What Is a Requirement

Contents

1. A requirement, stated fairly
2. The neighbours
3. Three cases the picture cannot hold
4. What the definition says, and what it leaves out
5. One direction only
6. The list is a naming
7. What meeting a requirement is
8. What it costs
9. An ordinary Tuesday

The word comes stapled to things we want. Entry requirements. Minimum requirements. The requirements for the role. Meets all requirements. By the time most of us are grown we have met hundreds of them — a grade for a course, a signature on a form, a birth certificate for a passport, a qualifying time for a race — and we have learned to read them in a particular way.

The way is a checklist. Somebody who knows what an outcome takes writes it down; you work down the list; each tick brings the outcome a little closer; the last tick delivers it, or ought to. On this picture a requirement is a portion of the outcome — a share of it, handed over in advance — and a completed list is something close to a claim on the rest. That is why I met every requirement comes so easily after a refusal, and why it is said with such conviction. It is heard as an argument that the refusal was a mistake.

The picture is not naive. Lists written by people who know the work are useful, and they are right about a great deal. So it is worth asking what the word itself says. Not whether any list is fair, and not what belongs on one. What a requirement is.

The neighbours

Three earlier pieces sit close enough that the difference should be stated first. The piece on opportunity took apart the idea that a condition does something to an outcome — that it happens, or causes, or makes possible — and this piece takes all three denials as read rather than running them again. The piece on technicalities showed that a requirement which decided an outcome cannot have been idle; it stayed with a single rule and with procedure. This one stays with the prerequisite rather than with any rule that lists it, and asks the question that piece left alone: what a requirement decides when it is met. And the piece on discovery used the definition of a condition only as the ground of a naming. Here the definition is the subject.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

Put the checklist against three ordinary cases.

The seam is the same in all three. Each requirement was met, and the outcome did not come with it. And in each case the checklist picture comes with a reply: then the list was incomplete — there must have been another requirement, unwritten, that was not met. Sometimes that reply is right. It is worth noticing that the picture depends on it being right in every case, which is a much stronger claim, and one we will come back to.

Figure 01

What “I met every requirement” is carrying, and whose each part is

In the sentence	Whose it is	What the foundation lets it say
The requirement	Nobody’s	The name of a prerequisite — something the outcome needs. It says nothing about what the outcome will get.
The list	Its writer’s	A finite naming of such prerequisites. Not an inventory of everything the outcome rests on, and not able to become one.
The meeting	Yours	A mark — the transcript, the certificate, the recorded time — read against a named condition. Dated, permanent, and answered for by the person who made it.
The outcome	In none of the three	The definition gives the first row nothing to yield it from, the second row cannot certify that nothing else was needed, and the third row is a fact about marks.

What the definition says, and what it leaves out

I work from a small set of numbered primitives and the results derived from them. One primitive does most of the work today, and it is the plainest sentence in the foundation. A condition is a prerequisite in order for something to happen or exist (P6). The same primitive then denies a condition three things: it does not cause, it does not make possible, and it does not happen. Earlier pieces in this series have worked those denials hard. This one takes the clause they are attached to.

Read that clause for its direction. It is written from the outcome’s side. It says what the outcome needs: for this to happen or exist, that is required. It says nothing, either way, about what the condition supplies. Required is the whole of its positive content. A requirement, in ordinary English, is the name of such a prerequisite; named, a condition is an idea (P7), and that is all the word adds.

Now set the logician’s two words against it. Necessary: without it, the outcome does not happen or exist. That is simply what prerequisite means, so the definition contains it. Sufficient: with it, the outcome does. The definition does not contain that. And the two ways ordinary speech usually slips it in are exactly two of the three the definition denies — that the condition causes the outcome, and that it makes the outcome possible, in the sense of a door held open or a permission granted. Take both away and there is nothing left in the definition from which a met requirement could produce the thing it is a requirement for, or promise it.

One question should be settled before going further, because the checklist assumes the answer. Does one outcome have several prerequisites? The bread says so, and most lists say so. The primitives neither say it nor forbid it. The definition speaks of a prerequisite, one at a time, and nothing in it restricts an outcome to one; the circumference on which conditions sit is not closed by any enumeration (S1). That permits many prerequisites for one outcome. It does not prove that any particular outcome has more than one, and the argument here does not need it to. The construction above holds for a single requirement. The next two hold for a list of one.

One direction only

Go back to the piece on technicalities with the construction in hand. Every case in it — the search without a warrant, the will with one witness, the passport a day out of date — was a requirement unmet. That was not an accident of selection. It is the only way a requirement, by itself, decides anything.

Follow the definition both ways. Unmet: the outcome rested on the prerequisite, the prerequisite is absent, and the outcome does not happen or exist. That is not the requirement doing something — the piece on opportunity settled that a missing prerequisite is an absence, not an obstacle pushing back — it is what prerequisite means. Met: the definition has no clause to apply. It is silent. So the only verdict a requirement can return by itself is no.

• Unmet The outcome, which rested on it, does not happen. The requirement decided. This is where every technicality lives. A verdict: no.
• Met The definition has nothing to say. The requirement decided nothing on its own. Whatever happens next is not settled by this. No verdict. Not yes.
• Not on the list The list cannot say whether it is there. A list is a naming. See the next section. Unknown to the list.

This is not a claim that met requirements do not matter. They matter in exactly the way the definition says: without them there would have been nothing further to decide. The student who passed the first course was in the room for the second. That is not small. It is just not the second course.

A gate can be believed when it says no. It has not said yes when it lets you through.

The list is a naming

Now the reply that comes with the checklist. When every listed requirement is met and the outcome does not follow, people holding the picture conclude that the list was missing something. That conclusion may be true on a given day. What cannot be true is the assumption underneath it: that a complete list was there to be written, and that a careful enough writer would have written it.

Every condition is a point on one circumference, and the circumference is infinite; no enumeration closes it (S1). The foundation keeps two words apart here and does not let them trade places. Conditions are nameable without limit. The conditions named at any moment are finite. A requirements list is a set of named conditions. It is a naming, not an inventory — which is as true of a list of seven as of a list of one.

Notice that this cuts toward the writer of the list as much as toward the reader. Whoever writes meet these and you are in is promising more than a list can hold. Whoever writes without these we cannot consider you is promising exactly what a list can.

What meeting a requirement is

When you meet a requirement, what is it, exactly, that meets it? Not the outcome, and not you in general. Something made: the transcript, the certificate, the qualifying time as recorded, the dough on the counter, the form with both signatures. The foundation has a locked word for these — an artifact, an imperfect historical mark made in relation to an exemplar. Meeting a requirement is a mark read against a named condition. Meets is the verdict of that reading.

Three things follow, and they are the part of the word worth keeping.

The meeting is yours in a way the requirement never was. The requirement names a condition, and a condition belongs to nobody. The mark was made by someone, and the person is the site of conscious responsibility for it (R13).

The meeting is permanent. Records update expectation forward and never re-open (R2). A qualification met on a date stays met on that date, whatever happens to the application it went into. A refusal adds a record beside it. It does not reach back and un-meet anything.

And the disappointment has an address. A requirements list is usually read by two people at once, and both of them are forecasting. The writer of an advertisement is predicting what the work will need — in the foundation’s terms, an entry in the writer’s expectation, the denominator of R = A/E (P4). That is worth a sentence and no more; it is a forecast and should be read as one. The reader is predicting something else: that meeting the list will be enough. That second forecast is the checklist picture, and it is the one the first construction removes. When the refusal comes, what the applicant meets is neither the refusal alone nor the forecast alone but the quotient of the two (R8) — a surprise, felt, and below what was expected. That surprise is not evidence that the marks were read wrongly. It measures how much sufficiency was expected from a list that only ever named necessities.

What it costs

Three costs, and each takes away something people lean on.

“I did everything right” stops being a claim. It remains a true report, often a creditable one. It stops being an argument that the outcome was due. Doing everything required can end in nothing, and nothing in the foundation says otherwise or says that it will be made up somewhere else. That is bleak, and it should be said plainly rather than softened.

The checklist loses its sense of progress. Ticks feel like distance covered toward the outcome. They are distance covered in marks — made, dated, yours — and not a fraction of the thing on the far side. People who organise their lives by lists will feel this one.

The gatekeeper loses a shelter too. A person who writes requirements cannot say anyone who meets these will, and cannot answer a disappointed applicant with you met the list, so the list was not the problem as though that closed the matter. The list was a naming. Whatever the decision rested on beyond it belongs to the people who made the decision, and they answer for that mark as the applicant answers for hers.

An ordinary Tuesday

1. Read every requirement as “needed for”, not “enough for”. Then ask the second question the list cannot answer: what else does this rest on?
2. When you have met them all, say “I qualify”, not “I’m owed”. And plan for the no before it comes, because the list was never in a position to rule it out.
3. When you write requirements for other people, write only what a list can hold. Without these we cannot consider you is true. With these you are in usually is not, and saying it costs someone later.
4. Judge the preparation by the requirement, not by the result. The evaluative question for a mark is fidelity, not success (R11): did the transcript, the portfolio, the time meet the condition it was made toward? That question has an answer on the day, and the answer does not change when the letter comes.
5. Revise the reading, not the record. What is yours to change is your response to a readable condition (P5) — here, the habit of reading a list as a promise. The marks already made stay made.