[blml] concession

[Eric Landau]

On Jan 9, 2008, at 5:42 PM, Sven Pran wrote:

>> On Behalf Of Eric Landau
>> On Jan 8, 2008, at 4:41 PM, Sven Pran wrote:
>>
>>>> On Behalf Of Tim West-Meads
>>> ................
>>>>> Therefore also my sample statement "You get three tricks" when
>>>>> there are five more to play is a claim (of the two other  
>>>>> tricks) as
>>>>> good as any.
>>>>
>>>> But it isn't a claim according to L68A.
>>>
>>> If that statement isn't a statement to the effect that the player
>>> will take
>>> two of the remaining five tricks I do not know the meaning of the
>>> words "to
>>> the effect that". And I am pretty sure that I do indeed know the
>>> meaning of
>>> these words.
>>
>> ISTM that if a concession were a claim and claim were a concession,
>> there would be a law in TFLB governing "any statement to the effect
>> that a contestant will win or lose a specific number of tricks".
>> Since there are two entirely different laws, one for "win" and one
>> for "lose", the authors must have seen some difference between them
>> that Sven doesn't.
>
> A claim is not a simultaneous concession and a concession is not a
> simultaneous claim if any of them is for all the remaining tricks.  
> So the
> lawmakers have decided to treat them individually. That does not  
> prevent
> claims and concessions from being treated the same when they in  
> fact are the
> same, i.e. simultaneously both a claim and a concession (or vice  
> versa). Can
> that be so difficult to understand?
>
> Of course there could have been a single law about "any statement  
> or action
> to the effect that play should cease" handling both claims and  
> concessions,
> but the lawmakers haven't done it that way, and I am surprised that  
> anybody
> can have any problem with this?

This is where we started.  We know that if there was a claim of all  
the tricks, play must cease.  We know that if there was a concession  
of all the tricks (objected to), play must continue.  Initially, we  
accepted the intuitive-sounding notion that partial claims and  
partial concessions are the same thing, some hybrid claim/concession  
entity not actually mentioned in TFLB, and that "of course there  
could have been a single law".  So we tried to amalgamate the  
existing laws into that notional "single law", and discovered that it  
would require that play simultaneously cease and continue.  Of course  
there could have been a single law, but it would have had to direct  
one or the other.  Since there of course could have been, but there  
isn't, some of us are less than comfortable with assuming that  
somehow it just got left out by accident.  Rather than pretending to  
know what it would have said if someone had actually written it, we  
look to the laws that are actually there.


Eric Landau
1107 Dale Drive
Silver Spring MD 20910
ehaa at starpower.net