More like, to determine whether people are paying any attention. (I once took an online personality test which included questions such as “I’ve never eaten before” to prevent people from using bots or similar to screw up their data.)
It’s hard to get people to answer such things straightforwardly. I once included “Some people have fingernails” in a poll, as about the most uncontroversially true thing I could think of, and participants found a way to argue that it wasn’t true—since “some” understates the proportion.
Well… Some people does usually implicate ‘not all people, and not even all people except a non-sizeable minority’, but if we go by implicatures rather than literal meanings, X has fingernails (in contexts where everyone knows X is a human), in my experience at least, usually implicates that X’s fingernails are not trimmed nearly as short as possible, since the literal meaning would be quite uninformative once you know X is a human.
More like, to determine whether people are paying any attention. (I once took an online personality test which included questions such as “I’ve never eaten before” to prevent people from using bots or similar to screw up their data.)
It’s hard to get people to answer such things straightforwardly. I once included “Some people have fingernails” in a poll, as about the most uncontroversially true thing I could think of, and participants found a way to argue that it wasn’t true—since “some” understates the proportion.
Well… Some people does usually implicate ‘not all people, and not even all people except a non-sizeable minority’, but if we go by implicatures rather than literal meanings, X has fingernails (in contexts where everyone knows X is a human), in my experience at least, usually implicates that X’s fingernails are not trimmed nearly as short as possible, since the literal meaning would be quite uninformative once you know X is a human.
“There exists at least one X that …” is what logicians have settled on as the most easily satisfiable and least objectionable phrasing.