Use of Negatives

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• Cant Get Right Yearly + Live Member Sage ⭐ 🍌 7Sage Tutor

  February 2022 27900 karma

  I love this question so much.

  This really gets at the complexity of language. The answer to your question is, "It depends."

  And that's either a really fascinating or deeply frustrating answer, lol.

  Language is not obligated to be clear and concise. It is a biological process and we have studied its structure at a fairly high level of sophistication, but it's not something anyone ever sat down and invented. If you're interested in that, check out Noam Chomsky. A lot of people know him as a political commentator and celebrated intellectual, but he's also the most important linguist of the modern era. Anyway, before going down that rabbit hole, let's look at your statements. There's really several different ways we could interpret them. If I were to just say this to my friend, it would probably depend on context what I actually meant.

  You will not have to worry about having something to say.

  I could mean:
  1. Don't worry about it. When the time comes to speak, you'll find the words. You will have something to say.
  or
  2. Don't worry about it. You won't have to say anything at all.
  It just depends. And I think

  You will not have to worry about not having something to say.

  has the exact same possible meanings. Both statements are ambiguous in such a way that they can carry the exact same meaning. So their seeming the same is not superficial. It's actually complex and nuanced.

  So what do we do with this in the context of the LSAT?

  Well the first thing that needs to be noted is that there is no conditional relationship here. Why are we trying to diagram this? The instinct towards diagramming as a means of establishing precision in meaning can be misguided sometimes. If formal representation helps you nail down a conditional relationship in a way that adds clarification and precision to your understanding, fine. But is that the case here? You can force nearly anything into a conditional, but sometimes it can really be forced in a way that actually complicates meaning more. "I like apples," becomes, "If a thing is an apple, then I like that thing." We can diagram this, but does that add clarification? Do you understand my original statement better than you did before for having diagrammed it? Absolutely not. So don't force it. This goes for the above statement as well as 90% of other things you're going to read on the LSAT. The LSAT just isn't a conditional logic test. It isn't. It's a language test and sometimes we use conditional logic to indicate a specific kind of relationship. When we indicate such a relationship, we have a method of abstract representation which can be helpful to learn the implications of such relationships, generally and specifically. We emphasize this in teaching LSAT because it's important and complicated. But it is a very small part of what we're doing. The overwhelming majority of things you read on the LSAT just won't be conditional and will be complicated rather than simplified by conditional reasoning. If conditional representation/thinking is not going to add clarity, it is inappropriate to apply.

  So that's a pet-peeve of mine. Conditional logic is way overrepresented in LSAT curriculums. It kind of has to be because it is important and complicated and requires a lot of content to fully develop, but students often misunderstand and think that its emphasis corresponds to its frequency on the test and it just doesn't.

  But the far more interesting thing is just that different statements mean the same thing here. The LSAT tries to steer clear of these types of ambiguities, but they do come up. When that happens, you have to use context to identify the meaning. That isn't something that can be reduced into clean rules or formal representation. But that's language. At the end of the day it is too organic and chaotic to always conform to our structures for understanding it. When that happens, you've got to be responsive to it outside of those frameworks.
• 1 Like

  sammy400 Member

  February 2022 14 karma

  Thanks for the detailed response. I was at a loss as to how to precisely interpret the two sentences, so I thought I might try to force them into a conditional relationship in order to get a visual representation. However, after doing that, it only complicated things as you correctly point out.

  The LSAT learning curve is going to be an interesting one.