Presenting two options as exhaustive when others exist.
"Either we do this or we do nothing" is the standard institutional form. The test is whether the excluded middle actually exists, not whether the two named options are genuinely different.
In practice
- "Either we ship on Friday or we lose the customer" survives until someone asks about shipping half of it on Friday.
- A board is offered redundancies or insolvency, and the third option is a conversation nobody has scheduled.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- The catalogue of predictable errors