The author uses the word "immediacy" (line 39) most likely in order to express

hales on June 25, 2019

Sufficient and Necessary - Example 4

I need further clarification on example 4. Not every sentence will always have sufficient and necessary terminology and this is where I struggle - how and what do you do with these sentences? To break this sentence down - I understand how you turn sentence one: "Historically, monetary systems have developed only in population centers with marketplaces." into S&N terminology. Where I am confused is the next sentence: "Through the fourth century B.C./ Mesopotamian cities engaged in trade, but never had marketplaces." How is this sentence used to draw the premise that not market places leading to the conclusion not market centers? The third sentence: "Greek cities all had marketplaces, or algorse." _ I understand how that is turned into S&N terminology. However, the fourth sentence I am confused as to its role as well. What function does it play?

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Ravi on July 12, 2019

@hales,

Happy to help.

If a sentence contains no sufficient/necessary terminology, then you
almost certainly don't need to diagram it. There are plenty of
sentences that don't contain any conditional logic, so don't worry
about it when you come across a sentence that can't be diagrammed.

Regarding the sentence you're confused about ("Historically, monetary
systems have developed only in population centers with marketplaces"),
we could technically write this out as

Mesopotamian cities - >NO marketplaces

Since it's implied that we're discussing Mesopotamian cities, Mehran
abbreviates this to /MP in the example. So, for Mesopotamian cities,
we know they don't have marketplaces, which allows us to conclude that
they don't have monetary systems.

Regarding your confusion about the last sentence: the last sentence
introduces facts that are intended to distract you from the inference
of

MS - >MP
/MP - >/MS
/MP
/MS

The last sentence tells us that Greek cities' marketplaces were
centrally located and that goods were traded there for either money or
for commodities.

In this sentence, there is no wording that denotes sufficient and
necessary conditions. The types of words to look out for are words
like all, any, every, if, the only, only, when, whenever, must, only
if, then, requires, etc.

The aforementioned terms, and all terms that describe sufficient and
necessary language, are strongly worded and do not provide room for
exceptions. We're told that the Greek cities' agorae were centrally
located, but were ALL of the Greek cities' agorae centrally located?
We do not know. Additionally, We're told that goods were traded there
either for money or for commodities, but were ALL goods there traded
for either money or for commodities? We do not know. In other words,
we do not know if there were any exceptions.

Technically, if we assumed that all of the Greek cities' agorae were
centrally located, we could write

Greek city agorae - ->centrally located agorae
/centrally located agorae - >/Greek city agorae

and if we assumed that all goods at the Greek marketplaces were traded
for either money or for commodities, we could write

Greek city marketplace goods - ->traded for money or traded for commodities
/traded for money and /traded for commodities - >/Greek city marketplace goods

However, note that we'd be making assumptions here since there is no
conditional language in the sentence. As a result, since there is no
conditional language, we do not write out sufficient and necessary
conditions with this last sentence.

Does this help? Let us know if you have more questions!

hales on July 17, 2019

Wonderful explanation, as always. That makes much more sense, thank you so much for the the help!