Is this a mistake?

Chipster Study

In one of the early exercises on sufficient and necessary phrases and finding the lawgic indicators I am having trouble understanding JY's reasoning.

"The essential elements of calligraphy have not changed in any material way for over two thousand years."

He has "have" as the indicator and the lawgic as essential elements arrow to not changed and changed to not essential elements.

However, "have" is not on the list he presented but any is and he ignored this in the answer???

Thoughts? Thanks

sarkisp23

Any in this instance is being used as a way of talking about the "degree of change." As in, not in any way. Or not at all.

It is not talking about "categories of things." Any person that steals is evil. Those are categories. So if [person that steals], then [evil].

So since the calligraphy sentence is not using the categories version of any, then "any" wouldn't be the logical indicator. You can't really diagram the lawgic of that other usage of any I outlined. So the logical indicator would have to be another word. That other word is have.

Have can be a logical indicator like this:

"Jim has money."

So what do we know about Jim? He has money. If Jim, then money. So Jim is the sufficient condition and money is the necessary condition. If the only piece of information we had was "Jim," well then we would automatically have the piece of information "money" as well.

Similar words to have are: has (obviously), had, does, and is.

sarkisp23

Oh and to bring it back to your sentence above. The sentence is talking about those aforementioned categories. So this thing (A) has this other thing (B). Ex. This plane has wings.

The not is what confuses. Ex. This car does NOT have wings. So, if [this car], then what do we know about it? It does not have wings. And if we see something that does have wings? Well, it can't possibly be this car. That's the contrapositive.

SO, if it's an essential element, then it has not changed. If it's something that has changed? Well that thing can't possibly be an essential element.

Chipster Study

but "material way" is a category, any material way is a category, you know where you stand with those words??

Chipster Study

Sometimes JY's rules are confusing because he then goes onto violate his own instructions on how to do the problems.

emli1000

@"Chipster Study" said:
he then goes onto violate his own instructions on how to do the problems.

I don't ever recall JY violating his own instructions. If anything it was me, I didn't understand the question stem correctly or I misinterpreted an answer choice. Sometimes you just need to drill more and memorize some of the indicators. There may not always be indicators on every LR questions and that is when you have to use your intuition to figure out what is the sufficient condition and/or the necessary condition. But with time all if this will begin to click, eventually.

Pacifico

I found this in the syllabus and if you watch the video, JY specifically says there is no logical indicator in this sentence and he threw this question in there to test your ability to recognize sufficient and necessary conditions without it. He uses "have" as a stand in for a logical indicator just to help with the explanation, but because it isn't one, you can't use the four groups, instead you have to understand the logic of what the sentence is actually saying. In fact, that is exactly why he says you can use "have" as the indicator in this case: because it is performing that function in the sentence when one grasps the meaning.

While @sarkisp23 gets at some interesting concepts regarding uses of the word "any", however I think the real reason that "any" is not a logical indicator in this sentence is because it is a part of the predicate of the second clause to indicate the degree to which it has not changed. In my opinion, "any material way" is essentially functioning as an adverb to modify "not changed", and therefore it is not playing a role in dictating the logic of the sentence. Furthermore, you could take out "any material way" and it wouldn't really affect the meaning of the sentence very much.

As another example to perhaps simplify this, think about the sentence, "Jedi do not use the force in any material way". How would you diagram that?

The important thing to remember is that while the logical indicators are a helpful tool, they are ultimately a crutch, and you still need to be able to parse out the logic of a sentence and understand what it is saying apart from what the indicators tell you. You also need to understand context and recognize when those words appear but are not acting as indicators.

Chipster Study

Sark, Em, and Pac, Thanks for your thoughts and ideas. Appreciate the help. I will noodle on it.