Your comment cleared up quite a bit for me: this was my initial objection (that Reagan would likely only do so as part of a compromise), but the conjunction is at most equally likely. It does bring up for me another question, though: that of the hidden disjunction. For myself, this is the most insidious tripping point: my brain assumes that if Reagan were to compromise, that information would be provided, and so extrapolates the first statement to “Reagan provides support for unwed mothers without taking anything,” and then rules that conjunction as less likely than that he did trade something. I’d be curious to know if anyone else has the same sticking point: it seems to be baked into how I process language (a la Tom Scott’s rules of implicit assumption of utility).
Your comment cleared up quite a bit for me: this was my initial objection (that Reagan would likely only do so as part of a compromise), but the conjunction is at most equally likely. It does bring up for me another question, though: that of the hidden disjunction. For myself, this is the most insidious tripping point: my brain assumes that if Reagan were to compromise, that information would be provided, and so extrapolates the first statement to “Reagan provides support for unwed mothers without taking anything,” and then rules that conjunction as less likely than that he did trade something. I’d be curious to know if anyone else has the same sticking point: it seems to be baked into how I process language (a la Tom Scott’s rules of implicit assumption of utility).