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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9661612" data-attributes="member: 42582">All this has been core to most of the RPGing I've done since the mid-1980s.On the assumption that not all of that RPGing counted as &quot;living world&quot; sandbox, it follows that this core is not unique to that particular approach to RPGing. (EDIT: I've just seen that [USER=7044566]@thefutilist[/USER] makes the same point not too far upthread.)Yes. Upthread I posted this:I think I may be less sceptical than you about the capacity of plausibility, as a heuristic, to exclude certain possibilities (blatantly absurd ones). I agree with you that it tends not to be very useful, on its own, for winnowing down a set of possibilities to a unique answer.I certainly think that we can talk about fiction; and reason about it too. Here's an instance of reasoning about it: Sherlock Holmes lives in Victorian London; Sherlock Holmes, when he met Watson, was not familiar with (then) contemporary astronomical theories, as they were not relevant to his study and practice of detection; therefore, Sherlock Holmes does not read ancient Sumerian writing (given that such an ability is far more esoteric than knowledge of scientific astronomy). Similar sort of reasoning allows us to conclude that Holmes does not know the chemical structure of DNA; does not leave the house naked (by choice, at least); etc.We can reason expressly about causation too. For instance, if Holmes drops a hammer on a cobblestone, than everything else being equal that will make a noise. In one of the stories, we see Holmes drawing inferences from the failure of a noise to occur (the dog that didn't bark).But none of this shows that imaginary things are exercising causal power. It shows that humans can create fiction in accordance with various heuristics.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9661612, member: 42582"] All this has been core to most of the RPGing I've done since the mid-1980s. On the assumption that not all of that RPGing counted as "living world" sandbox, it follows that this core is not unique to that particular approach to RPGing. (EDIT: I've just seen that [USER=7044566]@thefutilist[/USER] makes the same point not too far upthread.) Yes. Upthread I posted this: [indent][/indent] I think I may be less sceptical than you about the capacity of plausibility, as a heuristic, to [I]exclude[/I] certain possibilities (blatantly absurd ones). I agree with you that it tends not to be very useful, on its own, for winnowing down a set of possibilities to a unique answer. I certainly think that we can talk about fiction; and reason about it too. Here's an instance of reasoning about it: Sherlock Holmes lives in Victorian London; Sherlock Holmes, when he met Watson, was not familiar with (then) contemporary astronomical theories, as they were not relevant to his study and practice of detection; therefore, Sherlock Holmes does not read ancient Sumerian writing (given that such an ability is far more esoteric than knowledge of scientific astronomy). Similar sort of reasoning allows us to conclude that Holmes does not know the chemical structure of DNA; does not leave the house naked (by choice, at least); etc. We can reason expressly about causation too. For instance, if Holmes drops a hammer on a cobblestone, than everything else being equal that will make a noise. In one of the stories, we see Holmes drawing inferences from the failure of a noise to occur (the dog that didn't bark). But none of this shows that imaginary things are exercising causal power. It shows that humans can create fiction in accordance with various heuristics. [/QUOTE]

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