Your sentence structure is: if {condition} then {subject} MUST {verb} in order to {purpose}. Here “must” carries the meaning of necessity and lack of choice.
No, ‘must’ here is acting as a logical conditional; it could be rephrased as ‘if {condition} and {subject} does not {verb}, then {purpose} will not occur’ without changing the denotation or even connotation. This isn’t a rare structure, and is the usual interpretation of ‘must’ in sentences of this kind. Leaving off the {purpose} would change the dominant parsing to the imperative sense of must.
It’s curious that we parse your sentence differently. To me your original sentence unambiguously contains “the imperative sense of must” and your rephrasing is very different connotationally.
Let’s try it:
“If the results are communicated with perfect clarity, but the recipient is insufficiently moved by the evidence … and the AI does not manipulate us then the emotional justification will not be in line with the logical one.”
Yep, sounds completely different to my ear and conveys a different meaning.
That’s an interesting “must”.
This is a commonly-used grammatical structure in which ‘must’ acts as a conditional. What’s your problem?
Conditional?
Your sentence structure is: if {condition} then {subject} MUST {verb} in order to {purpose}. Here “must” carries the meaning of necessity and lack of choice.
No, ‘must’ here is acting as a logical conditional; it could be rephrased as ‘if {condition} and {subject} does not {verb}, then {purpose} will not occur’ without changing the denotation or even connotation. This isn’t a rare structure, and is the usual interpretation of ‘must’ in sentences of this kind. Leaving off the {purpose} would change the dominant parsing to the imperative sense of must.
It’s curious that we parse your sentence differently. To me your original sentence unambiguously contains “the imperative sense of must” and your rephrasing is very different connotationally.
Let’s try it:
“If the results are communicated with perfect clarity, but the recipient is insufficiently moved by the evidence … and the AI does not manipulate us then the emotional justification will not be in line with the logical one.”
Yep, sounds completely different to my ear and conveys a different meaning.