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kens July 17, 2020

Sufficient & Necessary General Questions

I am confused as to what the best way is when writing diagram for certain conditional. For instance, when the statement says if y show no profit, do we write np for no profit or write profit and put cross over it. I guess it both means the same thing, but will it change the overall meaning? I always get confused when writing negative conditionals. I hope this make sense and Thanks in advance!

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shunhe July 17, 2020

Hi @kenken,

Thanks for the question! So in the end, it’s whatever makes the most sense to you. However, I personally like to diagram things like “No profit” as

~Profit (or profit with a cross)

Instead of writing out “no profit.” And I would also suggest this for most people. This is for the simple reason that if I have to take the negation of it for some reason (like a contrapositive), then I’d have to write out something like

~No profit (or No profit with a cross)

Which is a double negative and just unnecessarily confusing. It’s like that one episode of The Office where Michael Scott is telling people “Don’t Bother Luke,” but crossed it out, which just confused everyone (as Phyllis said, “it’s like you’re saying we should bother Luke”). You want to avoid confusing yourself when possible, and double negatives are confusing, so would recommend diagramming “no profit” as ~Profit to avoid having to say “not no profit” at some point.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.