necessitating a choice between mutually exclusive possibilities; "`either' and `or' in `either this or that'"
(also called (pairwise) disjoint) Of two events, the property that they cannot both happen; of more than two events, the property that the intersection of any pair is impossible.
Events that occur independently of each other and as a result of chance. the number of participants
said of two events, conditions, or variables which cannot occur at the same time. For example, one cannot be both male and female, or both Protestant and Catholic. Thus, the categories male and female, or Catholic and Protestant are said to be mutually exclusive.
A state in which one, and only one, of the possible conditions is true; for example, either A or not A is true, and one of the statements is false. When using Bayes' theorem to perform medical diagnosis, we generally assume that diseases are mutually exclusive, meaning that the patient has exactly one of the diseases under consideration.
Is a set of events in which if one happens the other does not. An example is the tossing of a "normal" coin. Either it is head or it is tails. It cannot be both. Another would be a hockey game where a team could either lose, tie or win. A team cannot win and lose, tie and lose, tie and win, or lose and tie and win.
A component of competition in a counterplan. Mutual exclusivity refers to the argument that the counterplan and the plan cannot be adopted or coexist at the same time.
