Comment by gjsman-1000
5 days ago
… however, even that is up for debate. Maybe the TV actor in your own example is Al Gore filming An Inconvenient Truth and the environmental scientist was in the minority which isn’t so afraid of climate change. Fast forward to 2025, the scientist’s minority position was wrong, while Al Gore’s documentary was legally ruled to have 9 major errors; so you were stupid on both sides, with the TV actor being closer.
True, but this is where the Boolean nature of traditional logic can really trip up a person trying to operate in the real world.
These "maybes" are on the table. They are probably not the case.
(You end up with a spread of likelihoods and have to decide what to do with them. And law hates a spread of likelihoods and hates decision-by-coinflips, so one can see how rhetorical traditions grounded in legal persuasion tend towards encouraging Boolean outcomes; you can't find someone "a little guilty," at least not in the Western tradition of justice).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolo_contendere There you still have booleans, just two of them instead of one.