{
  "id": "necessary.obligation",
  "term": "necessary",
  "sense": "obligation",
  "pos": "adjective",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 7,
  "arena": "lexicon",
  "domain": "adjective",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "required for a change to happen",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "required.obligation",
      "change.process",
      "happen.event-occurrence"
    ],
    "interaction": "required and change together create a condition that the change cannot occur without it",
    "novel_properties": [
      "dependency for change",
      "temporal necessity",
      "unavoidable condition"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The International Space Station requires regular reboosts to counteract atmospheric drag and maintain orbit.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "Cyanobacteria had to evolve oxygenic photosynthesis for Earth's atmosphere to shift from anoxic to oxic 2.4 billion years ago.",
      "domain": "biology"
    },
    {
      "text": "Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than Argentina annually to secure transaction validation on the blockchain.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "required.obligation",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "necessary"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "factual",
      "note": "Added happen.event-occurrence to components because the definition implicitly relies on the concept of occurrence in time; without it, 'happen' is ungrounded. Factual correction due to omission causin"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-necessary.obligation"
}