Re: The Conjunction Fallacy Fallacy [WAS Re: Anti-singularity spam.]

From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Wed May 03 2006 - 14:49:55 MDT


At 12:21 PM 5/3/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote:

>Richard Loosemore 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).

>Old, old, old alternative hypothesis disconfirmed a dozen ways from
>Tuesday... Go forth and read the literature before you make up your
>own interpretations.

Odd how often we see an imputation of the deficiency of an opponent's
background research. This gets very old, old and tired. I would argue
that Richard's case is more persuasive than Eliezer's, basing my
assessment on the old, old but evergreen hypothesis of Eleanor Rosch,
together with its empirical support, that the human mind functions by
observing/creating prototypical exemplars of categories. See for
example, from old, old, old 2001:

http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/LexSemantik3b.pdf

If Tversky and Kahneman take significant issue with the Roschian
case, I haven't seen it--but then my damned library is thousands of
klicks away.

Damien Broderick



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