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
Comments
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.
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.
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.