Please take a look at a passage from an LSAT:
The economy is doing badly. First, the real estate slump has been with us for some time. Second, car sales are at their lowest in years. Of course, had either one or the other phenomenon failed to occur, this would be consistent with the economy as a whole being healthy.
I have trouble understanding the italicized sentence and what interferences I could make from it. I simplified it as below:
Had either A or B has not happened, this would be consistent with C.
I am not sure what valid inferences I can make from it. As far as I can tell, this statement combines counterfactual condition and logic consistency. I did some research on the web about what's the concept of consistency in logic. Also, I learned from an oxford open course that a counterfactual conditional statement can be seen as a causation statement. Based on these, I tried to make the following inferences:
- If both A and B happened, it was contradictory that C is true.
- If C is true, then either A or B must not have happened.
- A and B together would have falsified C.
Would you please help explain whether my inferences are correct? Thank you very much for your time.