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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6877070" data-attributes="member: 42582">I made this point in the other thread.There's also another way to put it: back in the late 19th century Lewis Carrol published an article in the journal Mind, called &quot;What the Tortoise said to Achilles&quot;. In the article, Carrol made the point that every inference requires application of a rule which, if it were written down as an express premise, would then require another rule of inference to move from premises to conclusion. If one insisted that this new rule of inference be written down, the same issue arises - etc, etc, giving rise to an infinite regress.The lesson is that every application of a rules requires drawing upon a rule of inference which (on pain of regress) can't itself be written down as a premise in the reasoning.In maths and logic, the rules of inference are modus ponens, modus tollens etc.In applying the rules of D&amp;D, which aren't formal logical rules and which draw upon natural language and rely upon intuitions about the imagined circumstances within the fiction, the &quot;rules of inference&quot; include things like the imaginative/interpretive process that allows the making of comparisons and extrapolations, the drawing together of similar but not identical cases (eg lit torches, burning oil and alchemist's fire all do fire damage, and also are all capable of setting things alight in virtue of being aflame), etc.If this counts as houseruling just because it draws upon intuitions and principles that aren't written down, then every moment of adjudication will be houseruling.I addressed it upthread (though with reference to scrolls rather than torches, and with reference to Burning Hands - which contains the same rules text - rather than Fireball).Self-quoting:</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6877070, member: 42582"] I made this point in the other thread. There's also another way to put it: back in the late 19th century Lewis Carrol published an article in the journal [I]Mind[/I], called "What the Tortoise said to Achilles". In the article, Carrol made the point that every inference requires application of a rule which, if it were written down as an express premise, would then require [I]another[/I] rule of inference to move from premises to conclusion. If one insisted that this new rule of inference be written down, the same issue arises - etc, etc, giving rise to an infinite regress. The lesson is that every application of a rules requires drawing upon a rule of inference which (on pain of regress) can't itself be written down as a premise in the reasoning. In maths and logic, the rules of inference are modus ponens, modus tollens etc. In applying the rules of D&D, which aren't formal logical rules and which draw upon natural language and rely upon intuitions about the imagined circumstances within the fiction, the "rules of inference" include things like the imaginative/interpretive process that allows the making of comparisons and extrapolations, the drawing together of similar but not identical cases (eg lit torches, burning oil and alchemist's fire all do fire damage, and also are all capable of setting things alight in virtue of being aflame), etc. If this counts as houseruling just because it draws upon intuitions and principles that aren't written down, then every moment of adjudication will be houseruling. I addressed it upthread (though with reference to scrolls rather than torches, and with reference to Burning Hands - which contains the same rules text - rather than Fireball). Self-quoting: [/QUOTE]

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