[Renall]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

it's absolutely falsiable. If you claim someone is incompetent he just needs to prove his competence to falsify the statement. Of course it is to assume that someone who truly is incompetent cannot possibly perform well in the specific task not to a degree that can't simply be attributed to dumb luck.

"Competence" generally is not. If a person proves he is capable of doing something, he is demonstrating only that he is not incompetent at a particular task. You can't falsify the statement that he is incompetent as an abstract unless you specifically define "incompetent" to mean "capable of performing no tasks."

Is that your position? Because as respects Umineko it's precarious. Why? Because it makes Beatrice's statement false. Battler is provably capable of performing some tasks, and doing so with great "competence." Therefore you would pretty much have to take one of two positions:

• Beatrice's statement was opinion and Battler's ability to do so some things does not bear on her opinion that he is not sufficiently competent (and thus "incompetent" in her opinion); or
• Beatrice's statement was a factual assessment that Battler is not capable of performing any task competently. Since Battler demonstrates that he is capable of performing some tasks competently, Beatrice's statement is false. However, she was not prohibited from saying it and no Logic Error ensued. Therefore, her statement cannot have a truth value which contradicts Battler's demonstrated competence.

Since you already agreed with me that you can say only non-logical or true logical statements in red, you clearly agree with me that this is so, and therefore the only conclusion you can rationally draw is that the statement cannot be a logical statement which describes the actual fact situation in question.

We have statistic for that and tests based on statistic. If you think anything in the human knowledge can assume a level higher to a stastic probability except for things that humans themselves invented you are a fool.

All a test score proves is that a person is good at taking that particular test.

According to your distorted logic I couldn't even say that I'm happy or sad or that a particular student has good grades or that people are free or prisoners.

You can say that you're happy or sad, but your statement cannot be demonstrated to be proof of anything except that you believe yourself to be happy or sad. Good grades can be subjective, so yes, it's possible you could say only that you think the grades are good. And "freedom" is such an abstract concept that it is arguable that a person who is physically incarcerated wouldn't see himself as such (for example, if he had no awareness of his incarceration).

So... yes? That's not really distorted logic at all.

You also seem to forget that the nature of red truths is trascendental by definition. Most of them wouldn't be verifiable in any way in a real scenario. So your arguing about verifiability is completely pointless.

I don't mean verifiable as in backed up by other evidence. I mean verifiable in terms of whether it makes sense for them to be taken as axiomatic.

Originally Posted by Leafsnail

I can see that those statements have no truth value, but something like "These seals will not be broken" clearly does, and there's pretty much no way to construe it as an opinion.

It's not an opinion, you're right.

It's a prediction. Predictions are not logical statements; at best they are hypotheses. A hypothesis only becomes a logical statement when it is tested and a conclusion is derived. In other words, a prediction cannot have a truth value until circumstances arise which actually prove or disprove the prediction.

Worse yet: "These seals will not be broken [from this moment forward]" is a statement that you not only can't prove unless it happens, it's a statement you can never prove to be true. You can prove it false (by breaking them), but you can't actually confirm it (because as long as the seals exist, they may be broken in the future). Therefore, by simple logic, a prediction in red can never be true, yet could possibly be false.

In other words, predictions in red aren't just worthless, they completely undermine red and Ryukishi should never have used red for that purpose. But he isn't breaking his rules to do so.

EDIT: Note that there may be an implicit qualifier such as "until the end of the story," since a narrative has a discrete ending point. That doesn't actually make a prediction in red logically meaningful, but it would make the red retroactively true if we assume that all red text issued during the narrative will hold as true for the entire narrative at the end. The only problem there arises if the narrative can be altered while it is ongoing, and it's not actually clear that such a thing is even possible in Umineko's meta-fictional plane.