I'm reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. In appendix B I came across the following comment. Emphasis mine:
Studies of language comprehension indicate that people quickly recode much of what they hear into an abstract representation that no longer distinguishes whether the idea was expressed in an active or in a passive form and no longer discriminates what was actually said from what was implied, presupposed, or implicated (Clark and Clark 1977).
My first thought on seeing this is: holy crap, this explains why people insist on seeing relevance claims in my statements that I didn't put there. If the brain doesn't distinguish statement from implicature, and my conversational partner believes that A implies B when I don't, then of course I'm going to be continually running into situations where people model me as saying and believing B when I actually only said A. At a minimum this will happen any time I discuss any question of seemingly-morally-relevant fact with someone who hasn't trained themselves to make the is-ought distinction. Which is most people.
The next thought my brain jumped to: This process might explain the failure to make the is-ought distinction in the first place. That seems like much more of a leap, though. I looked up the Clark and Clark cite. Unfortunately it's a fairly long book that I'm not entirely sure I want to wade through. Has anyone else read it? Can someone offer more details about exactly what findings Kahneman is referencing?
It clearly an overstatement. People are very well able to distinguish them -- we are doing so right here. Perhaps what people are actually doing (I have not seen the Clark&Clark source to know what concrete observations they are discussing) is considering the implications to have been intended by the speaker as much as the explicit assertions. Well, duh, as the saying is.
Implicatures aren't some weird thing that the poor confused mehums do that the oppressed slans are forced to put up with. You don't say things when they are clear without being said, because it's a waste of time. It's a compression algorithm. As with any compression algorithm, the more you compress things, the more vulnerable the message is to errors, and you have a trade-off between the two.
This, btw, is my interpretation of the Ask/Guess cultural division. These are different compression algorithms, that leave out different stuff. Mixing compression algorithms is generally a bad idea: too much stuff gets left out if both are applied.
Are we? We're discussing the distinction, sure, but is each of us distinguishing the other's statements about implicature from the other's implications about implicature? Did I say everything you think I said? Did you say everything I think you said?
If I read this thread, then attempt to write down a list of significant statements you made from memory, and then compare that list to your actual text; will it contain things you did not say? Will it also contain things that I thoug... (read more)