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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (409)

Sort By: Leading

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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?