#2397 Some board games should never be played

[chike_eze]

Some board games have ambiguous rules, and some games that have ambiguous rules should never be played.

Please explain why we cannot infer from the argument above that "Some board games should never be played".

To me, "Some" is akin to At least one. i.e., at least one item must exist in the set. As opposed to "All" that could be 0 or many.

So for example, if we had 5 board games, 3 of which have ambiguous rules, and 1 of which should never be played; then it should follow that the 1 out of 5 games that should never be played is equivalent to asserting (in general terms) that "Some board games should never be played", i.e., "At least one board game should never be played"

Please correct my reasoning ways if I've strayed too far.
Thanks

[noah]

Thanks for the question.

First of all, to help your case, you should state that there are only 5 board games in the world. Otherwise, you might be talking about 5 board games (of the huge number that actually exist) that DON'T have ambiguous rules. Anyway, we have only 5 board games, and at least one of them is ambiguous. The issue is that we can't now apply the second statement. It's about games with ambiguous rules in general, not specifically board games. It might be about some game of tag.

Make sense? Kind of annoying, these minor detail issues, but so crucial!

[chike_eze]

Thanks for the question.

First of all, to help your case, you should state that there are only 5 board games in the world. Otherwise, you might be talking about 5 board games (of the huge number that actually exist) that DON'T have ambiguous rules. Anyway, we have only 5 board games, and at least one of them is ambiguous. The issue is that we can't now apply the second statement. It's about games with ambiguous rules in general, not specifically board games. It might be about some game of tag.

Make sense? Kind of annoying, these minor detail issues, but so crucial!

Thanks for the correction. I think it makes sense now.

"B is a sub-set of A"
"Some B's are C's"
"Some A's that are C's are also D's" (we know not which ones)
therefore, Some B's are D's (wrong inference)

The A's that are C's and also D's may or may not include any element from B (sub-set of A). This stuff is like pulling teeth

Thanks for the quick feedback.

[noah]

Thanks for the quick feedback.

Indeed!

Good write-up of the issue, by the way. - Noah