Philosophical Society of Texas, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting: 1984 Page: 24
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24 The Philosophical
our other knowledge - our knowledge of the world, if you will. This
is not surprising. Obviously, we interpret the sentences that we hear
in some context; we are with our spouse, we are talking to someone
who shares a hobby, we know that our friend watched the big game
last night. Still, such context effects are an important area of study;
we would like to understand in detail how context effects work. Such
understanding will have important implications for practical appli-
cations, as I'll show momentarily. Again, let's consider an example,
sentences f.) and g.).
f.) Three turtles sat on a log and a fish swam under it.
g.) Three turtles sat next to a log and a fish swam under it.
Sentences like these were given to listeners in an experiment carried
out by John Bransford and Jeffrey Franks of Vanderbilt University.
A particular subject in the study got either f.) or g.). A short time
later the subjects were tested to see whether they could accurately
recognize the sentences that they had heard. Those people who had
originally heard sentence f.) were tested with h.); those who had
heard g.) were tested with sentence i.).
h.) Three turtles sat on a log and a fish swam under them.
i.) Three turtles sat next to a log and a fish swam under them.
Look again at sentence f.) If you understand it and believe it to be
true, then you most likely will conclude that h.) is also true. If the
turtles are on the log and the fish swam under it, then it is very likely
that the fish swam under them as well. You use your knowledge of
the layout of the real world to draw such a conclusion - and, indeed,
your representation of sentence f.) in memory may be strongly in-
fluenced by such additional "real world" knowledge. Bransford and
Franks found that many people who had actually heard f.) were
willing to say that they had heard h.). And many of them were very
confident in that belief. They were wrong, of course, but it is easy
to see why they felt so confident. On the other hand, those people
who had heard g.) in the first place were not so likely to be fooled
into saying that they heard i.). If a fish swims under a log that
turtles are near, then the fish may swim under it without swimming
under them. Again, the subjects' knowledge of the world affected
how they stored the information from g.). One implication of such
a result is this: In order to interpret a simple sentence like f.) or g.),
we bring to bear a tremendous amount of relevant information that
we have stored in our memories.24
T he Philosophical
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Philosophical Society of Texas. Philosophical Society of Texas, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting: 1984, book, 1985; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1532713/m1/23/?q=%221984~%22: accessed August 15, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Philosophical Society of Texas.