In duly enacted laws, bureaucratic regulations, judicial rulings, contracts, international treaties, technical manuals, specifications, product disclaimers, and many other areas, language should be clear, precise, and devoid of ambiguity. In such areas, language needs to be univocal. That is, it needs to have only one meaning and not be open to multiple interpretations. There is an error of logic that is so pervasive and so little understood that it has found its way into these arenas where expression must be exact. I have not discovered whether there is a formal name for the error, but I call it the “not-or error.” The error occurs when disjunction (i.e. “or”) is used but the intent is demonstrably not disjunction. Hence: not-or. Some attorneys are aware of this error, but their explanations of it are unnecessarily complicated. They bring out heavy artillery from the arsenal of formal logic to shoot down illogical gnats, when something much simpler would...(Read Full Post)