LSAT Trap Choices: Circular Reasoning vs. Contradiction

Adrian Calloway

You are sitting there, time is ticking away on section two, and you read an argument about, um, municipal recycling or ancient pottery that just sounds like total garbage. It feels, it just feels completely nonsense. So your hand drifts over to option C, presupposes what it sets out to prove, and you click it because, well, it sounds smart and the argument was stupid.

Nora Ashford

I am in this picture and I do not like it. I, I, I genuinely did that on my very first diagnostic test, like, three times in a single section.

Adrian Calloway

And almost every single time someone does that, Nora, it is wrong. Circular reasoning, which is what that fancy answer choice actually describes, is the correct answer choice in less than one percent of official LSAT Logical Reasoning questions. Under one percent.

Nora Ashford

Less than one percent? But it shows up as an option on what, half the flaw questions on the test?

Adrian Calloway

At least. It is classic trap bait. Test writers know that when students get confused or when an argument feels circular in a colloquial sense, they run straight to the big jargon words. But formal logic has a very strict operational test for circularity. The premise and the conclusion must be functionally identical. Like saying, we must protect free speech because unrestricted speech is vital to freedom.

Nora Ashford

Right, okay. So, it is literally just saying A because A. You are rephrasing the conclusion and calling it evidence.

Adrian Calloway

Exactly. If the author presents any external factual claim, any empirical study, any historical reference, no matter how bizarre or poorly reasoned that evidence is, the argument is unequivocally not circular. The moment there is an actual outside premise, circular reasoning is off the table.

Nora Ashford

So if they say, you know, we should eat more broccoli because a study in 1994 showed it gives people energy, even if that study was terrible or totally irrelevantly applied, it cannot be circular reasoning.

Adrian Calloway

Not circular at all. It might suffer from an assumption gap, or bad sampling, or a temporal flaw, but it is not circular. In my classes, I teach what I call the Finger Cover Test. Literally take your finger on the screen or paper and cover up the premise sentence. If the conclusion that remains is identical in meaning to what you just covered, then congratulations, it is circular logic. But if removing that premise leaves a gaping hole, if it removes a structural bridge between two different concepts, you are looking at an assumption gap, not circularity.

Nora Ashford

That finger cover trick would have saved me so many points early on. I remember sitting there thinking, well, this argument is looping around its own weird point, so it must be presupposing what it seeks to prove. But I was just using circular as a translation for bad.

Adrian Calloway

Which is exactly what the test makers rely on. They use complex academic phrasing to tempt you when you lose the logical thread.

Nora Ashford

Yeah, you are just reaching for a life raft and they handed you a rock wrapped in high minded jargon.

Adrian Calloway

And that brings us to its twin sibling in the trap choice hall of fame, internal contradiction. You will see this written out as, bases a conclusion on claims that are inconsistent with one another, or, introduces information that actually contradicts the conclusion.

Nora Ashford

Oh yeah. Introduces information that actually contradicts the conclusion. That phrasing feels so tempting when an author brings up a counterpoint or a weird fact that does not seem to support their main point.

Adrian Calloway

And just like circularity, genuine internal contradiction is remarkably rare on the LSAT. It is an instant kill flaw, but candidates pick it constantly when they just mean the evidence is weak.

Nora Ashford

Okay, so what does actual internal contradiction look like when it does show up? Give me the real thing.

Adrian Calloway

Picture a mayor running for re-election. She gets up at a rally and says, unemployment reached an all-time high during my term, therefore job seekers in this city should re-elect me. Notice what happened there. The premise evidence provided by the speaker directly invalidates the exact conclusion drawn. She gave you a fact that explicitly torpedoes her own goal.

Nora Ashford

Okay, that sounds ridiculous when you lay it out like that. Nobody in real life makes an argument that overtly self-destructive unless they are completely incompetent.

Adrian Calloway

And that is why it is so rare. In legal depositions, a witness directly contradicting themselves on the stand is the holy grail. When it happens, the claim collapses instantly. But witnesses rarely do it, and LSAT authors rarely do it either. When the test writers do craft a true internal contradiction argument, it usually involves two premises that cannot both be true at the same time, or a premise that outright refutes the conclusion, just like that mayor example.

Nora Ashford

So how do we stop ourselves from falling for these abstract trap choices when we are panicked on test day?

Adrian Calloway

You use what I call the Literal Anchor Rule. You treat abstract flaw language as a strict, literal checklist, not a generic vibe. You never, ever select an internal contradiction answer choice unless you can physically point to two explicit sentences in the stimulus that actively cancel each other out. If you cannot underline sentence A and sentence B and say, these two statements cannot logically coexist, you cross that answer choice off immediately.

Nora Ashford

So if the choice says introduces information that actually contradicts the conclusion, I have to literally locate the sentence containing the information and the sentence containing the conclusion, and prove they fight to the death.

Adrian Calloway

Precisely. No hand waving, no saying, well, it kind of undermines it emotionally. It has to be a direct logical collision. If you hold abstract choices to that strict evidentiary standard, those siren song trap options lose all their power.

Nora Ashford

That makes so much sense. Treat the abstract flaw descriptions like statutory definitions. If the facts in the passage do not meet every single element of that definition, you acquit the answer choice and move on.

Adrian Calloway

Spoken like a true future lawyer, Nora. Once you stop treating abstract jargon as polite translations for bad argument, the whole section becomes a lot clearer.