On 2/20/2015 12:18 PM, DKleinecke wrote:
> On Friday, February 20, 2015 at 9:38:48 AM UTC-8, Peter Olcott wrote:
>> The logical law of polar questions
>>
>> When posed to a man whom has never been married,
>> the question: Have you stopped beating your wife?
>> Is an incorrect polar question because neither yes nor
>> no is a correct answer.
>>
>> All polar questions (including incorrect polar questions)
>> have exactly one answer from the following:
>> 1) No
>> 2) Yes
>> 3) Neither // Only applies to incorrect polar questions
>>
>> As far as I know I am the original discoverer of the
>> above logical law, thus copyright 2015 by Peter Olcott.
>>
>> Permission to copy and freely distribute the above
>> is hereby granted as long as it is distributed in
>> its entirely including this license agreement.
> As other people have observed - this is not valid. There is, by
> definition, no third alternative.
An Incorrect Question (IQ) is any question lacking a correct answer from
the
set of all possible answers.
An Incorrect Polar Question (IPQ) is any polar question lacking a
correct answer
from the set of {Yes, No}.
M1 in AdultHumanMales such that M1 has never been married.
M2 in AdultHumanMales such that M2 has stopped beating his wife.
M3 in AdultHumanMales such that M3 has not stopped beating his wife.
1) M1 & M2
2) M1 & M3
Both (1) and(2) come from the intersection of disjoint sets, therefore
neither (1) nor (2) is correct, thus we have a case of incorrect polar
question.
> The question is unfair because of the presuppositions people make but
> the answer is "no" unless the person being asked (assumed male) has
> a wife whom he used to beat but no longer beats.
>
The answer of "no" would logically entail that the man continues to
beat his non-existent wife.
We are not talking within the context of the sloppy imprecision of
natural language where logic errors are often not construed to be logic
errors. We are talking within the context of the precision of
mathematics such that all logic errors are always construed as logic
errors.