William_Quixote comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: elharo 08 July 2013 12:04PM

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

Comments (343)

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

Comment author: William_Quixote 13 July 2013 06:39:33PM 1 point [-]

Dumbledore clearly suspects Harry might be behind Azkaban. In fact, he says as much. However he doesn't "know".

Dumbledore certainly doesn't "say" that he knows. But as readers we are not shown his internal thoughts (in contrast to Harry, Hermione, Mcgonagall, and many others). Dumbledore's thoughts have been deliberately made opqaue to readers. So we can't definitively say that he knows or doesn't know something. We can only infer which is more likely given other known facts.

I will note on a meta level though, that one possible reason not to show a character's thoughts is that they are thinking and saying different things.