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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 8040400" data-attributes="member: 6683613">In the ideal Land of the Logicians, we define all our terms precisely and unambiguously and only after we have done so proceed to make cold, hard deductions.In the real world, we often learn natural-language terms by example: our parents and peers tell us "That's a dog" and "That's not a dog" until our brains figure out inductively what makes a dog a dog.In a way, you're right, it is backwards. Induction can be thought of as the reverse of deduction. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work.It does, however, require a bit of buy-in on the part the interpreter. Imagine a kid who takes a hostile approach to learning what a dog is: "You say dogs have fur and four legs, but the cat has fur and four legs, and you say it's not a dog. Contradiction!" "You say dogs bark, but the neighbor's old beagle never barks, and you say it is a dog. Nonsense!" "You keep pointing at dogs and non-dogs and saying there's a difference, but you're clearly just rationalizing an arbitrary and broken system, Mom!"From "nomads are chaotic", you can learn that change is a chaotic principle, and then when you see other elements of the setting that embody or promote change, you can associate those with chaos as well. The learning process is a back-and-forth between making a mental model from what you've observed and expanding that model outward to make new observations.A two-word descriptor is going to be insufficient as a complete explanation for how a creature acts, pretty much no matter what. (Possible exception: "Doesn't Act".) This could be taken to mean that the alignment system is doomed from the outset. But it could also be taken to mean that alignment descriptors are not trying to provide complete explanations for how a creature acts. This game has lots of descriptors, and I don't think any of them are intended to be taken as complete in this way. The fireball spell has the "Evocation" descriptor, but "Evocation" on its own does not explain what fireball does, and there are lots of other evocations that do very different things.</blockquote>

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