A: We both know that you don’t know of any specific chicken having crossed any specific road. Your question does not state a lie, but presupposes it. This would not be called out as a lie under ordinary social convention, but a deep commitment to truth requires occasionally flagging things like this.
Presuppositions are things which aren’t stated directly, but which are implied by an utterance because if they weren’t true, the utterance would be nonsensical. Presuppositions that aren’t truth-optimized can be surprisingly pernicious.
I have not only told you a joke, I have also told you that chickens live in contexts where they can interact with roads, are motile, and are capable of having motivations. I have told you these things in a way that bypasses some of your epistemic defenses. Some of these things are true, and some are false. I didn’t tell you these things on purpose, but they were communicated nevertheless.
I think that explicitly unpacking presuppositions, and spotting the questionable ones, is a foundational skill of rationality that I’ve never seen expressed. I also suspect some other techniques might be warped versions of this one. For example, there’s a lot of overlap between the ontology of frames, and what you get if you unpack presuppositions, but presupposition-truth is much more concrete.
Fighting presuppositions instead of letting them develop in dedicated sandboxes hinders their understanding, makes communication unnecessarily difficult. The false dichotomy is between belief and dismissal of falsehood. There is also understanding of apparent falsehoods, which produces valuable gears that reassemble into unexpected truths.
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: We both know that you don’t know of any specific chicken having crossed any specific road. Your question does not state a lie, but presupposes it. This would not be called out as a lie under ordinary social convention, but a deep commitment to truth requires occasionally flagging things like this.
Presuppositions are things which aren’t stated directly, but which are implied by an utterance because if they weren’t true, the utterance would be nonsensical. Presuppositions that aren’t truth-optimized can be surprisingly pernicious.
I have not only told you a joke, I have also told you that chickens live in contexts where they can interact with roads, are motile, and are capable of having motivations. I have told you these things in a way that bypasses some of your epistemic defenses. Some of these things are true, and some are false. I didn’t tell you these things on purpose, but they were communicated nevertheless.
I think that explicitly unpacking presuppositions, and spotting the questionable ones, is a foundational skill of rationality that I’ve never seen expressed. I also suspect some other techniques might be warped versions of this one. For example, there’s a lot of overlap between the ontology of frames, and what you get if you unpack presuppositions, but presupposition-truth is much more concrete.
(Crossposted with Facebook: link)
Fighting presuppositions instead of letting them develop in dedicated sandboxes hinders their understanding, makes communication unnecessarily difficult. The false dichotomy is between belief and dismissal of falsehood. There is also understanding of apparent falsehoods, which produces valuable gears that reassemble into unexpected truths.