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From: "Simon Jester UK" <simonjester2...@pantaloons.yahoo.co.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.fan.heinlein
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Subject: Re: Deety's and Lewis Carroll's game of sorites in TNOTB - did Deety's 6 statements lead to "Gay Deceiver is a time-traveling machine"?
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loupgarous wrote:
> On Friday, September 28, 2012 1:47:52 AM UTC-6, Simon Jester UK wrote:
>> loupgarous wrote:
>> ...
>> I'm open to any logical arguments I may have overlooked that Deety's
>> statements don't lead to only one possible outcome, that being that Gay
>> Deceiver is "a time-traveling machine."  Honestly, the only outcome one 
>> can
>> arrive at from rigorous logical analysis of those six statements is a
>> two-fold one:
>>
>> (a) Time-traveling machines should not be kept in a drawing room;
>> (b) Things that are what you expect them to be may be kept in a drawing
>> room.
>>
>> Nothing in Deety's six statements seems to me to connect the two folds of
>> the outcome as I've stated it.  I hope someone can show me where I went
>> wrong on that analysis.
...
>> ----
>>
>> I don't believe you are wrong, Vance - do you remember the post/essay by
>> "Gharlane of Eddore" on TNotB?
>
> No, but thanks for the suggestion, and for responding, Simon.
>
> I'm a little reassured that several years on what Gregory House, MD calls 
> "those tasty Vicodin" for assorted pains and ills hasn't dulled my ability 
> to parse logical statements :-)

Here's a page on the Heinlein Society website, that includes his essay:
http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/numberbeast.html

Particularly relevant:
"THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST is the most massive and wonderful practical joke 
ever played on the Speculative Fiction genre-reading public ... [the author 
is] demonstrating a kind of conscious ineptitude at his own craft, for a 
joke.... because only when you understand it, only when you are *aware* of 
it, can you purposely botch it up with such skill, and produce something 
that is *still* good enough to keep the people who DON'T realize what's 
going on ... reading."

It's my opinion that Deety's set of statements is another of the author's 
jokes - the logical conclusion is that a time-travelling machine is never 
something you would expect it to be (since time-travelling machines are 
excluded from the set of things that are what you expect them to be).

Since Gay Deceiver is the only obvious vehicle in the vicinity, it must 
obviously be the time machine - and therefore, it *cannot* be the time 
machine!

However, you would only spot this apparent "ineptitude" with logic if you 
followed the reasoning all the way through...