LSAT Question Explanation
PT 108, Section 2, Question 11
DisagreeArgument structure
Lucy rejects Mario's claim that cognitive science is not an autonomous discipline.
Lucy points out that Mario has always held that philosophy is an autonomous discipline, and that philosophy studies issues that other disciplines study as well. This contradicts Mario's own claim that an autonomous field of study needs to have a domain of inquiry that's all it's own (in other words, has to study issues that no other fields address). Lucy claims that an autonomous field of study just needs to have a unique methodology.
Explanation
Based on their statements in the stimulus, Mario and Lucy disagree about what makes a field of study genuinely autonomous. Mario thinks it needs to study a unique domain of inquiry, while Lucy thinks it can study a domain that is also studied by other disciplines. She says to be autonomous a field of study just needs a unique methodology.
Answer choices
Mario would disagree with this statement, while Lucy would agree. They disagree about whether a field of study needs to have a unique domain of inquiry to be considered genuinely autonomous.
We don't know what either of them think about this. They are discussing what makes a field autonomous, not the attributes of fields of study that are not autonomous.
Neither of them disagrees with this statement, they just each say that one of a unique domain or a unique methodology are necessary for a field of study to be autonomous. It's possible that they both agree about the claim in this answer choice.
Neither speaker addresses whether or not every single field of study that is not autonomous lacks both the unique domain and unique methodology.
Mario would probably think this is impossible, since his definition for genuinely autonomous was a field that studies issues not studied by any other discipline. But we don't know about Lucy. She may think that some non-autonomous disciplines don't overlap with autonomous fields in their domains of inquiry.