Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20190721003717/@comment-32182236-20190926185017

That is, if you do not know something, then it is possible for it to be either true or false.

Yes. This is exactly why I would advocate for using ternary logic.

Until we determine whether a statement is true or false, it is unknown.

Depending on how you interpret the value "Unknown", you might even be able to recreate a few quantum systems this way.

For instance, imagine that we know that either A OR B is true, and also know that they cannot both be true. But we don't know the truth value of either of them.

We have an entangled system right there! Because as soon as we find one to be true, the other collapses into false.

Ternary logic can actually help make quantum mechanics a bit more.. Intuitive.

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...come to think of it, Ambassador's example shows another problem with this fallacy. Claiming to know Sans in this context might not lead to a fallacy if we say "we know Sans and all of Sans's alternate identities."

Right.

The fallacy here is substituting Sans for River Person. The idea is that if they're the same person, then you should be able to substitute one for the other, right?

...No. That's not always the case. Because we don't know the identity of the River Person.

Statement 1:Sans is Sans (True, tautology) Statement 2:Sans is the River Person (Unknown) Statement 3:It is known who the River Person is (False-It is unknown).

If we find out that Sans is the River Person, statement 3 becomes true.

River Person is, as you said, an alternate identity. And knowing someone in their current identity doesn't mean you will know their alternate identities as well.

Now that I think about it, I know the base of this fallacy. It's a very, very well-disguised case of the equivocation fallacy. Let me attempt to frame my previous argument as a reduction ad absurdum.

Premise 1:Sans (the persona) is Sans (the person) Premise 2:We know that Premise 1 is true. Conclusion 1:By P1 and P2, Therefore, we know who Sans is. Premise 3:The River Person (the persona) is Sans (the person) Premise 4:We do NOT know who the River Person is

Since River Person, the persona, is the same as the person Sans.. Then we substitute River Person with the PERSONA of Sans.

See the fallacy now? It's equivocation. The persona of Sans is not the same as the person Sans.

So our substitution of:We know that River Person (persona) is Sans (person), does not logically follow. We cannot say that Premise 3 is a proper substitution of Premise 1, so we cannot conclude that, via Premise 2 and Premise 3, that we know that Premise 3 is true, and then conclude that we DO know who the River Person is.

So we do not have a contradiction. It only appears that way because there's an equivocation fallacy.

That's my take on the matter. A masked man fallacy is a special kind of equivocation fallacy.

See also the fallacy fallacy, which is claiming an opponent's conclusion is false because the argument is unsound; there is a possibility it could still be true for reasons which were not part of that argument.

That is correct.

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You did a nice breakdown of the false dichotomy as well. And even spotted it in a claim of mine!

...I think I need to fix my OP in Part 1. Hopefully I can find ANOTHER reason why Hard Mode cannot be canon.

You did say that there are other reasons. Have any sound arguments against the canonicity of Hard Mode?

And if there aren't any logical reasons to exclude Hard Mode from canon, is there something else that we DO have a reason to exclude, even though we observe it in normal gameplay? I don't want to argue that my conclusion of this rule being false is true if there aren't even any sound arguments for it.