Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/hedging/

Hedging.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_%28linguistics%29

Examples:

• Men are evil 
  
• All men are evil 
  
• Some men are evil
  
• most men are evil
  
• many men are evil
• I think men are evil
  
• I think all men are evil
  
• I think some men are evil 
  
• I think most men are evil

"I think" weakens your relationship or belief in the idea, hedges that I usually encourage are the some|most type. It weakens your strength of idea but does not reduce the confidence of it.

• I 100% believe this happens 80% or more of the time (most men are evil) 
  Or 
  
• I 75% believe that this happens 100% of the time (I think all men are evil) 
  Or
  
• I 75% believe this happens 20% of the time (I think that some men are evil) 
  Or 
  
• I 100% believe that this happens 20% of the time (some men are evil)
  Or
• I (Reader Interprets)% believe that this happens (Reader Interprets)% of the time (I think men are evil) 
  

They are all hedges.  I only like some of them.  When you hedge - I recommend using the type that doesn't detract from the projected belief but instead detracts from the expected effect on the world.  Which is to say - be confident of weak effects, rather than unconfident of strong effects.

This relates to filters in that some people will automatically add the "This person thinks..." filter to any incoming information.  It's not good or bad if you do/don't filter, just a fact about your lens of the world.  If you don't have this filter in place, you might find yourself personally attached to your words while other's remain detached from words that seem like they should be more personally attached to.  This filter might explain the difference.  

This also relates to Personhood and the way we trust incoming information from some sources.   When we are very young we go through a period of trusting anything said to us, and at some point experience failures when we do trust.  We also discover lying, and any parent will be able to tell you of the genuine childish glee when their children realise they can lie.  These experiences shape us into adults.  We have to trust some sources, we don't have enough time to be sceptical of all knowledge ever and sometimes we outsource to proven credentialed professionals i.e. doctors.  Sometimes those professionals get it wrong.

This also relates to in-groups and out-groups because listeners who believe they are in your in-group are likely to interpret ambiguous hedges in a neutral to positive direction and listeners who believe they are in the out-group of the message are likely to interpret your ambiguous hedges in a neutral or negative direction.  Which is to say that people who already agree that All men are evil, are likely to "know what you mean" when you say, "all men are evil" and people who don't agree that all men are evil will read a whole pile of "how wrong could you be" into the statement, "all men are evil".

Communication is hard.  I know no one is going to argue with my example because I already covered that in an earlier post.

Meta: this took 1.5hrs to write.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiobJhogNnA

The short version is that if the language you speak requires different verbs for the present and the future, it causes you to think about it differently. Depending on the magnitude of the effect, this has important implications for construal level theory. If your language allows you to think about the future in Near mode, it may allow you to think about it more rationally.

Previous discussion on one of Keith Chen's papers here.

The language you speak may affect how you approach your finances, according to a working paper by economist Keith Chen (seen via posts by Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative and Economy Lab). It appears that languages that require more explicit future tense are associated with lower savings. A few interesting quotes from a quick glance:

...[I]n the World Values Survey a language’s FTR [Future-Time Reference] is almost entirely uncorrelated with its speakers’ stated values towards savings (corr = -0.07). This suggests that the language effects I identify operate through a channel which is independent of conscious attitudes towards savings. [emphasis mine]

Something else that I wasn't previously aware of:

Lowenstein (1988) finds a temporal reference-point effect: people demand much more compensation to delay receiving a good by one year, (from today to a year from now), than they are willing to pay to move up consumption of that same good (from a year from now to today).

Willard Quine described, in his article "Ontological Relativity" (Journal of Philosophy 65(7):185-212), his doctrine of the indeterminability of translation.  Roughly, this says that words are meaningful (a collection of words emitted by an agent can help predict that agent's actions), but don't have meanings (any word taken by itself corresponds to nothing at all; there is no correspondence between the word "rabbit" and the Leporidae).

In Quine's words,

Seen according to the museum myth, the words and sentences of a language have their determinate meanings. To discover the meanings of the native's words we may have to observe his behavior, but still the meanings of the words are supposed to be determinate in the native's mind, his mental museum, even in cases where behavioral criteria are powerless to discover them for us. When on the other hand we recognize with Dewey that "meaning. . . is primarily a property of behavior," we recognize that there are no meanings, nor likenesses nor distinctions of meaning, beyond what are implicit in people's dispositions to overt behavior. For naturalism the question whether two expressions are alike or unlike in meaning has no determinate answer, known or unknown, except insofar as the answer is settled in principle by people's speech dispositions, known or unknown.

Quine got my hackles up by using the word "naturalism" when he meant "behaviorism", implicitly claiming that naturalistic science was synonymous (or would be, if he believed in synonyms) with behaviorism.  But I'll try to remain impartial.  (Quine's timing was curious; Chomsky had demolished behaviorist linguistics in 1959, nine years before Quine's article.)

Quine's basic idea is insightful.  To phrase it in non-behaviorist terms:  If all words are defined in terms of other words, how does meaning get into that web of words?  Can we unambiguously determine the correct mapping between words and meanings?

Quine's response was to deny that that is an empirical question.  He said you should not even talk about meaning; you can only observe behavior.  You must remain agnostic about anything inside the head.

But it is an empirical question.  With math, plus with some reasonable assumptions, you can prove that you can unambiguously determine the correct mapping even from the outside.  In a world where you can tell someone to think of a square, and then use functional magnetic resonance imaging and find a pattern of neurons lit up in a square on his visual cortex, it is difficult to agree with Quine that the word "square" has no meaning.

You may protest that I'm thinking there is a homunculus inside the mind looking at that square.  After all, Quine already knew that the image of a square would be imprinted in some way on the retina of a person looking at a square.  But I am not assuming there is a homunculus inside the brain.  I am just observing a re-presentation inside the brain.  We can continue the behaviorist philosophy of saying that words are ultimately defined by behavior.  But there is no particular reason to stop our analyses when we hit the skull.  Behaviors outside the skull are systematically reflected in physical changes inside the skull, and we can investigate them and reason about them.

The more I tried to figure out what Quine meant - sorry, Quine - the more it puzzled me.  I'm with him as far as asking whether meanings are ambiguous.  But Quine doesn't just say meaning is ambiguous.  He says "there are no meanings... beyond what are implicit in... behavior".  The more I read, the more it seemed Quine was insisting, not that meaning was ambiguous, but that mental states do not exist - or that they are taboo.  And this taboo centered on the skull.

That seemed to come from a religious frame.  So I stopped trying to think of a rational justification for Quine's position, and starting looking for an emotional one.  And I may have found it.