This is the same confusion I was originally having with Zed. Both you and he appear to consider knowing the explicit form of a statement to be knowing something about the truth value of that statement, whereas I think you can know nothing about a statement even if you know what it is, so you can update on finding out that C is a conjunction.
Given that we aren’t often asked to evaluate the truth of statements without knowing what they are, I think my sense is more useful.
Of course, we almost never reach this level of ignorance in practice, which makes this the type of abstract academic point that people all-too-characteristically have trouble with. The step of calculating the complexity of a hypothesis seems “automatic”, so much so that it’s easy to forget that there is a step there.
This is the same confusion I was originally having with Zed. Both you and he appear to consider knowing the explicit form of a statement to be knowing something about the truth value of that statement, whereas I think you can know nothing about a statement even if you know what it is, so you can update on finding out that C is a conjunction.
Given that we aren’t often asked to evaluate the truth of statements without knowing what they are, I think my sense is more useful.
Did you mean “can’t”? Because “can” is my position (as illustrated in the dialogue!).
This exemplifies the point in my original comment: