Translating "Never" into lawgic

CinnamonTea

Couple of questions:
1. How does one translate "never" into Lawgic? I know this is a group 4 indicator, but could someone really break it down and give a couple of examples? I'm struggling with this word.

2. How would one translate this sentence into lawgic (of. 258 of the LSAT trainer) "Sarah will never date a funny guy?" Could you not only state the answer but also WHY you translate it that way?

Thanks in advance!

Sami

Hey : )

So yeah these Lawgic translations can especially seem weird when we are trying to think of them in Lawgic at first but I think they are more intuitive and easier to understand if you try to actually see what they are saying in english vs lawgic.

Lets start with your example:
Sarah will never date a funny guy.
So if sarah ever dates anybody he will just not be funny
Can he be cute? maybe. We are not sure what kind of guys she will date.
Does she have to date somebody, nope. We only know information about "if" she dates somebody.
The only thing we know from our statement that any guys she dates will not be funny.

so in lawgic we will write it like this:
Sarah dates a guy ----> he is not funny
now you can abbreviate Sarah dating to SD and not funny to /F
SD-->/F

So you want to see the above statements of "never" as what is the thing that's not allowed if the sufficient condition kicks.

lets try another example:
If you plant seeds in winter they will never bloom.
so if the sufficient condition happens "the seeds get planted in winter (SPW)
The only thing we will know for sure is that they will never bloom (/B)
so we get: SPW---> /B

As you can see from our two examples the "never" gets put in the necessary condition. This is because it's an attribute of what happens when the sufficient condition kicks in.
If its an apple its never blue.
A-->/B
again the "never" got put in the necessary condition because we are not saying "if its not apple". We need our sufficient condition to kick in to conclude about what can "never be true" of that sufficient indicator.
Similarly we can also do the contrapositive.
B-->/A
Again the "never" went in the necessary condition because if a sufficient condition of something being blue happens we know that its not possible its apple. Its easier to see it in english this way at first.

So as you can see it didn't matter if we put Apple or Blue in our sufficient condition, just that we "negate the necessary" condition. Which is what in short we have named what the group 4 indicators do; they negate the necessary. It really doesn't matter which one you put where.

Lets come back to our first example:
If the guy is funny can Sarah date him? Nope.
So in lawgic it will say: Funny-->Sarah not date him or F-->/SD


I hope this helped. Let me know if it didn't.

BinghamtonDave

The translation of that is:
If Sarah is dating then it is not a funny guy.
D---->F
"Never" is a group 4 conditional indicator. How we do this on the LSAT is to negate the necessary condition.

It might be helpful to think about it like this: what if I were to tell you that I never cheer for the New England Patriots. What, conditionally could you conclude from that statement? JY says in the lessons on this topic that the first idea "exists in a conditional relationship with the second idea."
Lets talk that through: Given our example above, how about if you see me cheering? what do you know has to be the necessary condition of that statement? That I'm am not doing that cheering for the Patriots!

If David Cheering then not for the New England Patriots

Well, what if you see me watching the New England Patriots? If I am watching the New England Patriots, you know that the necessary condition is that I won't be doing any cheering.

If David watches NE Patriots then not cheering

How about this:
David never gets a perfect score on a reading comprehension section.

If I tell you that I got a perfect score on a section, what is the necessary condition for that state of events? That it wasn't an RC section.

What about if I just took a reading comprehension section? The necessary condition for that state of events is that you know that it wasn't an RC section.


What the word "never" is telling us is that the necessary condition in our relationship is negated. Essentially, when we see the word never on this exam, it has to trigger that the necessary condition cannot exist unnegated with the sufficient condition in place.


I never win on scratch off lottery tickets.

If I won, the only thing you can get from that statement was that it was not from a scratch off lottery ticket.

Won----->lottery ticket


Hope this helps
-David

CinnamonTea

Thank you so much both of you!