The majority of human beings cannot fully comprehend a statement that has a conditional as a key part of its meaning.
This sounds incredible to those who can, but I'm pretty sure it's true.
This sounds incredible to those who can, but I'm pretty sure it's true.
When a person who can't encounters such a statement, they don't go "ERROR," they just collapse it down from "If P then Q" to either "P" or "Q".
Here's an example of how the conversation goes, and how this fact remains hidden:
A: "If I were going to Paris, where would be the best place to get a baguette?"
B: "Oh! You're going to Paris?"
A: "No, I'm just saying, where's the best place in Paris to get a baguette?"
B: "Oh yeah, sure, you want to go to.... etc"
B: "Oh! You're going to Paris?"
A: "No, I'm just saying, where's the best place in Paris to get a baguette?"
B: "Oh yeah, sure, you want to go to.... etc"
In B's response above, they actually didn't fully understand A's statement, but collapsed it into a form and repeated it in a way that enabled A to (reflexively, because this is how we explain things) dumb it down to a mode that B could fully comprehend and engage with.
Once you know that this happens, YOU WILL SEE (HEAR) IT EVERYWHERE.
(Even fewer humans have the cognitive ability to easily parse sentences with multiple levels of conditionals, so don't even try that in casual conversation)
Finally, an interesting corollary of this is that it means most humans aren't Turing-complete.
This thread is getting enough play that's it's worthwhile for me to clarify that the example I gave above is bad and insufficiently unambiguous.
The popular "how would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch?" is in fact a pretty good example.
The popular "how would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch?" is in fact a pretty good example.
And someone helpfully posted this as being related:
perfect-english-grammar.com
perfect-english-grammar.com
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