All or None (AON)

an order to buy or sell a stock in its entirety or not at all — Wikipedia

Everyone knows the principle of AON. I've seen people use it to counter many positions that employ the principle.

Of course logic, especially classical logic, depends on it - the law of the excluded middle (LEM). I'm no logician so won't attempt to go into the fine structure of LEM but I will say that there's Fuzzy logic and multi-valued logic that deny the LEM.

The AON like LEM denies anything between two options given. "Either you're with us or against us" captures the AON very well. One could even call it digital thinking, 0 or 1 and nothing else.

Ye we all know reality arranges itself on a spectrum. We could say that there's an upper bound and a lower bound but we can see that between them there's a whole range of possible values.

It appears then that the AON is wrong in failing to account for an essential aspect of reality - that it's "best" model is a spectrum and not digital (1 or 0).

However, AON has an advantage that may be the reason why it exists at all. Simplicity. AON is very simple - there are only two choices. This makes it easy to learn. Ever notice how children are black & white thinkers.Tell them "Don't talk to strangers" and they'll run from ALL strangers. As children grow up they begin to see the spectrum nature of reality and learn to act appropriately.

A "disadvantage" of rejecting the AON is that it requires adopting a spectrum viewpoint on nature which, obviously, makes matters complex - a juggler with too many items to keep track of is bound to make an error.

We have a choice between the simplicity of AON and the complexity of rejecting AON, both with inherent pros and cons.

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