Not sure how to think about this overall. I can come up with examples where it seems like you should assign basically full credit for sloppy or straightforwardly wrong statements.
E.g. suppose Alice claims that BIC only make black pens. Bob says, “I literally have a packet of blue BIC pens in my desk drawer. We will go to my house, open the drawer, and you will see them.” They go to Bob’s house, and lo, the desk drawer is empty. Turns out the pens are on the kitchen table instead. Clearly it’s fine for Bob to say, “All I really meant was that I had blue pens at my house, the point stands.”
I think your mention of motte-and-baileys probably points at the right refinement: maybe it’s fine to be sloppy if the version you later correct yourself to has the same implications as what you literally said. But if you correct yourself to something easier to defend but that doesn’t support your initial conclusion to the same extent, that’s bad.
EDIT: another important feature of the pens example is that the statement Bob switched to is uncontroversially true. If on finding the desk drawer empty he instead wanted to switch to, “I left them at work”, then probably he should pause and admit a mistake first.
Based on your description of that incident, I expect that when Bob said:
“I literally have a packet of blue BIC pens in my desk drawer. We will go to my house, open the drawer, and you will see them.”
that he did not, in fact, really mean:
“I have blue pens at my house”
That is a bizarre interpretation of that set of words. Why did Alice and Bob open the drawer to look for pens if they didn’t both interpret his words as indicating that there was, literally, a packet of blue BIC pens in Bob’s desk drawer?
So when Bob says:
“All I really meant was that I had blue pens at my house”
then he is making a false statement. Perhaps he is knowingly making a false statement—that’s ethically bad. Perhaps he is unable to comprehend the meaning of his own words—that’s epistemically bad. Either way it’s not fine.
Instead Bob could say a true thing like:
“I was wrong about where the pens were, but right about BIC making blue pens”
Or a shorter true thing like:
“See, BIC makes blue pens”.
My score for Bob:
full credit for knowing whether BIC makes blue pens.
partial credit for mostly knowing the location of his pens.
large demerit for being untrustworthy about the meaning of his own words, in a low stakes situation where there was no reason to lie. Get a grip, Bob.
huh? I see the bizarreness in the opposite way—why would you score Bob in such an anti-useful way?
to me, it seems blindingly obvious what Bob was trying to communicate and that Alice would be completely on Bob’s side without any untrustworthiness points about any words or anything else between them, not even a hint… they looked into the drawer because that’s where Bob remembered leaving them, then they both concluded that the exact statement is wrong and that they should focus on the gist of the problem they are trying to solve—if they both see the blue pens on the table, they both agree about the existence of blue BIC pens and they both agree that either Bob’s memory is faulty or that someone else moved the pens, but that it doesn’t matter, that the argument Bob should have made was a weaker version of what he actually said when he was too enthusiastic, that a more carefully worded argument would have been warranted but that what he meant was that he can prove the existence of blue pens by showing them to Alice
I believe Bob has a grip, and that Alice does not even need to be that extra charitable, just reasonable / not adversarial. There is no need to paint Bob in any wrong light here, the structure of this story is completely within the bounds of intellectual standards proposed in the OP, I don’t see what could possibly be said against Bob here in any honest manner.
If Bob’s prediction was written down “for the record” somewhere, that place should be updated by the new definition that both Bob and Alice completely agree about, for the benefit of onlookers—yes, I can agree with that! But in this story, Bob should NOT be accused of anything—not even that he was sloppy—given the everyday-life stakes of this story, the level of precision was entirely appropriate IMHO.
We may have different values, or we may be imagining a different hypothetical, or something else. I’ll try to elaborate.
Like you, it seems blindingly obvious to me what Bob was trying to communicate by saying “I literally have a packet of blue BIC pens in my desk drawer”. To be explicit, Bob is stating his belief that there is a packet of blue BIC pens in his desk drawer. He doesn’t specify his credence, but it’s probably somewhere 90-99% depending on other factors.
Bob’s words imply other things that have been mentioned, all of which are straightforwardly true:
Blue BIC pens exist in the world.
There is a packet of blue BIC pens in Bob’s house.
Bob can prove the existence of blue BIC pens by showing them to Alice.
Bob remembers the packet of blue BIC pens being in the drawer.
It would be surprising to Bob if there were no packet of blue BIC pens in the drawer.
I’m okay with assigning “basically full credit” for Bob’s statement. I wouldn’t call it “sloppy”; I wouldn’t say it was “too enthusiastic”; I wouldn’t call for a “weaker version” or “more carefully worded argument”. It’s okay to make mistakes, try to fix them, and learn from them too.
The statement that I say is false and bad is:
“All I really meant was that I had blue pens at my house”
To me, Bob’s words here prioritize status-defending over clarity. They remind me of this from TurnTrout’s opening post:
An author committed to clarity might say something like: “I can see how my words led you to believe X. To be clear, what I mean is Y.” This response takes responsibility.
A status-defending author might say something more like: “You are wrong to read it as X. It obviously means Y, and you are being uncharitable.” This response deflects responsibility.
I’m not clear what your position is exactly (and it may not be mattmacdermott’s position). I guess one of:
Bob’s statement is literally false, but should be understood as something else (what?) that is true.
Bob’s statement is true, because the meaning of Bob’s earlier statements retroactively changed when Bob opened the drawer.
Bob’s statement is false, but given the low everyday-life stakes, it’s ok.
I have some sympathy with these positions, but I respectfully disagree.
Thanks for the elaboration. My position is that Bob’s first statement is literally false but that it implies a truth and the implication is what has been important for Alice throughout the interaction; that Bob’s second statement does NOT claim that the first one should have been originally understood as something else that is true—only in the explicit context of additional evidence; that Bob does NOT claim that his earlier statement retroactively changed.
I would still say that Bob did communicate that he was “too enthusiastic originally” and that he would have wanted to make “more carefully worded argument” if the stakes were higher—the one that was implied by the original statement and that would not have been literally false but would have been literally true if worded more carefully. But since the implied argument that he meant to say is clear to all participants at the time of the second statement, Bob knows that Alice knows what Bob meant to say, thus I say it’s OK for Bob to say that the thing in his mind had the correct shape all along—in all important aspects given the stakes of the discussion—he really did mean the thing that they together discovered as the truth even if the exact thing he said turned out literally false, but it’s false in a way that doesn’t matter now that they both know better.
I believe both of us would agree that if Bob said “All I really meant to say was that I had blue pens at my house”, that would have been a better way to comment on his own mistake, without skipping the part that disambiguates between the 2 interpretations: whether he believes in equivalence between 2 literal statements that are incompatible; or whether he would have wished to think about his words more carefully and not try to bet on a statement that is too narrow (a la the “introverted librarian” vs “librarian” fallacy which I forgot the name of—edit: conjunction fallacy)...
But I believe our disagreement is that I took 1 extra charitable step and I don’t believe Bob did any status-defending at the cost of clarity. I think Bob was clear in his communication as long as I don’t take an adversarial stance towards the imperfectly-worded “All I really meant was that I had blue pens at my house”. That the imperfect wording is excusable given the low stakes.
Though I would not endorse similar imperfect wording in a scientific paper errata.
After reading your comments and @Jiro ’s below, and discussing with LLMs on various settings, I think I was too strong in saying “large demerit” and “get a grip, Bob”. While it’s notable to me that Bob expressed himself with a status-defending post-hoc rationalization, that’s just one piece of weak evidence to Bob’s overall character.
TurnTrout’s essay includes this disclaimer:
The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.
This thread was started with a thought experiment about low-stakes verbal communication. I incorrectly applied intuitions from the opening essay outside of the intended context.
You need to distinguish between errors that are of no significance and errors that are significant. Although Bob’s words were not literally true, the error is not relevant to the proposition for which the statement was used as evidence. (That’s what a nitpick means: caring about an error that is not relevant to the associated proposition.)
Bob’s statement 1: “I literally have a packet of blue BIC pens in my desk drawer” was not literally true, and that error was not relevant to the proposition that BIC make blue pens. I’m okay with assigning “basically full credit” for that statement.
Bob’s statement 2: “All I really meant was that I had blue pens at my house” is not literally true. For what proposition is that statement being used as evidence? I don’t see an explicit one in mattmacdermott’s hypothetical. It’s not relevant to the proposition that BIC make blue pens. This is the statement for which I assigned a “large demerit for being untrustworthy about the meaning of his own words, in a low stakes situation where there was no reason to lie”.
I don’t think that Bob’s statement 2 is an error of no significance. If I’m Alice, and Bob is my friend, then he apparently just lied to my face. Hopefully it’s a one-off slip of the tongue, and not part of a pattern.
Bob’s statement 2: “All I really meant was that I had blue pens at my house” is not literally true. For what proposition is that statement being used as evidence?
It’s not being used as evidence for anything.
“All I really meant” is a colloquial way of saying “the part relevant to the proposition in question was...” As such, it was in fact truthful.
Not sure how to think about this overall. I can come up with examples where it seems like you should assign basically full credit for sloppy or straightforwardly wrong statements.
E.g. suppose Alice claims that BIC only make black pens. Bob says, “I literally have a packet of blue BIC pens in my desk drawer. We will go to my house, open the drawer, and you will see them.” They go to Bob’s house, and lo, the desk drawer is empty. Turns out the pens are on the kitchen table instead. Clearly it’s fine for Bob to say, “All I really meant was that I had blue pens at my house, the point stands.”
I think your mention of motte-and-baileys probably points at the right refinement: maybe it’s fine to be sloppy if the version you later correct yourself to has the same implications as what you literally said. But if you correct yourself to something easier to defend but that doesn’t support your initial conclusion to the same extent, that’s bad.
EDIT: another important feature of the pens example is that the statement Bob switched to is uncontroversially true. If on finding the desk drawer empty he instead wanted to switch to, “I left them at work”, then probably he should pause and admit a mistake first.
Based on your description of that incident, I expect that when Bob said:
that he did not, in fact, really mean:
That is a bizarre interpretation of that set of words. Why did Alice and Bob open the drawer to look for pens if they didn’t both interpret his words as indicating that there was, literally, a packet of blue BIC pens in Bob’s desk drawer?
So when Bob says:
then he is making a false statement. Perhaps he is knowingly making a false statement—that’s ethically bad. Perhaps he is unable to comprehend the meaning of his own words—that’s epistemically bad. Either way it’s not fine.
Instead Bob could say a true thing like:
Or a shorter true thing like:
My score for Bob:
full credit for knowing whether BIC makes blue pens.
partial credit for mostly knowing the location of his pens.
large demerit for being untrustworthy about the meaning of his own words, in a low stakes situation where there was no reason to lie. Get a grip, Bob.
huh? I see the bizarreness in the opposite way—why would you score Bob in such an anti-useful way?
to me, it seems blindingly obvious what Bob was trying to communicate and that Alice would be completely on Bob’s side without any untrustworthiness points about any words or anything else between them, not even a hint… they looked into the drawer because that’s where Bob remembered leaving them, then they both concluded that the exact statement is wrong and that they should focus on the gist of the problem they are trying to solve—if they both see the blue pens on the table, they both agree about the existence of blue BIC pens and they both agree that either Bob’s memory is faulty or that someone else moved the pens, but that it doesn’t matter, that the argument Bob should have made was a weaker version of what he actually said when he was too enthusiastic, that a more carefully worded argument would have been warranted but that what he meant was that he can prove the existence of blue pens by showing them to Alice
I believe Bob has a grip, and that Alice does not even need to be that extra charitable, just reasonable / not adversarial. There is no need to paint Bob in any wrong light here, the structure of this story is completely within the bounds of intellectual standards proposed in the OP, I don’t see what could possibly be said against Bob here in any honest manner.
If Bob’s prediction was written down “for the record” somewhere, that place should be updated by the new definition that both Bob and Alice completely agree about, for the benefit of onlookers—yes, I can agree with that! But in this story, Bob should NOT be accused of anything—not even that he was sloppy—given the everyday-life stakes of this story, the level of precision was entirely appropriate IMHO.
We may have different values, or we may be imagining a different hypothetical, or something else. I’ll try to elaborate.
Like you, it seems blindingly obvious to me what Bob was trying to communicate by saying “I literally have a packet of blue BIC pens in my desk drawer”. To be explicit, Bob is stating his belief that there is a packet of blue BIC pens in his desk drawer. He doesn’t specify his credence, but it’s probably somewhere 90-99% depending on other factors.
Bob’s words imply other things that have been mentioned, all of which are straightforwardly true:
Blue BIC pens exist in the world.
There is a packet of blue BIC pens in Bob’s house.
Bob can prove the existence of blue BIC pens by showing them to Alice.
Bob remembers the packet of blue BIC pens being in the drawer.
It would be surprising to Bob if there were no packet of blue BIC pens in the drawer.
I’m okay with assigning “basically full credit” for Bob’s statement. I wouldn’t call it “sloppy”; I wouldn’t say it was “too enthusiastic”; I wouldn’t call for a “weaker version” or “more carefully worded argument”. It’s okay to make mistakes, try to fix them, and learn from them too.
The statement that I say is false and bad is:
To me, Bob’s words here prioritize status-defending over clarity. They remind me of this from TurnTrout’s opening post:
I’m not clear what your position is exactly (and it may not be mattmacdermott’s position). I guess one of:
Bob’s statement is literally false, but should be understood as something else (what?) that is true.
Bob’s statement is true, because the meaning of Bob’s earlier statements retroactively changed when Bob opened the drawer.
Bob’s statement is false, but given the low everyday-life stakes, it’s ok.
I have some sympathy with these positions, but I respectfully disagree.
Thanks for the elaboration. My position is that Bob’s first statement is literally false but that it implies a truth and the implication is what has been important for Alice throughout the interaction; that Bob’s second statement does NOT claim that the first one should have been originally understood as something else that is true—only in the explicit context of additional evidence; that Bob does NOT claim that his earlier statement retroactively changed.
I would still say that Bob did communicate that he was “too enthusiastic originally” and that he would have wanted to make “more carefully worded argument” if the stakes were higher—the one that was implied by the original statement and that would not have been literally false but would have been literally true if worded more carefully. But since the implied argument that he meant to say is clear to all participants at the time of the second statement, Bob knows that Alice knows what Bob meant to say, thus I say it’s OK for Bob to say that the thing in his mind had the correct shape all along—in all important aspects given the stakes of the discussion—he really did mean the thing that they together discovered as the truth even if the exact thing he said turned out literally false, but it’s false in a way that doesn’t matter now that they both know better.
I believe both of us would agree that if Bob said “All I really meant to say was that I had blue pens at my house”, that would have been a better way to comment on his own mistake, without skipping the part that disambiguates between the 2 interpretations: whether he believes in equivalence between 2 literal statements that are incompatible; or whether he would have wished to think about his words more carefully and not try to bet on a statement that is too narrow (a la the “introverted librarian” vs “librarian” fallacy which I forgot the name of—edit: conjunction fallacy)...
But I believe our disagreement is that I took 1 extra charitable step and I don’t believe Bob did any status-defending at the cost of clarity. I think Bob was clear in his communication as long as I don’t take an adversarial stance towards the imperfectly-worded “All I really meant was that I had blue pens at my house”. That the imperfect wording is excusable given the low stakes.
Though I would not endorse similar imperfect wording in a scientific paper errata.
After reading your comments and @Jiro ’s below, and discussing with LLMs on various settings, I think I was too strong in saying “large demerit” and “get a grip, Bob”. While it’s notable to me that Bob expressed himself with a status-defending post-hoc rationalization, that’s just one piece of weak evidence to Bob’s overall character.
TurnTrout’s essay includes this disclaimer:
This thread was started with a thought experiment about low-stakes verbal communication. I incorrectly applied intuitions from the opening essay outside of the intended context.
You need to distinguish between errors that are of no significance and errors that are significant. Although Bob’s words were not literally true, the error is not relevant to the proposition for which the statement was used as evidence. (That’s what a nitpick means: caring about an error that is not relevant to the associated proposition.)
Bob’s statement 1: “I literally have a packet of blue BIC pens in my desk drawer” was not literally true, and that error was not relevant to the proposition that BIC make blue pens. I’m okay with assigning “basically full credit” for that statement.
Bob’s statement 2: “All I really meant was that I had blue pens at my house” is not literally true. For what proposition is that statement being used as evidence? I don’t see an explicit one in mattmacdermott’s hypothetical. It’s not relevant to the proposition that BIC make blue pens. This is the statement for which I assigned a “large demerit for being untrustworthy about the meaning of his own words, in a low stakes situation where there was no reason to lie”.
I don’t think that Bob’s statement 2 is an error of no significance. If I’m Alice, and Bob is my friend, then he apparently just lied to my face. Hopefully it’s a one-off slip of the tongue, and not part of a pattern.
It’s not being used as evidence for anything.
“All I really meant” is a colloquial way of saying “the part relevant to the proposition in question was...” As such, it was in fact truthful.