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?
I'm not sure I agree. Expecting people to judge stated claims and ignore implicature all the time is unreasonable, sure. But expecting them to judge stated claims over implicature when the stated claim is about empirical facts strikes me as plenty reasonable.
...or that was my opinion until now, anyway. This bit about the brain not actually distinguishing the two has me questioning it. I still don't think that it's okay to conflate them, but if the tendency to do so is hardwired, then it doesn't represent willful stupidity or intellectual dishonesty.
It is, however, still a problem, and I don't think it's one that can be blamed on the speaker; as Gunnar points out elsethread, it's hard to explicitly rule out implicatures that you yourself did not think of. It's also hard to have a discussion when you have to preface statements with disclaimers.
I should add that I am talking about relatively neutral statements here. If I may steal an example from yvain, if you say "The ultra-rich, who control the majority of our planet's wealth, spend their time at cocktail parties and salons while millions of decent hard-working people starve," you pretty much lose the right to complain. For contrast, if you say "90% of the planet's wealth is held by the upper 1%," and your discussion partner asks you why you support the monster Stalin, I think you're on solid ground asking them WTF.
...or again, so I thought. If the brain really doesn't distinguish between the neutral version of that statement and the listener's belief that people making it must be Communists, then the comparison is inevitable and I am boned.
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... (read more)