Q26

[zainrizvi]

Not really sure how (D) is supported in Passage B. Passage (A) I can see the support in lines 16-17.

Passage (B) just says that to see historical scholarship as distinct from propaganda. It doesn't necessarily say historians may go towards that..

[noah]

"Propaganda" is clearly mentioned in Passage A as a negative phenomenon (lines 17-18) - and the worst form of it. In Passage B, the reference to "propaganda" begins as part of a long description of what must be done to avoid it. While we could infer that the author of Passage B is against propaganda - the whole passage is a call for his or her brand of objectivity - to arrive at (D) we only need to have seen that propaganda is being referred to as an extreme. (D) doesn't say "negative extreme."

(A) is tempting, as it seems there's a lot of arguing going on; however "propaganda" isn't part of the real debate. The nature of objectivity is what's being discussed.

(B) is out of scope.

(C) is unsupported - recently?

(E) is tempting, but it's clear that Passage A is not about persuasive writing - it's about objective writing.

[crf2132]

I think I misunderstood something in answer (d) here. I felt that it couldn't be correct because in Passage B the first sentence says "historical scholarship as an enterprise distinct from propaganda". Passage A also says that objective historians must never become "propagandists". So I actually felt that D couldn't work because both authors would believe that writing propaganda wouldn't be acting as a historian. I read answer (d) and thought: would the author even think someone writing propaganda could call themselves a historian? Probably not. Am I overthinking this answer or missing something?

[ohthatpatrick]

I see what you're saying/asking: once you skew enough towards propaganda, can you properly be called a historian?

No, definitely not. But a propagandist might still call himself a historian. It wouldn't be a PROPER label, but there could certainly be some historians who don't deserve to have that job title.

Remember that objectivity is mentioned as an "ideal" in psg A (line 2 and 7).

We might aspire to an ideal of total honesty, with total deceit at the other end of the spectrum. Since we land somewhere between perfection and absolute failure, we're all just approximations between an ideal and its opposite (this, by the way, is the thrust of Aristotle's moral philosophy).

Psg B says "the very POSSIBILITY of historical scholarship that's distinct from propaganda" ... implying that it's POSSIBLE for historical scholarship to be distinct from propaganda, but also allowing for the possibility that its practitioners sometimes fall short of that mark.

After all, if avoiding propaganda "requires that self-discipline that enables X, Y, and Z", it's easy to picture that a historian might sometimes have lapses of self-discipline.

So I think you're getting yourself tangled in a binary label of "you're either a historian or a propagandist", when both passages are describing the messy efforts of real people who lie at some point on the continuum between historian and propagandist, while aspiring to be purely the former.

Hope this helps.

[Didius Falco]

This one really got my goat. Fooled me during the exam into selecting (E). I am very curious for anyone’s opinions on good ways to clearly identify it as a false lead? To see why it caught me, I’ll go over my thinking quickly.

Noah’s quick elimination is that (E) has a term shift—from articles about ‘objective writing’ to articles about ‘persuasive writing’. Very respectfully, I’m not entirely sure I see that (or at least that I can see that with sufficient certitude to eliminate this answer preliminarily).
Passage A, in lines 7-11, strongly implies that good historical writing writing will be motivating an argument or point (interpretations being presented to explain facts; then judged by their success towards that end). Later, in 16-17, we see the importance of objective historians acting as a neutral judge. Of what exactly? It seems clear the answer is historical arguments, and their relative persuasiveness.
Passage B enters similar territory; devoting much of paragraph 2 and 3 to explaining why the exemplary form of historical argument is ‘powerful argument’, whose specialness is certainly wrapped up in its ability to leverage detached analysis (36) and clear understanding of opposing views (45-50) into a very convincing case for the historian’s position. A persuasive case.


I am certainly not arguing that passage A and B are centered around ‘persuasive argument’—they are both involved in discussing the role and nature of objectivity in the historian’s craft. But I think it is fair to say that they both strongly imply that objective historical argument is a form of persuasive writing. In fact, it seems to me that both historical writing and propaganda are persuasive—but the historical persuasion is grounded in the ideals of truth, accuracy, (see 4-6) etc….

This is why I was so tempted by (E). To my foolish brain, it seemed that that is exactly why propaganda was mentioned—in order to contrast a justified, ground, evidentiary form of persuasive argument with one which is implied to lack these traits (see 27-32; which implies that propaganda is deficit of the reality testing of history).




On review, I am drawn to seeing (D) as stronger not because of the term ‘persuasive writing’, but because of the words surrounding it. “Identify an extreme” seems to more clearly fit with the brief and fleeting uses of propaganda in lines (18) and (28) respectively than does “draw contrasts”. In my Lsat gut, “draw contrasts” just seems to substantial a role for the reference, when “identify an extreme” is sitting right over it. Particularly in 16-19, the idea of propaganda as an extreme seems to be developed (history-advocacy-propaganda). And nowhere is propaganda actually engaged as a substantial subject in its own right.; brief mentions are all presented.
But this is that instinctual knowledge acquired from having taken a great many reading sections, and is not incredibly satisfying (since it failed to present during the test itself…).

Does anyone have thoughts on this question? Think that I simply inferred to broadly during the test, and should have seen persuasive wiring as a jump from historical argument—and thus a quick and dirty term shift elimination?

(By the way, since I have never posted before, I wanted to thank all the experts and the community for their contributions here. Manhattan has the best material in the business, but this forum just may be more important for learning this test at that second, deeper level; at least for those who have been at it for a while.)