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).
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).