[lit-ideas] Re: The Educational Value of Slips of the Whatever
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:46:10 +0000 (GMT)
--- On Wed, 30/9/09, Richard Henninge <RichardHenninge@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: Richard Henninge <RichardHenninge@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The Educational Value of Slips of the Whatever
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Wednesday, 30 September, 2009, 12:14 AM
> Evidently Donal is no mathmo,
> computer bod or logician:
>
> "A perhaps better example is the Wason (Selection)
> test/task: this can be wiki'd at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task ,
> along with related entries.
>
> If you don't want to know the result look away now, as a
> comment on one such test/task follows (further to Pinker's
> excellent 2 page discussion in "How the Mind Works":-
>
> If the rule to be tested is 'If vowel, then even number'
> and the cards are
> '4', 'A', 'D', '7' - a common response is to chose 'A' and
> '4'.
>
> '4' is incorrect because it cannot falsify the rule. But it
> is surely chosen because if the flip of '4' is a vowel it
> appears to confirm the rule.
>
> 'A' is correct. But I guess many choose it, as with '4',
> because if the flip is a vowel it appears to confirm the
> rule. But this is not a logically valid reason for the
> choice. 'A' is correct only because if the flip were an odd
> number that would falsify the rule.
>
> Other choices are logically irrelevant because they cannot
> falsify the rule."
> ...
>
> Whoops!
Indeed. I should have explicitly said '7' is a necessary card to turn -
amazingly I am well aware of this. What I _meant_ by the last line quoted (in a
dashed off and curtailed post; internet cafe closing as I typed) was that
choices that are logically irrelevant are so because they cannot falsify or be
inconsistent with the rule (that they may be consistent with the rule is not
enough to make them logically relevant, because this kind of consistency does
not mean they constitute any kind of test of the rule: to constitute a test
they must be potential falsifiers of, or potentially inconsistent with, the
rule). That is, what I _meant_ was that the WasonST is a good example of both
the validity of falsificationism as the only logical approach to testing (as
opposed to a confirmationist approach) and of how this approach jibs with
confirmationmist bias in our psychological thinking.
Add-on: consider "All swans are white" and three boxes - the first contains 'A
black swan', the second 'A white swan', a third is 'Empty'. Instinct or
intuition might suggest the empty box is irrelevant as a test of the rule
whereas the other two are relevant. On P's logic only the first box is
logically relevant as it falsifies the rule. The other two are equally
irrelevant - the only sense in which they are logically relevant is that they
are both cases of the absence of a counter-example, and in this sense both
boxes are examples of points in space-time where the rule passes an
observational test since no counter-example is observed. But the second box no
more confirms the rule than the third.
While logical, this is not intuitive to many people I would guess.
However, Richard shows a clear understanding of the falsificationist logic that
underpins the WasonST when he rightly clarifies:-
>The choice of '7' is logically relevant because if
> the flip were a vowel it would falsify the rule. The choice
> of both 'A' and '7' are logically necessary--I wouldn't call
> them logically "valid"--to falsify the rule because you have
> to turn over every visible odd number to see if it conceals
> a rule-breaking, rule-invalidating vowel, as well as any
> vowel to see if its hidden side conceals a rule-breaking,
> rule-falsifying odd number.
My only quibble is that it seems to me that the choices that are "logically
necessary" can fairly be described as "logically 'valid'"; just as choices that
are logically irrelevant might be fairly be described as "logically invalid".
Donal
Carrying on despite
Being not a mathmo, computer bod or logician
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