arundelo comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong

109 Post author: Yvain 19 March 2009 01:07AM

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Comment author: gwern 29 March 2014 01:53:31AM 3 points [-]

Hah! I thought of the exact same thing before I saw your comment: the interviews by Luria with Russian peasants where the peasants refuse to abstract in any way. Shalizi provides an example http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/484.html :

Consider the following dialogue (p. 112) with an illiterate peasant named Nazir-Said:

The following syllogism is presented: 'There are no camels in Germany. The city of B. is in Germany. Are there camels there or not?'
Subject repeats syllogism exactly.
So, are there camels in Germany?
"I don't know, I've never seen German villages."
Refusal to infer.
The syllogism is repeated.
"Probably there are camels there."
Repeat what I said.
"There are no camels in Germany, are there camels in B. or not? So probably there are. If it's a large city, there should be camels there."
Syllogism breaks down, inference drawn apart from its conditions.
But what do my words suggest?
"Probably there are. Since there are large cities, there should be camels."
Again a conclusion apart from the syllogism.
But if there aren't any in all of Germany?
"If it's a large city, there will be Kazakhs or Kirghiz there."
But I'm saying that there are no camels in Germany, and this city is in Germany.
"If this village is in a large city, there is probably no room for camels."

Comment author: arundelo 29 March 2014 03:47:42AM 0 points [-]

Not to deny that this is an example of someone who does not think abstractly -- I agree that it is -- but there's also a Gricean interpretation: From the subject's point of view, if the experimenter already knows that there is literally not even one camel in all of Germany including all of its cities and villages, then the experimenter would not ask whether there are camels in a specific city in Germany, therefore the experimenter must mean, "There are no camels in Germany not counting the cities", or "There are extremely few camels in Germany".

Comment author: gwern 29 March 2014 04:01:02AM 3 points [-]

That doesn't wash given the dialogue, rather than a single question. A single question might reasonably elicit a Gricean answer to a different question, but repeated questioning on the same point?

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