Oz’s theories and the people of Earth
March 19, 2005Oz likes to have universally generalized theories of pretty much everything. For example: We go to the local supermarket (the “Hannaford”) for groceries, so Oz puts forth the generalized theory: “Everybody gets their groceries at the Hannaford.” But when we say no, that not everybody does that, he works at contstraining the generalization to try to make it true — e.g., moving to “Only everybody in Troy gets their groceries at the Hannaford.” Hey, he’s a little theoretician, revising his theory in the light of new data.
But one of the odd things is that his typical first attempt to constrain the generalization is to limit it to only Earthlings. So, he says “Everybody does F”, we say that not everybody does F, and so he responds with “Only everybody on Earth does F”. As opposed to the people back on his home world, apparently.
