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Posts Tagged ‘entailment’

White Protestants and Catholics don’t frequently attend religious services

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Breaking news from the Potomac Primaries:

White Protestants and Catholics backed Mrs. Clinton, but Mr. Obama was strongly supported by voters who frequently attend religious services.

Seeing as backing Mrs. Clinton and supporting Mr. Obama are, in terms of votes, mutually exclusive, this sentence entails that white Protestants and Catholics (the majority of ) are not a part of “voters who frequently attend religious services”, as is demonstrated by the infelicity of the following sentence:

“Group A did A, and Group B did not do A — but Group A is part of Group B.”

Well, that just settles it then.


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