I was recently involved in an online discussion in which more than one person seemed confused by my use of the conjunction “or”. I was very surprised by this, as “or” is a very simple, common word and I was using it in what I thought was a perfectly ordinary and straightforward manner. But since this did happen with more than one person (AFAIK native English speakers), I’m wondering if maybe it’s common for people to be confused as to exactly what the word “or” means.
For this poll please don’t consult a dictionary or anything, just give your immediate response.
My problem is that I’m a detail person, so your sentence strikes me as false. After I got past the accuracy of the statement*, I decided that either two or three would be possible interpretations. With the limited information, my more likely interpretation of the sentence would be number two.
There is no way that number one reflects the meaning of the word or. I am a native (American) English speaker.
*Seriously, I would have to write a sentence like that with a bunch of modifiers, which I why I have to work hard on self-editing.
IF SKIN = 'Red' OR SKIN = 'Yellow' OR SKIN = 'Green'
PUT OUTFILE
END-IF
So let’s say that in your input file the variable SKIN has one of the following values for each record: Red, Yellow, Green, Red and Yellow, Green and Yellow, Red and Green, Red and Yellow and Green. With OR in the IF statement, only those records with apples with a single skin colour will be written to the output file.
When we studied logic that was one of the hardest things to understand, the difference between “or inclusive” and “or exclusive.” Or. what Randy Seltzer simulposted.
You left out one possible (though improbable in this context) meaning:
(All apples are red) or (all apples are yellow) or (all apples are green).
That is, all apples are the same color, and that color is either red, yellow, or green.
In math, logic, and computer science, “or” is the inclusive or. So “P or Q” includes the possibility that both P and Q could be true. If you want to exclude that possibility, you use the exclusive or: “P xor Q” means either P is true or Q is true, but not both.
In ordinary speech, the word “or” may be either inclusive or exclusive. Sometimes it’s clear from the context which is meant, but when it’s not clear, confusion may ensue.
No; #2 simply says that every apple has a skin color that is one of those three choices. It doesn’t say that all apples have the same skin color, which is a necessary component of the proposition as stated by Thudlow Boink.
“Or” is always a choice of multiple things in which exactly one of the things is always chosen. “And or” is good for one or more things being chosen from that group.
That choice relies on an implied none option being available in an “or” question. The polite host will allow for the choice of none if it’s possible as in they didn’t premix the coffee in the kitchen. In which case the guest assuming that none was a valid choice was wrong.
It is clearly the case that there are some contexts in ordinary English in which “or” is used inclusively (“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?”. Lifetime members with no intention of quitting don’t get to answer “No”), and some contexts in which it is used in manners of more exclusive flavor, often by implicature: e.g., in questions/offerings which are not meant to be answered yes/no but with the selection of a disjunct, in certain statements with the connotative aid of words like “either”, and so on. I daresay the most straightforward, vanilla uses of the word “or” are all “inclusive”, but there are these other contexts where it is employed more “exclusively” [though in some of these, we may want to analyze what happens as not really a logical disjunction at all].
Anyway, devoid of context, my natural instinct is to parse the example sentence exclusively, for some reason, but that means nothing; the slightest change in my mood or the setup, and things go greyer. So, I give the answer “Answers 2 and 3 are both possible meanings”, as is really the only reasonable one; you can’t really rule out as ill-conceived either of those two parsings. It’s just one of those millions of everyday natural language ambiguities that relies on context or further clarification for disambiguation when disambiguation is called for. It’s not that people are confused as to what the word “or” means, but, as with so many bits of language, it can mean various related but slightly different things.
I said answers 2 and 3 were plausible. In order for the sentence to convey exactly the meaning specified in answer 2, I think it would have to be written, “All apples are either red, yellow, or green.” The way it’s currently written doesn’t have the specificity to rule out multi-colored apples.
The specific way a term is used in the formalized jargon of programming or mathematics need not be (and generally isn’t) the same as the web of senses that term originally had and continues to have in ordinary language.