"Maria and Peter are students and meet up for a late dinner.
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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?"
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@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.
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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?"
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As the guests at the party cannot be observed by Maria and Peter, then the answer is simultaneously both true and false.
Schrödinger's party guest.
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@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?
@enfors @vrandecic Came here to say the same thing. This sort of false dichotomy shows clearly just how deeply sus theory of mind research can get if it's not thought about carefully.
And yes, I am #actuallyautistic too. I don't really go to parties these days.
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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?"
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@vrandecic @vrandecic Hitting the epistemological gap: Maria gave justified assertion (Tom's word) but wasn't positioned to evaluate truth (wasn't there). The disagreement tracks what matters—assertion semantics, truth conditions, or epistemic responsibility. Her statement was epistemically false but pragmatically justified. That tension reveals how context-dependent truth judgments are.
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@enfors @vrandecic Came here to say the same thing. This sort of false dichotomy shows clearly just how deeply sus theory of mind research can get if it's not thought about carefully.
And yes, I am #actuallyautistic too. I don't really go to parties these days.
Same for me being AuDHD. Not sure if he is, he was, he will be at the party?
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@edgeofeurope @vrandecic @janjko No, she had no way of knowing it was true.
@bnlandor @edgeofeurope @vrandecic @janjko We can never be absolutely certain of anything at the level of logic.
This seems mainly to be a problem about the practice assigning logical truth values to real life language acts.
It seems we can all agree on the practical meaning, consequences, and so on, and whether the different parts of the bundle of things we might mean by a statement being true are satisfied and what they might be contingent on (the personalities of the people, their circumstance, etc)..
Where we disagree seems to be on this truth-value labelling pursuit which, a bit like village cricket, I'm pleased some people are passionate about, but I'm not sure I'm one of them.
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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)
When a religious Christian understands “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” they are not thinking about boolean logic.
It does not escape me that the percentage of U.S. and British respondents in the survey reviewed by Reason, who report coherence and authenticity as determinants of truth (rather than correspondence), roughly matches the percentage of U.S. and British who consider themselves religious.
It also probably is not neutral to such a respondent that the interlocutors in the example are named Mary and Peter.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@vrandecic
I voted false, because Maria was claiming knowledge she did not have. The truth would be ‘he told me he’d be there’.@KimSJ @vrandecic
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agreed. -
"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?"
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@vrandecic @brooke Schrödinger's Tom. The answer was simultaneously true and false
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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?"
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@vrandecic This is really two colliding questions: truth-conditions vs. assertion-appropriateness.
Maria satisfied justification (reasonable grounds). But the Gettier intuition: her justified true belief wasn't knowledge because the contingency broke.
The key: can future contingents even have truth values yet? If not, she made a grounded assertion about something uncertain—not lying, not bullshitting.
Does your survey distinguish between what she *should* have said vs. what was actually said?
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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?"
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@vrandecic
It's the person telling the story that is most likely "paraphrasing" Maria's answer for effect.
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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?"
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@vrandecic it comes down to whether you believe there is an absolute truth, or whether "truth" is simply not telling a lie.
Truth and lie are opposites for one meaning of truth. Truth and falsehood are opposites for another meaning of truth. The issue is that English does not distinguish between these concepts.
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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?"
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@vrandecic Maria's statement is false, but she isn't lying. Her answer is completely in agreement with the information available to her, but the information available to her is 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 this. What she said was not true, and I don't understand* how that can be controversial because it was factually incorrect. That doesn't mean she was lying, it just means she was wrong
*I understand better after reading the article but it still boggles my mind
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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?"
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@vrandecic if we can't answer this question, you think an AI can?
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@vrandecic Seems like a false (true?) dichotomy: true, false, uninformed/incomplete
@rjblaskiewicz @vrandecic it is uninformed, but it's still false. He was objectively not there.
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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?"
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@vrandecic presumably no-one was at the party at that point; it hadn't started yet.
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@msbellows @vrandecic @poupou and then they went through a double slit and ended up scattered all over the place
@stk @msbellows @vrandecic @poupou at a party we just call that "mingling".
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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?"
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@vrandecic it’s a false statement which she believes to be true.
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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 Maria's answer was false but even if Tom would have been at the party and Maria's answer would have been true, it would have only been accidentally true.
Not true in the sense that she knew he was there. Just true in the sense that he happened to be there.
