Dear All,
I have an example of just the opposite sort to the one Francisco Yus
pointed us to in the Frazier sitcom. It is a (real world) example in
which someone understood an instruction as requiring the performance of
a sequence of actions when in fact it required the simultaneous
performance of those actions.
Every semester I give my students an orientation session in which I
explain to them how to log onto and off of the computers in our logic
lab and explain to them some basics about the logic software that they
will have to use. Even as recently as the mid-1990s, I had some students
who had had no previous experience with computers.
One young woman was having difficulty logging off her machine. I had
told students to press Ctrl+Alt+Del and then to select the option to log
off and sign on as new user. This woman was pressing Ctrl, then Alt and
then Del, releasing each key before pressing the next, instead of
pressing them down simultaneously (or holding them all down
simultaneously). I bet there were a lot of people who had the same
problem, but that they were able to solve the problem for themselves by
experimenting with various different options.
I also think that if we are dealing with written instructions, an
instruction to twist-and-pull would be interpreted differently from an
instruction to twist and pull.
Regards, Anne.
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Anne Bezuidenhout
Department of Philosophy
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208, U.S.A
anne1@sc.edu
Tel: 1-803-777-3738
Fax: 1-803-777-9178
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