How can I describe a "one or more" condition (one that has many options; a "non-boolean")?

Generally speaking a boolean condition is understood to be an "either/or" relationship; for example, something is hot or cold.

What's do you call a "one or more" condition, e.g. something that can have many colors?

To add a bit of clarification, in conversation most people understand Boolean to be an "either/or" proposition, whether there are two or more conditions, as when you ask someone to pick a single color of paint (red, green, or blue).

When discussing that with non-programmers, I find they perfectly understand that when I describe it as a boolean condition.

However, I don't seem to know what to call a "one or more" condition, for example, "pick any colors that you like: red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple."

I find my self saying "non-boolean" which isn't all that useful.

-- EDIT --

Rubergly's answer gave me an interesting thought:

Boolean is similar to "dichotomous" and also similar to "binary" (1 or 0). Trinary means set of three... so is "polynary" a word, or is there something similar?

Solution 1:

There are many existing terms for a number possible concepts that you might be using:

• if you are talking about a question/situation that has one outcome (functional) out of many distinct choices, like one out of many but a finite set of colors, then it is discrete or nominal (the latter technical for statistics).
• if you are considering a situation where you get many results at once, like red, blue, and green together from the rainbow, then it is multivalued, a subset, a tuple, or n-ary (the latter 3 are technical). 'n-ary' is probably not in any nontechnical dictionary but is in wide use in mathematical language.

There's a lot of technical math vocabulary that may or may not be appropriate in informal conversation; one can consider the kinds of values returned (as in computer programming the type like boolean, int, or real) and also the number of different values returned (for a person - height, eye color, handedness). Here is a small taxonomy:

• number of values returned
  • single value = functional
  • multiple value = relational (or multivalued)
    • a given set number of values returned is fixed arity
    • variable being n-ary or polyadic (multivariate for arguments, __multivalued for results),
• the range/possibilities of a given single value
  • continuous
  • discrete, and discrete has a number of words to describe variations (binary, boolean, dichotomous, nominal, integral, combinatorial)

Solution 2:

What about multiple-valued as in multiple-valued logic?

Time is precious, so I quote:

In logic, a many-valued logic (also multi- or multiple-valued logic) is a propositional calculus in which there are more than two truth values. Traditionally, in Aristotle's logical calculus, there were only two possible values (i.e., "true" and "false") for any proposition. An obvious extension to classical two-valued logic is an n-valued logic for n greater than 2.