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If you clean my house, I'll give you 50e. Do you think i'd give you 50e out of the blue if you refused to do the job ? I feel this area of langage is one full

by malka 11y ago

If you clean my house, I'll give you 50e. Do you think i'd give you 50e out of the blue if you refused to do the job ? I feel this area of langage is one full of implicit meaning and shared context. Because in your example it is indeed a non exlusive if, while mine is.

wutbrodo 11y ago
> If you clean my house, I'll give you 50e. Do you think i'd give you 50e out of the blue if you refused to do the job ? Ignoring the "out of the blue" part, which is entirely off-topic, actually yes: "How about if I wash your car?". As mentioned downthread, it would be a hugely bizarre interpretation to assume that there are no circumstances under which you would ever give me 50e other than cleaning your house. In this example, it's trivially possible that there are other jobs that I can perform that you might give me 50e for.
aetherson 11y ago
No. But also, I wouldn't assume that the only reason that you would conceivably give me 50e is because I cleaned your house.
tjradcliffe 11y ago
Exactly, and this makes this purportedly logic problem a pyschologcial or sociological problem that is only tangentially related to the nominally pure logic of the question. Since we can with equal legitimacy infer either an exclusive or non-exclusive meaning to the "if", how we answer the question depends entirely on that choice. Amongst undergraduates it is not implausible that when you tell them "this is a logic problem" they will tend to assume--based on the norms of undergraduate thought--that the researcher means "iff" when they say "if". I certainly would have as an undergrad. To pretend that interpreting "if" as "iff" in an unusual situation is an error, is an error. The test subject is forced to guess what the researcher means, and for all kinds of reasons (not wanting to look stupid, etc) is unlikely to simply ask, "Do you mean if-and-only-if or not?" Almost all supposed "logic problems" are in fact psychological problems of this kind. Any problem of the form, "What is the next number in this sequence..." for example, has an infinite number of valid answers, since no finite sequence deteremines its next element. Solving such problems requires making an informed guess about the state of mind of the person who designed the sequence, and infering which of the infinite number of possible patterns they thought was the obvious one.

by malka 11y ago

wutbrodo 11y ago

> If you clean my house, I'll give you 50e. Do you think i'd give you 50e out of the blue if you refused to do the job ? Ignoring the "out of the blue" part, which is entirely off-topic, actually yes: "How about if I wash your car?". As mentioned downthread, it would be a hugely bizarre interpretation to assume that there are no circumstances under which you would ever give me 50e other than cleaning your house. In this example, it's trivially possible that there are other jobs that I can perform that you might give me 50e for.

aetherson 11y ago

No. But also, I wouldn't assume that the only reason that you would conceivably give me 50e is because I cleaned your house.

tjradcliffe 11y ago

Exactly, and this makes this purportedly logic problem a pyschologcial or sociological problem that is only tangentially related to the nominally pure logic of the question. Since we can with equal legitimacy infer either an exclusive or non-exclusive meaning to the "if", how we answer the question depends entirely on that choice. Amongst undergraduates it is not implausible that when you tell them "this is a logic problem" they will tend to assume--based on the norms of undergraduate thought--that the researcher means "iff" when they say "if". I certainly would have as an undergrad. To pretend that interpreting "if" as "iff" in an unusual situation is an error, is an error. The test subject is forced to guess what the researcher means, and for all kinds of reasons (not wanting to look stupid, etc) is unlikely to simply ask, "Do you mean if-and-only-if or not?" Almost all supposed "logic problems" are in fact psychological problems of this kind. Any problem of the form, "What is the next number in this sequence..." for example, has an infinite number of valid answers, since no finite sequence deteremines its next element. Solving such problems requires making an informed guess about the state of mind of the person who designed the sequence, and infering which of the infinite number of possible patterns they thought was the obvious one.