When "or" means "and" does it belong to Group 3?

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  Cant Get Right Yearly + Live Member Sage ⭐ 🍌 7Sage Tutor

  February 2023 edited February 2023 27902 karma

  Not everything should be represented conditionally, and this is a great example. To be clear, anything can be represented conditionally, so the option is always available.

  For example, let's consider famous lines from two iconic American novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Native Son:

  HF: All right, then, I'll go to hell.
  NS: You can't make me do nothing but die!

  Or, conditionally:
  HF: If one is me, then one will go to hell.
  NS: If you can make me do something, then that thing is to die.

  Have the conditionals given us added clarity or have they just jumbled things up for no reason than just for the sake of doing it? Sure, these lines can be represented conditionally, but we should just never, never think of them this way. Sometimes, sentences are just assertions without any meaningful conditional relationships involved. An even simpler example: "They sky is blue," vs. "If the thing referenced is the sky, then the thing referenced is blue." All these are assertions, not conditionals, and so is your example.

  In your example, what is the sufficient condition? It's really just kind of an existential assertion; something like, "If the entity we're referring to is Jane . . ." We can totally do that, but it abstracts rather than clarifies the meaning because it's really just an assertion. Or, if it helps, it's a compound of two assertions:

  1. Jane is a faster eater than Mary.
  2. Jane is a faster eater than Jon.

  So we definitely treat this "or" as an "and," but that doesn't have any meaningful conditional applications here.
• cardi tea Live Member

  April 2023 41 karma

  Thank you so much! I really appreciate your thorough explanation.