Hello,
I came across a puzzling question while I was answering this reading comprehension question. Just to be clear, my question is more a question on formal logic than that of reading comprehension. I was wondering if the following two statements (ideas) have the same meaning.
Statement 1: Since courts cannot decide such cases on legal grounds, for its resolution, they must consider exercising judicial discretion.
Statement 2: Since courts cannot decide such cases on legal grounds, they rely for its resolution only on judicial discretion.
These two statements are statements that I edited and recreated from the passage to fit the description of my question that came across my mind regarding conditional logic (the first hybrid statement is located at lines 24 - 29 in the passage, and the second statement is a hybrid statement of answer choice D of question 14). Using conditional logic, it seems that in both cases exercising judicial discretion is the necessary condition for the resolution of the case [Statement 1 has "must" and Statement 2 has "only"]. However, just intuitively, the first statement seems to imply that while judicial discretion is necessary, there may be more. On the other hand, the second statement seems to imply that judicial discretion is THE one and only necessary condition....
Is there something I am missing? Is there maybe a subtle difference of meaning between necessary condition indicators such as "require/must/only if/etc," and the indicator of "only"?? Or is it maybe because the necessary condition for the first statement is "CONSIDERING judicial discretion" while the necessary condition for the second statement is JUST judicial discretion? They look like logical equivalents, yet they seem to imply two different things.... Any help would be great!
https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-17-section-4-passage-2-passage/
https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-17-section-4-passage-2-questions/