Sufficient & Necessary Questions - - Question 4

Efficiency and redundancy are contradictory characteristics of linguistic systems; however, they can be used together...

180 October 7, 2013

Sufficient and necessary condition

I am curious as to know why there was not any S & N in the beginning of the sentence; moreover, I used the first part of the sentence in my diagram which threw me off. I know the key terms for S & N but the previous questions had the words are which separated the S from the N logic should I only worry about known sufficient and necessary terminology and disregard everything else in my diagram? Thank you in advance for your assistance.

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Mehran October 8, 2013

It is important to remember the idea behind Sufficient & Necessary, (i.e. the existence of the sufficient condition 100% guarantees the existence of the necessary condition) because not all S & N statements we encounter on the LSAT will have S & N key word indicators.

The first sentence here, "Efficiency and redundancy are contradictory characteristics of linguistic systems" is not a sufficient and necessary statement. This is not a general principle. Similarly, the second part of the first sentence, "they can be used together to achieve usefulness and reliability in communication," is also not a sufficient and necessary statement because of the presence of the word "can." Usefulness and reliability in communication is possible, but it doesn't 100% follow.

Let's take a look at another example without sufficient and necessary keyword indicators:

Cats are invariably irrirating.

This would be a sufficient and necessary statement because we know that if something is a cat, it is invariably irritating so it would be diagrammed as follows:

C ==> II
not II ==> not C

Hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.

180 October 21, 2013

Thank you that made sense I know have conquered this question now that you have enlightened me