A myopic view of “necessity and sufficiency:” a case of conjunctivitis?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Genetics, Neuroscience
- Keywords
- commentary, neuroscience, genetics, neural circuits, optogenetics
- Copyright
- © 2019 Anderson et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. A myopic view of “necessity and sufficiency:” a case of conjunctivitis? PeerJ Preprints 7:e27812v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27812v1
Abstract
A recent perspective has argued that the phrase “Necessary and Sufficient,” long a staple of the genetics literature, has been misapplied in the context of neuroscience, and should be abandoned (Yoshihara and Yoshihara, 2018). Here we rebut this proposal on both logical and semantic grounds. We argue that the claim that “Necessary and Sufficient” is “misapplied” in genetics and neuroscience rests on its narrow meaning in formal logic, in which the phrase is used to define the properties of classes of objects. In genetics, however, this term is used as shorthand to summarize the results of different kinds of experiments. This logical conflict, moreover, applies only to the conjunctive phrase “Necessary and Sufficient;” the unlinked use of those words to describe genetic results is simply a matter of semantics.
Author Comment
This article is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. It is an opinion piece rebutting a commentary by Yoshihara and Yoshihara (2018, J. Neurogenet. 32, 53-64), which was highlighted in an editorial published in Nature (Nature 558, 162 (2018) doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-05418-0).