From: Martin Striz (mstriz@gmail.com)
Date: Wed May 03 2006 - 13:24:09 MDT
On 5/3/06, Richard Loosemore <rpwl@lightlink.com> wrote:
> Human minds are designed for immensely sophisticated forms of cognitive
> processing, and one of these is the ability to interpret questions that
> do not contain enough information to be fully defined (pragmatics). One
> aspect of this process is the use of collected information about the
> kinds of questions that are asked, including the particular kinds of
> information left out in certain situations. Thus, in common-or-garden
> nontechnical discourse, the question:
>
> Which of the following is more probable:
> 1) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
> 2) Linda is a bank teller.
>
> Would quite likely be interpreted as
>
> Which of the following is more probable:
> 1) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
> 2) Linda is a bank teller and NOT active in the feminist movement.
>
> It just so happens that this question-form is more likely than the form
> that follows the strict logical conjunction. In fact, the strict
> logical form is quite bizarre in normal discourse, and if we intended it
> to actually ask it, we would probably qualify our question in the
> following way:
>
> Which of the following is more probable:
> 1) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
> 2) Linda is a bank teller, and she might be active in the feminist
> movement or she might not be - we don't know either way.
>
> We would make this qualification precisely because we do not want the
> questioner to bring in the big guns of their cognitive machinery to do a
> reading-between-the-lines job on our question.
Except that, even if you interpret 2) to mean "Linda is a bank teller
and NOT active in the feminist movement," it is still more likely than
1), since far more people are not involved in the feminist movement
than those who are, and people know that. So, it's not a
misinterpretation of the question, it's an actual logical fallacy
based on a psychological phenomenon.
Martin
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