Did you specifically think at the time “well, if ‘married’ and ‘unmarried’ were the only two possibilities, then the answer to the question would be ‘yes’—but Anne could also be divorced or a widow, in which case the answer would be ‘no,’ so I have to answer ‘not enough information’”?
Not accusing you of dishonesty—if you say you specifically thought of all that, I’ll believe you—but this seems suspiciously like a counter-factual justification, which I say only because I went through such a process. My immediate response on learning that I got the answer wrong was “well, ‘unmarried’ isn’t necessarily coextensive with ~married,‘” except then I realized that nothing like this occurred to me when I was actually answering, and that if I had thought in precisely these terms, I would have answered ‘yes’ and been quite proud of my own cleverness.
Regardless, for any potential future purposes, this problem could be addressed by changing “is a married person looking at an unmarried person?” to “is a married person looking at someone who is not married?” Doesn’t seem like there’s any reasonable ambiguity with the latter.
I recognise that it might be counter-factual justification. If I had explicitly wondered if “married/unmarried” were or were not exhaustive possibilities, I would have realised that the intent of the question was to treat them as exhaustive possibilities. The actual reasoning as I remember was “Only one of these people is known to be married, they are looking at someone of undetermined marital status”. The step from “undetermined marital status” to “either married or unmarried” was not made, and, if you had asked me at the time, I might well have answered “could be divorced or something? …. wait wait of course the intent is to consider married/unmarried as exhaustive possibilities”.
I am pretty sure that if the question had been
Three coins are lying on top of each other. The bottom coin lies heads-up, the top coin lies tails-up.
Does a heads-up coin lie underneath a tails-up coin?
I would have answered correctly, probably because it pattern-matches in some way to “maths problem”, where such reasoning is to be expected (not to say that such reasoning isn’t universally applicable).
The only controversy I could find in that article was ‘Some unmarried people object to describing themselves by a simplistic term “single”.’
But certainly, the word-problem interpretation was also tested there. If the word-problem interpretation part of the test was harder and more sensitive than the test of disjunctive reasoning, the data would actually tell us about word-problem interpretation, not disjunctive reasoning :P
Some unmarried people object to describing themselves by a simplistic term “single”, and often other options are
given, such as “divorced”, “widowed”, widow or widower, “cohabiting”, “civil union”, “domestic partnership”
and “unmarried partners”.
People saying this obviously aren’t satisfied with a simple married/unmarried dichotomy.
Indeed. Though different dictionaries give both meanings, the Dutch bureau for statistics uses exclusively the “ongehuwd (literally: unmarried) = has never been married” meaning.
I realise I answered Question 1 (the marriage one) incorrectly. This is because I did not think of married/unmarried as exhaustive:
unmarried : has never been married
married : is married right now
divorced : was married, no longer married due to divorce
widow : was married , no longer married due to the partner’s death
the intent of the question was to consider unmarried = all possibilities other than married.
Is this a language issue? Wikipedia indicates there’s at least some controversy on the use of “unmarried”
edit : Ok, no, that’s actually controversy on the use of “single”.
Did you specifically think at the time “well, if ‘married’ and ‘unmarried’ were the only two possibilities, then the answer to the question would be ‘yes’—but Anne could also be divorced or a widow, in which case the answer would be ‘no,’ so I have to answer ‘not enough information’”?
Not accusing you of dishonesty—if you say you specifically thought of all that, I’ll believe you—but this seems suspiciously like a counter-factual justification, which I say only because I went through such a process. My immediate response on learning that I got the answer wrong was “well, ‘unmarried’ isn’t necessarily coextensive with ~married,‘” except then I realized that nothing like this occurred to me when I was actually answering, and that if I had thought in precisely these terms, I would have answered ‘yes’ and been quite proud of my own cleverness.
Regardless, for any potential future purposes, this problem could be addressed by changing “is a married person looking at an unmarried person?” to “is a married person looking at someone who is not married?” Doesn’t seem like there’s any reasonable ambiguity with the latter.
I recognise that it might be counter-factual justification. If I had explicitly wondered if “married/unmarried” were or were not exhaustive possibilities, I would have realised that the intent of the question was to treat them as exhaustive possibilities. The actual reasoning as I remember was “Only one of these people is known to be married, they are looking at someone of undetermined marital status”. The step from “undetermined marital status” to “either married or unmarried” was not made, and, if you had asked me at the time, I might well have answered “could be divorced or something? …. wait wait of course the intent is to consider married/unmarried as exhaustive possibilities”.
I am pretty sure that if the question had been
I would have answered correctly, probably because it pattern-matches in some way to “maths problem”, where such reasoning is to be expected (not to say that such reasoning isn’t universally applicable).
I want to say that I was thinking this too, but I think that is revisionist history on my part.
The only controversy I could find in that article was ‘Some unmarried people object to describing themselves by a simplistic term “single”.’
But certainly, the word-problem interpretation was also tested there. If the word-problem interpretation part of the test was harder and more sensitive than the test of disjunctive reasoning, the data would actually tell us about word-problem interpretation, not disjunctive reasoning :P
I meant specifically
People saying this obviously aren’t satisfied with a simple married/unmarried dichotomy.
(in looking this up I wasn’t trying to obtain arguments against the way in which the question was posed, I just wanted to know if “unmarried” in English carries different connotations than it does in my native language. )
Apparently yes, it does.
On the contrary, people referred to in that article aren’t satisfied with a married/single dichotomy.
Indeed. Though different dictionaries give both meanings, the Dutch bureau for statistics uses exclusively the “ongehuwd (literally: unmarried) = has never been married” meaning.