Tom_Breton comments on Variable Question Fallacies - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 March 2008 06:22AM

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Comment author: Tom_Breton 05 March 2008 11:29:25PM 0 points [-]

"Have you stopped beating your wife?" has well-defined true-or-false answers. It's just that people are generally too stupid to understand what the no-answer actually indicates.

It's usually given as "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" (Emph mine). The problem is the presupposition that you have been beating your wife. Either answer accepts (or appears to accept) that presupposition.

It's a different sort of bad question than the underconstrained questions. The Liar Paradox OTOH is a case of underconstrained question because it contains non-well-founded recursion.