International Law

The Logic of Provability

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Howard Raiffa, one of the academic deans of analytic thought about negotiation theory and practice, is fond of saying "When I hear the options are A or B, I think why not both?"

(Ironically, the two solution to the two person bargaining game which incorporates this thought, the Kalai solution is different than Raiffa's solution to the two person bargaining game.)

Yesterday, I wrote about a neat exercise in logical thinking, the cash register exercise from Diane Levine's Mediation Blog.

The exercise is more than a complex LSAT logic exercise. It illustrates a very good logical principle or methodology which may prove valuable for a mediator in pure problem solving mode - a checklist for determining when competing proposals are really exclusive either A or B.

Here is how I solved the problems, under 5 minutes and with complete accuracy. First, I cheated. I figured that Diane would pose a problem in which most of the answers were not provable. Second, I then went through each of the questions asking how if this question was neither true nor false, then what had to be the case.

For example, for the first question, if we didn't know the sex of the owner or whether the owner and businessman were the same, then question 1 would be unprovable, neither true nor false.

Good problem solvers probably use this technique intuitively, but I thought it might be useful to make the technique explicit. Hope it helps.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on October 15, 2008 (boomark / email).