"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner.
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@vrandecic @irina @janjko if Maria had said yes or no without knowing about Tom, this would neither have been a lie, but bullshit.
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@vrandecic @poupou hehe now I've given this a bit more thought. Language is a messy way of transmitting information with lots of pragmatics. Do we take the exchange at face value? Do we interpret it as the question being asked whether Maria knows for a fact that Tom will be at the party? Or is it meant to say whether Tom can be expected to be at the party from the information currently available?
@stk @vrandecic @poupou Quantum psycholinguistic ethics teaches us that Tom was both present at and absent from the party at the same time and didn't actually become not there until Maria and Peter arrived and looked for him.
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic Given Maria's knowledge of Peter's plans at the time she was asked the question, the answer she gave was true to her at the time it was given, regardless of what Peter decided to do.
Had Peter informed Maria about his change of plans before she was asked the question, the answer would have been false if she had given it as stated.
Maria answered at the best of her ability with what knowledge she had of Peter's plans at the time.
Subjective vs objective truth.
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@stk @vrandecic @poupou Quantum psycholinguistic ethics teaches us that Tom was both present at and absent from the party at the same time and didn't actually become not there until Maria and Peter arrived and looked for him.
@msbellows @vrandecic @poupou and then they went through a double slit and ended up scattered all over the place
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@vrandecic @irina @janjko if Maria had said yes or no without knowing about Tom, this would neither have been a lie, but bullshit.
@nichtich
Bullshit does indeed have a formal philosophical definition that seems to work here. https://philosophywithoutbullshit.com/2026/04/20/what-the-hell-bullshit-is-revising-frankfurts-definition/ -
@msbellows @vrandecic @poupou and then they went through a double slit and ended up scattered all over the place
@stk @vrandecic @poupou I mean, there's a reason Tom is NB.
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@vrandecic @poupou The truth as she knew it, yes. It turned out that she was mistaken but she couldn't know that when she made the statement.
@irina @vrandecic @poupou I would say that she didn't know it before going to the party. She answered the question wrongly. A correct answer would have been, "I don't know if he is there or not, because I am not there. But he did tell me he is going."
Her answer was sincere, though. She made a leap of faith using the information she had and her trust in Tom. Faith can be dangerous, and in this case it led to her ultimately being wrong.
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A new study shows that there is much, much less agreement on the answer to this question than I would have expected. Even after reading about the study, I still expect people in my bubble to have the same answer as I do. Let's see. But this probably means that the meaning of truth, in the general population, is simply different from what I would have assumed. And explains a number of public discourses.
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The surprising divide over what counts as true
A new study finds that what people think about facts, authenticity, or coherent beliefs explains why they disagree about what is true.
Reason.com (reason.com)
@vrandecic Seems like a false (true?) dichotomy: true, false, uninformed/incomplete
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@janjko yeah, I have the same problem. I would say Maria never lied. But for me, that doesn't mean what she said is true.
@vrandecic @janjko as far as she knew, it was true.
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@vrandecic @poupou hehe now I've given this a bit more thought. Language is a messy way of transmitting information with lots of pragmatics. Do we take the exchange at face value? Do we interpret it as the question being asked whether Maria knows for a fact that Tom will be at the party? Or is it meant to say whether Tom can be expected to be at the party from the information currently available?
@stk @vrandecic @poupou the question is even more fuzzy, because Peter (according to the question as stated) isn't asking whether Tom will be at the party, he's asking something Maria can't reasonably be expected to know for sure - whether Tom is at the party already. Maria might well have considered this rather useless question a misstatement and answered with what she thought she was being asked - which is whether Tom was going to be there; and to the best of her knowledge he was (not her fault he's fickle
)i'm also kind of stunned. is this how vaguely allistic folk communicate? how do they ever get anything done?! if Maria had only answered "he told me he would be", all the ambiguity would go away...
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
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@vrandecic@mas.to Maria's answer was false, but she wasn't telling a lie.
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
1/2
@vrandecic Insufficient info to say. She said he was at the party at the time she said it ("he is at the party"), but when they got there - later - he was not. But perhaps he *was* there when she said that he was? She didn't say "he will be there all night", she said he was there at that moment. And we don't know if he was or not.
Yes, I am autistic, and yes I am fun at parties, why do you ask?
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A new study shows that there is much, much less agreement on the answer to this question than I would have expected. Even after reading about the study, I still expect people in my bubble to have the same answer as I do. Let's see. But this probably means that the meaning of truth, in the general population, is simply different from what I would have assumed. And explains a number of public discourses.
2/2
The surprising divide over what counts as true
A new study finds that what people think about facts, authenticity, or coherent beliefs explains why they disagree about what is true.
Reason.com (reason.com)
@vrandecic I noticed that some people interpret Maria's claim as a claim about what will happen in the future. I wonder if that affected the results? (I think that there is some evidence that some people take claims about what will happen to be true if they would become true if things carried on as they are now.)
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
1/2
@vrandecic Saying “yes, he is at the party” based solely on the fact that he said he would be at the party is a bit silly and just bad communication imo
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@janjko yeah, I have the same problem. I would say Maria never lied. But for me, that doesn't mean what she said is true.
I agree. What she should have said is that he said he would be at the party. Then it wouldn’t be false either way.
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@vrandecic @janjko as far as she knew, it was true.
@edgeofeurope @vrandecic @janjko No, she had no way of knowing it was true.
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@vrandecic (not having read the link) it's a question about something that could happen in the future. Therefore it's impossible for the statement to *really* be either true or false; it's a prediction based on past information; I'd say the statement is true -- that is her prediction based on previously obtained information and she's not saying anything false about what she predicts -- and whether the prediction turns out to be correct is a separate question that is not asked in the poll.
(Update) Read the link and now more confirmed that claiming Maria's statement is false is mumbo jumbo in this case. Y'all are asking the wrong question for the context, so you get a nonsensical answer.
@brooke
Yeah, anyone who, when asked about someone if they're at the party, doesn't respond with something like "they're supposed to be but I haven't seen them yet", but a statement "yes they're here" is a crazy liar. They can't be trusted about anything factual. They are willing to state as fact information that they don't have knowledge of. -
@vrandecic @irina @janjko that's how it is. The fact that it seems debatable is the symptom of so many things
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"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
1/2
@vrandecic
I voted false, because Maria was claiming knowledge she did not have. The truth would be ‘he told me he’d be there’. -
"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom is at the party that they intend to go to after dinner. Maria answers that Tom is at the party. After all, Tom had told her that he would be at the party. When they arrive at the party, it turns out that Tom had changed his plans, and is not at the party. Was Maria's answer true or false?"
(please spread for visibility, I would like this to be as wide as possible)
1/2
@vrandecic I would call it 'misleading', I've always been a believer in trying accurately communicate certainty, origin of information, etc - maybe an autie thing? I'd never use the form of words in the question, and tbh, if someone said to me "Tom is at the party", I wouldn't trust it anyway unless they had just come from the party.
