The True - False Fallacy

I propose there is a theory that we subscribe to that if something is not true, it has to be false.

Now you say of course if A=1 and B=2 then A+B cannot equal 5.

But if I said that A is between 1 and 5 and B is between -3 and +3,  then A + B could be anywhere from -2 to +8 and still be correct.

So if we take two statements:

1. All people unemployed and on welfare are lazy.

2. Businesses eliminate jobs due to government regulation.

At first you may say that they are unrelated and you can hold that each statement may be true or that each statement may be false.

The problem is that in saying that a statement is either true or false, you then limit yourself to possibilities between the two.

For example, there might be reasons other than government regulations, why companies lay people off.  Automation, cost cutting, lack of sales, etc.  These people who are laid off are not lazy if they lost the job not due to anything they did or did not due.  The skills that they had may not be valuable anymore in the workplace. Therefore there are people who are unemployed and on welfare who are not lazy, just do not have the skills to ind a job.

In this case one of the solutions is better education and retraining.  However, either one of the statements by themselves will not lead to this conclusion; only by assuming they are not strictly true or false.

Now there are people who are on welfare and are lazy, and some people might lose jobs due to regulation.  If these cases are the majority of instances, you deal with them differently than if they are a small subset. If most people on welfare are lazy, then you look for ways to tie welfare into motivation, rather than education.

For example, let us look at the statement "If you car burns oil, the engine is defective".
If your car burns a quart of oil every 3000 miles, you tend to just add oil and accept that.  On the other hand, if you car uses a quart of oil every 50 miles, you rebuild the engine or buy another car. The solution is different depending on the degree of the problem.

Ford got into trouble with the Pinto, because they calculated that the design of the car could result in fatalities, but that the cost of the fix would be more than the cost of the lawsuits.  On the other hand, some people said that even one death was too much.  So if you had to design the car so that nobody ever, could get killed in the car, the price would be so high that nobody could afford it.  Neither solution is reasonable.  Ford should have spent built the car to a higher standard. and not just calculated a cost, once they were aware of an issue.

So instead of looking at a statement that it is EITHER True or False, accept that there may be cases where the statement contains a degree of truth and make decision related to the degree.

1/29/2017