Could I not also say, "The last time I went to Ohio, I visted the theme park Paramount's King's Island"? I had never been to Ohio before then, and I don't know when, if ever, I will get the chance to go there again.
It is indeed possible to argue over semantics all day long and never clear this up, so let's illustrate this with an even crazier example. Consider the following sentence: "The last time I went to Moscow, I did a Russian jig."
This statement is true... but really it's only
technically true. This is because I have NEVER been to Moscow. So ponder this for a second... since I've never been to Moscow, there was no last time that I went to Moscow; the conditional part of the sentence--in this case, "the last time I went to Moscow"--didn't happen. The condition is absurd. However, because the qualification fails, I can say anything in the actual predicate of the statement and
technically not be lying. Philisophically speaking, the statement is true in the strict denotative sense. (In case this confuses you, try it with the following sentence instead: "Every time I have been to Moscow, I did a Russian jig.")*
However, no sane person would make this claim unless they were trying to fool people. The
connotative semantics of this sentence vary drastically from the technical sentence construction. In fact, when you saw that sentence, you probably immediately assumed that I had been to Moscow because of how I chose to word it. Most people would not construct their sentence this way and honestly try to pass off that they've never been. Usually, we'd then say, "Were I to go to Russia, I'd do an Irish jig."
The same thing goes for differentiating actions that have taken place only once versus multiple times. While the above statement
technically applies if I've gone to Moscow either once OR more than once, a more grammatically
exact reply to cover the case when I only went once to Moscow would be such: "When I went to Moscow, I did a Russian jig." The connotation--the implied context--in this sentence differs greatly from the first sentence under consideration.
Since there is a more exact way of expressing an action that has only happened once, interpreting the original sentence to mean that it only happened once is grammatically
inexact and therefore is unlikely to be the intended meaning.
I bring up this whole point to illustrate the freedoms and dangers of parsing the canon text. You can easily read a single sentence multiple ways... and technically all of them would be correct interpretations. However, some are most likely more correct than others, or perhaps a better way of saying this would be "safer interpretations" than others.
Let's use this formula.
Minish came at least twice > Minish came exactly twice (as you have said, and I cannot deny)
Minish came at least twice > Minish came more than twice
That sounds like it would mean:
Minish came exactly twice = Minish came more than twice
You're actually misapplying what I'm saying here. "Sounds like" doesn't really apply to a strict logical argument.
In my logical proof in my previous post, I did not give any explicit relationship between "exactly twice" and "more than twice". I did not say that they both had equal merit nor did I say that one theory was more promising than the other. I said that neither could be firmly discounted as a legitimate possibility. So when you use your "sounds like" or "rhymes with" approach here, you're misreading what I intended in my previous post.
Now you can attempt, of course, as it seems you're trying to do (I'm sort of replying as I read through your post, so I may be slightly off base at this point) to apply an Ockham's Razor argument to the two statements and try to reduce that to which one is "better". (If you try that, I've got a nice stamp graphic talking about windmills that I'll apply to your post, and I have no qualms about using it.) However, just because a theory is "better" doesn't make it fact; Ockham's Razor is only a tendency, not an absolute, so when it is used, you do need to apply it with care. In short, when applying Ockham's Razor to promote a theory that is
possible, it does not become a tautology; it merely becomes
probable at best, and the distinction is important.
It comes down to one question: Are you comfortable with adding unneccisary events to the timeline? If there is proof that TMC comes after OoT, then it would be neccisary for the door to open more than twice times. If there is no proof of that, then TMC wouldn't hurt anything if it came first, so it would be unneccisary for the door to open more than twice.
Again, so much of this relies upon the context. So let's dig into a good quote here from
Minish Cap:
MELARI
The [elemental] sanctuary is a strange realm, trapped between two worlds. It is the bridge between the Minish world and the human world. The doorway to the sanctuary only opens once every hundred years! [emphasis mine]
So notice the bolded text. Now, technically speaking (per my original argument), the door need not have EVER opened to make this particular statement legit. The case for this would be that some trustworthy authority told Melari in this case that the door would open every 100 years... and so he believes it implicitly, and thus is able to quote is as valid despite it never having happened. The case where the door has only opened once prior is a very
similar case. Under those circumstances, there is no way that the habitual cycle of the periodic event could have been determined; for all they knew, it could have been a once-in-a-lifetime event! So there would need to be some other information (outside of collective experience) that was given to Melari about the door to explain that the door is a periodic process.
Only by having the door opened multiple times prior to
Minish Cap does it become allowable for Melari to legitimately claim this as fact without having to rely upon external information;
only in this case, he would be able to rely upon his memories and the historical record of the Minish people.
So, while
technically (but not
contextually) it is unnecessary to have the door open multiple times prior to
Minish Cap, the other argument (that it only opened once) is burdened with having to answer the questions of how Melari came to know of this. This very well could force a believer of it to be required to answer all questions up to and including who actually created the door, and I do not think (I could be wrong) that this is answered for us. So I should note here that both theories require this extra, non-canonical information that you keep mentioning.
However, if I may, I'd also like to ask you a question as well, if only to stimulate thought:
What difference does it necessarily make if the Minish have only opened their little door exactly twice vis à vis more than twice? In other words, what hinges upon the sole fact that we must differentiate between the two possibilities, especially considering that this is only undecided when
Minish Cap comes first... and defining what happens prior to the first game in a series is of relative unimportance? Could we not make a stronger theory by merely mentioning that it happened "at least twice" without getting into specifics?
Because, going by your own rule, "The Minish came at least twice" > "The Minish came exactly twice." (Oh snap?)
* A more rigorous proof of this is as follows:
Every time I went to Moscow, I did a Russian jig. This statement is false if and only if it can be shown that there was at least one time when I was in Moscow where a Russian jig was NOT performed. However, since I have never made any trips to Moscow, no such time where a Russian jig was NOT performed in Moscow exists. Therefore, that original statement is not false; thus it must be true.
Edited by The Missing Link, 11 April 2007 - 05:40 AM.
