference is this time drinking coffee is doing something to the stress levels--it is increasing them. So this is a causal claim, not just a correlative one. We can point to a specific term (increases) that shows that drinking coffee influenced stress levels in some way.
Notice how you won't necessarily see obvious indicator terms like 'cause' or 'effect'. All that matters is whether you have an action term showing that one event did something to another.
Difference #2: Time Matters in Causal Statements
Suppose you saw the following statement in an LSAT passage:
"If the rooster crows, the sun is up"
This is a conditional (but not a causal) statement because of course the rooster did not cause the sun to come up. But let's dive deeper into why a sufficient condition does not always cause the necessary condition.
A common misconception is that the sufficient occurs before the necessary. But that is not necessarily true. In this case, the rooster could have crowed after or around the same time the sun came up. In a conditional statement, we have no idea about the temporal relationship between the conditions unless the LSAT specifically tells us.
Now, contrast that with a causal statement we saw earlier:
"Drinking coffee increases stress levels"
In this case, a temporal relationship is implied. Drinking coffee must have happened before the stress levels. Otherwise, how could it have increased the levels?
So, in causal statements the cause must occur before the effect.
Difference #3: More of the sufficient does not guarantee more of the necessary
Based on basic conditional logic, we know that if the sufficient condition occurs, the necessary condition must occur. But from that, people often assume that as we have more of the sufficient, we must also have more of the necessary. But let's reconsider the previous example:
"If the rooster crows, the sun is up"
Does this mean that if the rooster crows more, the sun comes up more? Not really. On certain days, the rooster may crow more, but the sun would still come up just as much as it did in the past. Therefore, in purely conditional statements, more of the sufficient does not guarantee more of the necessary. It could happen for certain conditional statements but does not have to.
For causal statements, the opposite is true. More of the cause produces more of the effect--at least up to a certain point. If drinking caffeine causes people to be stressed, we would expect that as people drink more caffeine, they would get more stressed.
Side note: Conditional statements CAN be causal as well
As mentioned earlier, conditionality and causality are not mutually exclusive. It is possible for a conditional statement to also imply causality if it includes a term that shows one condition influenced another.
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