the assumption that the listeners fit their relatively vague preconception of who they talk to, rather than about.
Can you rephrase this for me? It’s not parsing my language-interpreter.
It’s far from clear when an Anglophonic Western man says “Men and women marry each other for romantic love” that he is cognizant of the distinction.
Certainly. Arguably, for the majority of cases it’s not even relevant whether he is or isn’t. In all likelihood whoever he is talking to also shares that set—as you said, it’s his “default context”. Now, yes, absolutely failing to recognize that one’s default context is not the sole available context can be a significant problem. But that really isn’t relevant to the topic of my assertions about cognitive burden per statement of equivalent informational value and the relevance of said burden to knowing when generalizing trivial elements of a statement is a net gain rather than net loss.
an English-speaking, technically-trained man in India (where arranged marriages for purposes other than romantic love are still pretty standard).
You know, after years of making daily calls to workers in India (I do corporate sysadmin work, for a number of various corporations) -- I still have absolutely no clue beyond the vaguest notions gleaned from the “idiot box” (TV, but at least I mean PBS-ish) about the cultural contexts of a modern urban Indian person. I really do feel like I understand more about the unspoken assumptions of Amazonian tribesmen than I do about Indian people.
I do, however, find it both insulting when my offshores co-workers think they can slip insults by me through such expedients as telling me to “do the needful” in a particular tone, but I digress.
Sometimes people on this site even take norms like that and try to infer over all of human evolution.
Absolutely not an unreasonable thing to question, since any norm not empirically validated to exist in other monkeys (I am of the belief that all modern primates qualify monocladistically as monkeys) is simply not viable material for Evo-Psych theories without significant and rigorous documentation.
By the way, I just made an inaccurate statement for the purposes of making the statement less misleading, as I previously asserted. It has to do with my use of the term “empirically”—I follow the thinking of Poplerian falsificationism which, while similar to empiricism, does not suffer from the problem of induction. While this one instance is trivial—keeping up that level of technicality quickly turns casual conversation into cited, researched, thesis papers. And it’s just plain impossible to always communicate at that level; ergo, devoting actual thought and consideration to building a rational heuristic for when generalization / inaccuracy is acceptable is a necessary part of the toolkit. Which is what I was saying from the outset.
Can you rephrase this for me? It’s not parsing my language-interpreter.
Certainly. Arguably, for the majority of cases it’s not even relevant whether he is or isn’t. In all likelihood whoever he is talking to also shares that set—as you said, it’s his “default context”. Now, yes, absolutely failing to recognize that one’s default context is not the sole available context can be a significant problem. But that really isn’t relevant to the topic of my assertions about cognitive burden per statement of equivalent informational value and the relevance of said burden to knowing when generalizing trivial elements of a statement is a net gain rather than net loss.
You know, after years of making daily calls to workers in India (I do corporate sysadmin work, for a number of various corporations) -- I still have absolutely no clue beyond the vaguest notions gleaned from the “idiot box” (TV, but at least I mean PBS-ish) about the cultural contexts of a modern urban Indian person. I really do feel like I understand more about the unspoken assumptions of Amazonian tribesmen than I do about Indian people.
I do, however, find it both insulting when my offshores co-workers think they can slip insults by me through such expedients as telling me to “do the needful” in a particular tone, but I digress.
Absolutely not an unreasonable thing to question, since any norm not empirically validated to exist in other monkeys (I am of the belief that all modern primates qualify monocladistically as monkeys) is simply not viable material for Evo-Psych theories without significant and rigorous documentation.
By the way, I just made an inaccurate statement for the purposes of making the statement less misleading, as I previously asserted. It has to do with my use of the term “empirically”—I follow the thinking of Poplerian falsificationism which, while similar to empiricism, does not suffer from the problem of induction. While this one instance is trivial—keeping up that level of technicality quickly turns casual conversation into cited, researched, thesis papers. And it’s just plain impossible to always communicate at that level; ergo, devoting actual thought and consideration to building a rational heuristic for when generalization / inaccuracy is acceptable is a necessary part of the toolkit. Which is what I was saying from the outset.