Inferences
This is an edited-down excerpt from a reply I made to Dave on the Elephant Call thread. In my edits I've taken out some of my sharp opinions because they aren't relevant to the point of this post, but by all means click the link, for the sharpness. And I'm going to sneak the actual point of this post down in the comments, so look there as well:
Suppose Sam says to Chris, "Let's get together for lunch. Are you free Thursday?" Chris replies, "I'm pretty much swamped for the next couple of weeks. How about after that?" Sam says, "Actually, as I think about it, I'm swamped too and Thursday was overoptimistic. Let's say around the end of the month." Chris: "That sounds good."
Now, I would say that they're each implying that they'd like to see the other, though they're also implying that they have more immediate (though not necessarily more important) priorities. Neither of these implications may be true, but each is definitely implied. Even if Sam and Chris are lying — perhaps they're secret embezzlers who plan to see each other the next afternoon to plan their latest chicanery, and the whole conversation is a charade to mislead potential undercover agents — they've nonetheless implied that though they want to see each other they have more immediate priorities.
I'd also say that this interchange reveals a hunk about Sam and Chris and their world. It may not reveal what they really want or need, but it tells me what they want to convey and the social forms they use to convey it. Of course, I myself know something about their world (we'll say it's contemporary America, and Sam and Chris are socially more or less like me). E.g., "lunch" isn't the same commitment as "dinner," the latter implying (again, not necessarily correctly) a stronger friendship.
Okay, we can ask questions of this interchange. For instance, "What sort of friendship will Sam and Chis end up having?" "What sort of friendship would Sam and Chris like to have?" "What sort of friendship should Sam and Chis have?" Is this the sort of thing you have in mind when you [i.e. Dave] use the phrase "implicitly posed question"? If so, "implicitly" is the wrong word, since neither Sam nor Chris implied the question. In some ways, their current and subsequent behavior may "answer" such questions, but that doesn't mean that Sam and Chris are either asking them or implying them. I'm the one who's asking them. I'd say the questions are there to be asked, simply because the world has a future and we can try to predict it, and, barring a sudden calamity or unexpected events, Sam and Chris are likely to at least have the opportunity to interact in said future. (I take it that neither is expected to be sentenced to prison in the next day or so.)
In any event, by changing a few words, we can ask ourselves similar questions about people in the anime and video-game worlds: how will they interact? how would they like to interact? how should they interact? And we can throw in all sorts of variables: race, class, gender, whether people are positioning themselves as fans or critics or intellectuals or geeks, whether they are there just for fun or they're serious participants, and so on. [I'll add that] if anime/VG is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions [as Dave says], then the rockwrite world is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions too, no matter how bad a botch the latter world's explicit questions and answers are.
To put all this more abstractly, there's a bunch of stuff that I generally put into the category "hairstyle"/"acting out" — I'm using these words as positives in this particular paragraph — that I consider to be at least a rudimentary form of thought, or at least as having the potential for containing thought. The way I put it is that, by choosing my cut of hair, or what shirt to put on, or what tone of voice to use on a comment thread, I'm to some extent answering some questions (what will my relationship be to others given their hairstyles and shirts and tones of voice?) even if I'm not asking such questions explicitly or implicitly, and even if I think the questions are a waste of time (which I don't, but that's a different issue). As I said, I don't see how rockwrite, no matter what it does, can make such answers and their attendant questions go away.
Suppose Sam says to Chris, "Let's get together for lunch. Are you free Thursday?" Chris replies, "I'm pretty much swamped for the next couple of weeks. How about after that?" Sam says, "Actually, as I think about it, I'm swamped too and Thursday was overoptimistic. Let's say around the end of the month." Chris: "That sounds good."
Now, I would say that they're each implying that they'd like to see the other, though they're also implying that they have more immediate (though not necessarily more important) priorities. Neither of these implications may be true, but each is definitely implied. Even if Sam and Chris are lying — perhaps they're secret embezzlers who plan to see each other the next afternoon to plan their latest chicanery, and the whole conversation is a charade to mislead potential undercover agents — they've nonetheless implied that though they want to see each other they have more immediate priorities.
I'd also say that this interchange reveals a hunk about Sam and Chris and their world. It may not reveal what they really want or need, but it tells me what they want to convey and the social forms they use to convey it. Of course, I myself know something about their world (we'll say it's contemporary America, and Sam and Chris are socially more or less like me). E.g., "lunch" isn't the same commitment as "dinner," the latter implying (again, not necessarily correctly) a stronger friendship.
Okay, we can ask questions of this interchange. For instance, "What sort of friendship will Sam and Chis end up having?" "What sort of friendship would Sam and Chris like to have?" "What sort of friendship should Sam and Chis have?" Is this the sort of thing you have in mind when you [i.e. Dave] use the phrase "implicitly posed question"? If so, "implicitly" is the wrong word, since neither Sam nor Chris implied the question. In some ways, their current and subsequent behavior may "answer" such questions, but that doesn't mean that Sam and Chris are either asking them or implying them. I'm the one who's asking them. I'd say the questions are there to be asked, simply because the world has a future and we can try to predict it, and, barring a sudden calamity or unexpected events, Sam and Chris are likely to at least have the opportunity to interact in said future. (I take it that neither is expected to be sentenced to prison in the next day or so.)
In any event, by changing a few words, we can ask ourselves similar questions about people in the anime and video-game worlds: how will they interact? how would they like to interact? how should they interact? And we can throw in all sorts of variables: race, class, gender, whether people are positioning themselves as fans or critics or intellectuals or geeks, whether they are there just for fun or they're serious participants, and so on. [I'll add that] if anime/VG is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions [as Dave says], then the rockwrite world is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions too, no matter how bad a botch the latter world's explicit questions and answers are.
To put all this more abstractly, there's a bunch of stuff that I generally put into the category "hairstyle"/"acting out" — I'm using these words as positives in this particular paragraph — that I consider to be at least a rudimentary form of thought, or at least as having the potential for containing thought. The way I put it is that, by choosing my cut of hair, or what shirt to put on, or what tone of voice to use on a comment thread, I'm to some extent answering some questions (what will my relationship be to others given their hairstyles and shirts and tones of voice?) even if I'm not asking such questions explicitly or implicitly, and even if I think the questions are a waste of time (which I don't, but that's a different issue). As I said, I don't see how rockwrite, no matter what it does, can make such answers and their attendant questions go away.
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(1) Most people will assign Sam and Chris genders.
(2) If we were to remind the readers a few days hence that they'd read an anecdote about two people who were deciding what day to meet for lunch, the same gender assignments would remain.
(3) In most readers' memories, the gender would be a fact of the anecdote, not something they'd added.
Btw, I'm not a social psychologist and I'm actually wondering what the best way to conduct such an experiment would be. We could tell the subjects that we were testing their memory, and ask, "What were the genders of the two people having the conversation?" My hypothesis is that the subjects would tell us genders rather than say, "Genders weren't specified." But by asking the question, aren't we prompting them to assume the characters had been given genders in the anecdote? Whereas if we ask, "Do you recall whether the genders of the characters had been specified, and if so, what the genders were?" we're prompting our subjects to think the genders hadn't been specified, and to respond accordingly. I'm not sure how to avoid such prompting.
Maybe we could simply ask them to recall what they could of the anecdote, and then see if a significant number assign genders in the retelling, such as by the use of gender-specific pronouns. (I don't think that too many would use "he" as a generic pronoun rather than a masculine, though that's another potential problem.)
Another hypothesis would be that if we were to ask each of the subjects, "Why do you say [one of the characters] is [whatever gender the person specified] when actually it is [opposite of whatever the person specified]?" some of them would get mad and accuse us of lying. [Which we kind of are.] We'd then explain that the anecdote doesn't specify a gender, but in fact these were real people [another lie] and did have genders different from what the person had assigned. (Yes, I know that nowadays people are positing alternatives to assuming there are only two genders; that might further complicate my questions but doesn't change my point.)
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If you asked me the gender question, I would automatically think back and realize the names were non-gender specific in 21st century common usage -- but I do still think of them as male names. I wouldn't remember the pronouns, not having heard any, so wouldn't assume I'd heard any.
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I wonder if by making Sam and Chris potential embezzlers I also unintentionally coded them male for the reader. I'd originally planned to make them potential secret lovers, not potential embezzlers, and then realized that that would immediately make the reader consciously wonder about Sam's and Chris's genders, which was the last thing I wanted to happen. I wanted the gender assignment to be subconscious.
In my everyday life I actually know more female Chrisses than male Chrisses (one of whom is in her 60s), but I agree that Chris still codes more strongly male than female, as of course does Sam.
But my main hypothesis is that most people are like me in automatically assigning gender unless they receive a strong signal not to. Even when I'm consciously aware that I don't know (e.g., when I know someone only online and only by a funny Internet name), I'll assign someone a gender in my mind. I can't stop myself. And who's to tell how often I've assigned a gender without even noticing that I don't know? — and this is in plenty of circumstances where someone's gender really is or ought to be of very low relevance; economics blogs, for instance. This doesn't mean there's no value in tracking the relationship between ideas on the one hand and the demographic characteristics of the person who holds them on the other; but a lot of the time gender isn't a totally necessary thing to be thinking about.
The problem isn't that we notice gender, it's that we — or I, at any rate — don't seem to have the psychological option of turning off the noticing, even when the gender isn't there to be noticed!
Of course, the larger phenomenon I'm interested in isn't gender, but how hard it is for us to be aware that we've unjustifiably added information to what we've read or observed. I believe I unconsciously add info a lot less than the average person does, but of course, I'm only going to notice that I'd unconsciously added information when opposite information subsequently comes along to surprise me, or when someone corrects my mistake, or when I'm really poring over what I'm reading, and rereading. There's a lot that I'm sure I never notice. What I especially won't notice is that I've added information that turns out to be right but that I'd initially not had nearly enough evidence to support.
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I would say, if you're interested in unconsciously added information, you've picked a good example -- I think this is way more deeply-rooted than picturing everyone as heterosexual or white until proven otherwise, for instance.
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I'm not too hard on myself for this. Not only have I been heavily socialized to be this way, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm biologically programmed as well.* At night when I see a man and a woman walking together I'm not nearly as wary and potentially scared of being mugged as when I see a man and a man walking together. So gender determination is something I make as fast as possible, and this just seems built-in, whether the building-in was natural or social.
But what's gnawing on my mind is this: I don't mind being proven wrong about a lot of things when I've already got an inkling that I could be wrong. That's one of the things that makes K-pop fun to write about. I've turned off the requirement that I've got to know my shit. (Not that I've turned off the requirement to try to learn.) That's one reason I enjoy occasionally posting about economics and physics, two subjects I'm incompetent to talk about. Rather, it's the stuff that I'm so absolutely sure of that I don't even notice that I believe it, it's so unquestionably set in my mind: when some of this turns out to be wrong, I get really upset, and really don't want to credit the counter-evidence, and certainly don't want someone else to know I was wrong. My being wrong makes me feel that I can't handle life.
The thing is, to understand anything, be it a word, a sentence, or an event, we have to add our knowledge of meanings and categories to it. Words and events don't come with instructions how to interpret them. I imagine that we mostly do a pretty good job of it. When I see someone open the refrigerator door, I know what refrigerators and doors are, and what opening is. But when what people add is wrong, and they don't even know they've added it, there's initially an adamant refusal to recover from their misinterpretation. At least that's what I've observed. And for most people on most any subject, the refusal goes on forever.
*Of course, I may be wrong about the biological programming. I've hardly studied biology.
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That being said, I don't think I do the refusal bit. This isn't to say I'm a better person than most, it's that either a thought occurs to me consciously or it does not, and by the time it occurs consciously, most of the processing is already done. When I was reading Kahneman I was struck by the fact that most of the psychological biases he describes are stuff that I'm aware is happening in my mind, I just normally have no real reason to try and stop it (if one brand of cereal presents itself as more appealing than another, sure...).
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