What Is a Precondition

Contents

1. The precondition, stated fairly
2. Three cases the picture cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. What the word is the name of
5. A condition has no start date
6. Two things under one word
7. “The preconditions are in place”
8. “No preconditions”
9. What it does not mean
10. What it costs
11. An ordinary Tuesday

A precondition, as people ordinarily use the word, is something that has to be true before something else can go ahead. You hear it most often about talks. One side sets preconditions for talks; the other side calls them unacceptable; after a while one side drops its preconditions, or both do, and the talks begin. Or nobody sets any, and the talks are announced as being “without preconditions.” Outside negotiations the word turns up in forecasts: the preconditions for a recovery are now in place; the preconditions for a major fire are in place across the region.

The picture underneath is reasonable and mostly works. A precondition is a kind of gate. It is put up at some point, it stands for a while, and it is either opened — met — or taken down — dropped. Gates have histories, so preconditions have histories: a date when they were set, a date when they were met or waived, a stretch in between when they were in force. When enough of them are open at once, the conditions are “in place,” and whatever was waiting can proceed.

None of this is foolish. People who negotiate for a living use the word precisely, and a forecaster who says the preconditions are in place is saying something checkable. The question is not whether the word is useful. It is what, exactly, carries all those dates.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam is the same in all three. The picture gives a precondition a lifespan — set, in force, met or dropped — and then has to put that lifespan somewhere. In the first case it lands on two statements that the talks turned out not to need. In the second it lands on a requirement that did not change, when what changed was the brush. In the third it lands on a sentence one person said and could unsay. All three cases are composites, not reported events, and none takes a side in the kind of dispute it is drawn from.

The neighbours

Several earlier pieces stand close to this one, and the resemblances should be named rather than left for the reader to find.

The piece on an opportunity took the same primitive and spent its first denial on a window: each date in an opportunity story sits on a mark, and what opens and closes is whether a condition is legible to somebody, not the condition. It said in one sentence that being required is not an occurrence and that the temporal shape belonged elsewhere. This piece is that elsewhere. The difference is the verbs. An opportunity is said to arrive and close; a precondition is said to be set, imposed, waived, dropped and put in place — verbs of somebody doing something to it — and that turns the question from when can it be seen? into who can make it, and who can take it away?

The piece on a requirement owns the positive clause of the definition: a prerequisite is necessary, and nothing in the definition makes it sufficient. This piece carries that from there in words and uses only its plainest part — that if an outcome happens without a thing, the thing was not a prerequisite of it. The piece on a technicality owns the claim that a prerequisite is not inert; this piece does not depend on it. The piece on a compromise owns what happens once two parties are at the table with two conditions and one mark to make. This piece stays in the room before the table.

And the piece on set in stone, two days ago, read non-negotiable and its relatives as a keeping: a rate of revision held low by a person who answers for holding it. Part of this piece’s ending sounds like that one, and the difference is where the argument starts. That piece started from what cannot change and found a keeper. This one starts from what cannot start or stop, and finds that the thing being set and dropped was not a condition in the first place.

What the word is the name of

I work from a small set of numbered primitives and the results derived from them. The one doing the work today is the definition of a condition: a condition is a prerequisite in order for something to happen or exist. It does not cause, does not make possible, and does not happen (P6). An idea, in the same vocabulary, is a named condition, and naming does not create it; naming makes the relationship conscious (P7).

A precondition, in the word’s plain sense, is a prerequisite — the extra pre- only repeats what prerequisite already says. So the definition applies to it directly, and its third denial is the one this piece is about. The first two have been spent elsewhere in the series. The third — does not happen — is short, and it is the one the ordinary word breaks most often, because the ordinary word is full of dates.

A condition has no start date

Take the third denial at face value. A condition does not happen. So it has no occasion: no moment at which it began to hold and no moment at which it stopped. A prerequisite that started would need a stretch beforehand during which the outcome did not rest on it, and then a moment when the outcome came to rest on it — and that moment would be the condition happening, which the definition rules out.

Now go back through the cases and ask what is carrying each date. The union’s statement was made on a day. So was the company’s. So were both withdrawals. The brush dried over a month, and the readings were taken on particular afternoons. The brother’s sentence was said after the funeral. Each of these is either a mark — in the foundation’s locked sense, an imperfect historical mark made in relation to an exemplar: a statement made in relation to what it names, a reading made in relation to what it measures — or a thing changing: the brush getting drier, the strike going on. None of the dates belongs to a prerequisite.

The last sentence of that box matters, and it is worth saying again in the open. The obvious way to finish the thought is so a condition is timeless. The foundation does not say that, and neither does this piece. The definition denies a condition an occurrence. It does not then hand it a different relation to time. What can be said is only the negative: the dates are elsewhere.

Two things under one word

If no condition has a start date, then a precondition that was set on a Monday was not a condition. So what was it?

It was a statement. We will not come back to the table until the steward is reinstated. That sentence does two things at once. It names something — reinstatement — and it announces what the speaker will do until that thing is met. Call it a stipulation, to keep it apart from a prerequisite. The word precondition covers both, and the verbs sort them cleanly. A stipulation can be set, imposed, waived, dropped, softened and renewed, because it is something somebody made. A prerequisite can be none of those things, because it is not something anybody made.

Could a stipulation turn its named thing into a prerequisite, simply by being said firmly enough? Two lines of the foundation say no. Naming does not create a condition (P7): saying that reinstatement is required does not make anything rest on reinstatement. And the person who made the stipulation can occupy a position from which their response to a readable condition is revisable (P5). So in case one, what stood between the two sides and the table for three weeks was not reinstatement. It was the union’s continuing refusal — a response, revisable by the people making it, and revised on a Wednesday. A requirement that holds only as long as somebody keeps requiring it is a person’s position. It has the shape of a mark, not of a condition.

The record keeps both statements. Records update expectation forward and do not reopen (R2), so the demand made on the first Monday is still in the record after it was dropped; the withdrawal is a second mark beside it, not an erasure of it. That is why the history of a negotiation can be written at all. It is a history of statements, each dated, none edited away.

Figure 01

What carries the date in four ordinary sentences about preconditions

The sentence	What carries the date	What did not happen	Who answers
“They set preconditions on Monday.”	Monday’s statement: a stipulation, naming a thing and announcing a response.	Nothing came to be required on Monday.	Whoever made the statement.
“Both sides dropped their preconditions.”	Wednesday’s statements, added to the record beside Monday’s.	Nothing stopped being required on Wednesday.	Whoever made the withdrawals.
“The preconditions are now in place.”	The things that changed — the brush, a signed ceasefire, a passed law — and somebody’s reading that they now meet a named condition.	No condition came into place.	Whoever made the marks, and whoever made the reading.
“Talks without preconditions.”	An absence of stipulations, as of the day of announcing.	No prerequisite was removed.	The parties, for what they did and did not stipulate.

“The preconditions are in place”

The forecaster’s sentence deserves its own section, because it is the one that sounds most like a condition arriving. Read it with the table. Over a hot month the brush dried; that is a change in a thing, and it has dates. On particular afternoons somebody measured humidity and fuel moisture and wrote the numbers down; those are marks, and they have dates. Then somebody read those marks against what a large fire requires and said: met. That reading has a date too.

So the preconditions are now in place is a true sentence, and what it dates is two things: the marks and changes that now meet a named condition, and the reading that they do. Nothing on the side of the condition moved. This matters in practice for one reason. A reading can be wrong, and a reading can be late. If the gauges were misread, the preconditions were not in place, whatever the bulletin said; if nobody read them, they were in place, whatever the bulletin did not say. What the sentence reports is a finding, and findings are checked against marks.

“The preconditions are now in place” dates the marks and the reading. Nothing on the side of the condition came into place, because a condition does not come or go.

“No preconditions”

Now the phrase that announces talks. The two sides will meet without preconditions. Read as a sentence about prerequisites, it cannot be true: whatever the talks rest on, they rest on it whether or not anybody names it, because naming does not create a condition (P7), and not naming does not remove one. Read as a sentence about stipulations, it is plainly true and useful: nobody has announced a response that waits on a named thing.

One caution belongs here. The foundation defines what a condition is. It does not say that whatever happens has one, and this piece does not need it to. The argument runs in one direction only: if the talks rest on something, the announcement did not take it away.

The plainest part of the definition then gives a test, carried in words from the piece on a requirement: a prerequisite is necessary, so if an outcome happens without a thing, that thing was not a prerequisite of it. Apply it to case one. The talks began on Thursday with the steward still suspended and the walkout still on. So neither named thing was a prerequisite of the talks. That settles what the stipulations were not. It settles nothing about whether reinstatement is a prerequisite of a settlement, which is a different outcome, later, with its own requirements. A negotiator who names a prerequisite of the end and attaches it to the start has made a stipulation about the start. Dropping it from the start leaves it exactly where it was, if it was a prerequisite of the end at all.

What it does not mean

Four misreadings sit close enough to the argument that they should be stated and refused.

Stipulations are bluffs. No. A stipulation is a genuine mark with consequences, and it is often the most honest thing a party can say: this is what I will do until that is met. The piece does not say any stipulation is unwise, insincere or unfair. The argument supports the party that sets one and the party it is set against equally well; it only says what kind of thing was set.

Nothing is really required. The opposite. Prerequisites are untouched by the verbs in this piece. They are exactly the part of the situation nobody can drop.

Conditions are timeless. Not said. The definition denies a condition an occurrence; it does not give it another way of being in time, and whether conditions are abstract objects is held open in the foundation and left open here.

The person who calls it a precondition is lying. Usually not. Most stipulations name something the speaker reads as a prerequisite of a later outcome — a settlement, a reconciliation — and the reading may be right. The piece sorts what was said; it does not grade the person who said it.

What it costs

The stipulator loses “it’s not up to me.” A precondition presented as a condition sounds like a fact about the world that the speaker is merely reporting. Read as a stipulation, it is the speaker’s own mark, kept at the speaker’s discretion, and answered for by the speaker (R13). Holding it may be right. It is no longer out of their hands.

The other side loses something too. If the thing named is in fact a prerequisite of the settlement, then getting it dropped from the talks buys talks and nothing else. Pressing the other party to “drop their preconditions” is a reasonable thing to want when what they have set is a stipulation about the start. It changes nothing about what the end requires.

Waiting for the conditions to be right loses its comfort. When the conditions are right sounds like something that will happen without anybody doing anything. On this reading, nothing on the side of the condition is going to happen. What can happen is marks — things made, statements withdrawn, readings taken — and each of them has a maker.

An ordinary Tuesday

1. When you hear “precondition,” ask whether it has a date. If somebody set it, it is a stipulation. If nobody could have set it, it is a prerequisite. The verbs give it away.
2. When you set one, say it in the first person. Not “that is a precondition” but “I will not do this until that.” It is the same stipulation, and it is honest about whose it is.
3. Use the test. If the thing goes ahead without what was named, what was named was not required for it. Note what that does and does not settle.
4. Separate the start from the end. Something required for an agreement is not thereby required for a conversation. Dropping it from the conversation leaves it where it was.
5. When something is “finally in place,” ask what was made and who read it. The finding is only as good as the marks and the reading.
6. Do not wait for the conditions to arrive. They are not on their way. Look at what is left to be made.