The Four Logical States

(1) True (0) False (-1) Wrong Question (-2) Insufficient information

The idea here is that asked a direct question, a person should be able to give a Yes/No answer. What I have found is that when (most) people ask for a binary answer, they are engaged in a misdirection. There needs to be a way to tell the questioner that they are involved in a straw man argument: that the question is invalid.

Assuming the asker is asking the right question, I often will still not give an answer because there is no mechanism by which to get sufficient information.

For example:

Q: Is there life after death? A: It’s impossible to say, since we don’t have clear communication across the boundary.

Q: Will the project finish on time? A: It’s impossible to say, sir, because in order to speed things up, you had everybody stop tracking their progress

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