Grand Champ: Fallacy of the Excluded Middle Division

[akirlu]

One of the things that's most engaging about andrewducker's polls is that they so reliably afford the keen player of false dilemma bingo the opportunity to play along. It's always fun to see how many instances of the excluded middle fallacy he can pack into one post.

This morning we discover that in Britain, IKEA stores don't have shortcuts, unlike IKEA stores everywhere else, apparently. Or, you know, not.

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Not quite sure where you get that from that poll, as surely use of shortcuts fits into the second option? (And yes, they do exist in British Ikeas)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I don't see that taking the shortcuts at all fits into the second option, since "wandering around all the tiny bedrooms" in my mind rather clearly precludes skipping any, or skipping all, which is what taking the shortcuts allows. I'm sure I'm being too pedantic about the meaning of "all" but there you go.

But yes, I rather thought that the map with the shortcuts made it pretty clear the shortcuts exist in the UK.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Hummm.... I was supposing that the "all" was adopted from (or a Reference to) the traditional (D&D?) Description that runs something like "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike..." [fair warning: board & computer games are outside my experience... well... except for checkers, chess, & monopoly]. I find that Ducker is sometime Very Literal and sometimes Very Not Literal ... and that I almost never have any difficulty figuring out which he's being in any specific incidence.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

From the original Adventure computer text game, actually. There were two mazes, the "maze of twisty little passages, all the same", and the fiendishly clever "maze of twisty little passages, all different" (where each location in the maze used a different ordering of the words, so the descriptions were in fact all different; hence it could be mapped without dropping objects to make locations recognizable when you returned to them).

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yah, yah, I get the reference, but the fallacy of exhaustive hypothesis implicit there is either you a) get lost in the maze, b) follow the 'maze' all the way around, or c) never enter the 'maze' in the first place and I'm suggesting that there is (at least) also a further d) just take the damn' shortcuts already, go directly to the cafe, eat your meatballs, and leave option that the ever clever Ducker is either ignoring or utterly unaware of.

I, too, can often see what he *means* to say, but the fact that he generally isn't actually saying it, and doesn't seem to realize that he hasn't actually said it, and that there are options that he's missed, gets to be a bit like a mosquito in the bedroom when you're trying to sleep after a while.