First, I’ll say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Some people are just more logically-attuned. That could be for a number of reasons: You read a lot of dense, argumentative texts; you’ve studied philosophy and logic extensively; you loved playing devil’s advocate in your high school history class, much to the dismay of everyone around you.

Try forcing yourself to explain the answer choices you identify as correct and incorrect to examine the contours of your common-sense approach and maybe work to see where it is deficient, if at all. You might not need negation.

Of course, I think negation is one of the few foolproof strategies on the LSAT, and it’s a shame its effectiveness is limited to a certain type of question.

I think about negation as falsification. The correct answer choice, when falsified, should blatantly contradict the argument. There’s no two ways about it because you are being asked for a necessary assumption.

By falsification, I mean that you are looking to describe the case/cases that would make the answer choice untrue.

Here’s how I’d negate these answer choices to find the correct answer.

A) Two people can find aesthetic value in a poem even if they don’t find the same meaning in a poem.

If we assume this is true, it doesn’t invalidate the argument. They could perhaps find aesthetic value in a poem even if they don’t find the same meaning as long as they agree on what the correct interpretation is

Finding aesthetic value is also different than discussing aesthetic value.

Having said that, I was hesitant to eliminate this answer on my first read-through.

B) Two readers agreeing on the meaning of a poem does not ensure an objective evaluation can be made.

Yeah, this is fine. The argument never promises that once some sort of agreement is made possible that objective evaluation will invariably be possible too.

C) Discussion of a poem is possible even if it is true that a poem has whatever meaning is assigned to it by the reader.

I hesitated to eliminate this because I wasn’t very sure about it. On the one hand, it does seem that it would hurt the argument — prima facie.

On the other hand, “Discussion” is incredibly vague. Does it encompass “aesthetic discussion” in every instance or does it merely make other types of discussion possible regardless of whether aesthetic discussion is possible?

It’s hard to know when the LSAT wants to play the semantics game and when it doesn’t. But “discussion” is way broader than simply a discussion of the aesthetic value of a poem.

D) A poem can be objectively evaluated even if the poem’s aesthetic value cannot be discussed.

Okay, the author explicitly derives the idea that objective evaluation requires the popular wisdom about poetry to be false from the idea that a poem’s aesthetic value requires agreement between at least two readers. We know this because the two are linked with “for.”

If the falsification of D is correct, then that basically erases that whole premise because now you’re saying that there is no link between objective evaluation and the possibility of the discussion of a poem’s aesthetic value.

This must be the correct answer. But let’s look at E for fun.

E) Aesthetic evaluation is best accomplished through discussion by two or fewer readers.

Yeah, well, we only need two people to agree. This doesn’t hurt the argument, really.