True, when someone says “The wait staff at Laughting Jack’s are always friendly” it’s implicitly understood that it’s meant to say “They’ve always/nearly always been friendly so the odds are high they will be if you go there”. In such situations, since the unstated conclusion: Therefore if you want friendly wait staff, Laughing Jack’s is a good place to go" is still true in all ways that matter.
However, the context which likely gave rise to this question is Todd Akin. As you know, Todd Akin said that it’s “really rare” for a legitimate rape to result in pregnancy. In such a situation where the unstated conclusion is “Therefore there shouldn’t be a rape exemption to an abortion ban” how true the premise is very much matters since the conclusion (at least partly) hinges on it being “really rare”. It therefore matters if it’s really rare or just less likely. “Less likely” =/= “really rare”.
Or, to put it another way, two situations:
1)If I say that you never get cramps if you warm up before sports when in fact it gives you a 1% chance of getting cramps, it would be fair to say it’s partly true.
2) If I say that you never catch AIDS if you wear a condom when in fact it gives you a 1% chance of getting AIDS, it would not be fair to say that it’s partly true.
There are some matters that require more than everyday heuristics. To give a physical example: If, when I throw a baseball into a net, I only make very basic, fuzzy calculations of momentum, kinetic energy, air resistance and gravity in my head, that’s ok. If I’m launching a satellite into space, I have to be a lot more precise. Using rocket-launching heuristics when throwing a baseball would be ridiculous. Using baseball-throwing heuristics when launching a rocket would also be ridiculous even though they’re both fundamentally the same action.
If you had said “The wait staff at Laughing Jack’s are always friendly. There are no exceptions.” then the glaring waiter would have shown your statement to be flat-out wrong.
However, you didn’t say “There are no exceptions,” and in the circumstances, you almost certainly didn’t mean to imply it. So under the circumstances I’d agree with your analysis. In certain contexts though, such as mathematics and logic, “there are no exceptions” is understood.
I find it odd that most people are voting “completely wrong.” That’s just not how language works, in my experience. Everyone keeps citing the exceptions, like mathematics or logic, where they specifically use language differently. But, in most cases, most people would only think of themselves as partly wrong.
For example, if my mom says that all dogs have fur, and I point out a bald one, she doesn’t think she was completely wrong.
I voted “Completely Wrong” mostly because of the phrasing of the OP, including the priming statement “feel free to use formal logic.” I’d agree that in colloquial usage, such as statements like your dogs example or the previous waitstaff example, there is a different mechanism at work, but the phrases in the OP are constructed in such a way as to indicate a more formal application of logic. I’ve no doubt the results would be different if the poll were done using colloquial language.
Some exceptions are trivial, foolish, and pedantic.
When someone said “All men are capable of rape,” the exception of a quadriplegic patient, or a newborn baby, or someone whose entire pelvis has been amputated, isn’t valid in the context of the dispute. It’s pointlessly persnickety. It isn’t relevant to the real point. Much more meaningful objections can be (and should be, and have been) made to the declaration. Point to real men who have patience, wisdom, moral strength, self-control, and personal honor. Don’t hide behind facile sophistry when there are meaningful things that can be said.
Had I not specified the bit about formal logic (and also, depending on where I went to ask the question), I think the answers might have been different.
“All swans are white” is an entirely false statement, once it is established that some swans are not white.
However, if only a fairly small proportion of swans are in fact non-white, the way in which the statement “All swans are white” defines the domain - that is, it describes a world full of white swans, may be perceived as mostly correct.
People will answer differently, I think, depending on whether they are considering the logical validity of the statement, or the degree by which the subject of the statement matches reality - and these two things are not exactly the same.
Sorry - I don’t know what happened there - I was trying to respond to Senegoid’s question in post #18* - No idea how I managed to hit the Quote button on your post. Sorry.
If we’re talking different grades of wrongness, these are clearly less wrong than statements with the following exceptions:
[ul]
[li]X is never Y[/li][li]P is always O, never Q[/li][li]A leads directly to Z, not B[/li][/ul]Those are absolutely, hilariously, wrong, where one should question the sanity / intelligence of the person making the claim. Your initial list is of a person making an absolute claim when it is merely highly probable. Wrong, but not nearly as wrong as some possible alternatives.
“All swans are white” is wrong but not nearly as wrong as “Swans are tall ducks”
If you’re using Aristotelian logic, or something else that uses the law of the excluded middle, it doesn’t make any sense for something to be “partly wrong”. A statement is either true or false, and if it’s not true it has to be false. There are no gradations.
But if you’re using something like fuzzy logic, or probabilistic logic, then things can be partly wrong. And I would say that the statement “All X are Y” is false to the extent that, well, it isn’t true. So, if 99% of X are Y, then it is 1% false. If 50% of X are Y then it’s 50% false and if 1% of X are Y then it’s 99% false.
And there are other forms of logic besides those, but I don’t know how they would apply to this question.