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Necessity vs Modality - What's the difference?

necessity | modality |

As nouns the difference between necessity and modality

is that necessity is the quality or state of being necessary, unavoidable, or absolutely requisite while modality is the fact of being modal.

necessity

Noun

(necessities)
  • The quality or state of being necessary, unavoidable, or absolutely requisite.
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-28, author=(Joris Luyendijk)
  • , volume=189, issue=3, page=21, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Our banks are out of control , passage=Seeing the British establishment struggle with the financial sector is like watching an alcoholic […].  Until 2008 there was denial over what finance had become. […]  But the scandals kept coming, […]. A broad section of the political class now recognises the need for change but remains unable to see the necessity of a fundamental overhaul.}}
  • The condition of being needy or necessitous; pressing need; indigence; want.
  • That which is necessary; a requisite; something indispensable.
  • *
  • Love and compassion are necessities , not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.
  • That which makes an act or an event unavoidable; irresistible force; overruling power; compulsion, physical or moral; fate; fatality.
  • * 1804 , Wordsworth,
  • I stopped, and said with inly muttered voice,
    'It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold:
    This neither is its courage nor its choice,
    But its necessity in being old.
  • The negation of freedom in voluntary action; the subjection of all phenomena, whether material or spiritual, to inevitable causation; necessitarianism.
  • (legal) Greater utilitarian good; used in justification of a criminal act .
  • (legal, in the plural) Indispensable requirements (of life).
  • Synonyms

    * (state of being necessary) inevitability, certainty

    Antonyms

    * (state of being necessary) impossibility, contingency * (something indispensable) luxury

    Derived terms

    * make a virtue of necessity

    Anagrams

    *

    modality

    English

    Noun

    (modalities)
  • the fact of being modal
  • (logic) the classification of propositions on the basis on whether they claim possibility, impossibility, contingency or necessity; mode
  • (linguistics) the inflection of a verb that shows how its action is conceived by the speaker; mood
  • (medicine) A method of diagnosis or therapy.
  • *
  • *
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  • Any of the senses (such as sight or taste)
  • (semiotics) a particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text or genre
  • (theology) the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations
  • (music) the subject concerning certain diatonic scales known as musical modes
  • (sociology) a concept in structuration theory
  • See also

    * * (Linguistic modality)