With reference to Frankie Roberto's puzzle, there is a shorter form
of the puzzle which is as follows :
A child is told : "You are my son, but I am not your father". Who is
the speaker ?
This simple form is as efficacious as the long one, which rules out
the hypotheses based on stereotypes.
It turns out that this puzzle has already been studied experimentally
( its study goes back at least to Noordman, 1979 ). Some time ago, I
have offered an elementary explanation of it within relevance theory
in terms of a pragmatically based presupposition.
The presupposition is that the speaker is a man, which results from
the lack of relevance of "I am not your father" if this were uttered
by a woman, for this utterance would not enable the hearer to draw
contextual implications besides the obvious fact that a woman cannot
be a father. ( In a non oral communication where there is no visual
or auditory indication of gender, "the speaker is a man" would come
as a scalar implicature obtained from scale reversal under negation
). Now the reasoner is in an impasse in his/her search for a
solution, as the speaker is a parent, is not the father and yet is a
man.
Is there a way to get out of the impasse ? Just build a context such
that "I am not your father" achieves relevance even if it is uttered
by a female character. This can occur, for instance, if it is known
to both the hearer and the speaker that only the father is entitled
to/endowed with some special privilege/power, etc. This prediction
was tested and satisfied, as it resulted in a significant decrease in
the rate of failure to solve the riddle.
References:
Noordman, L.G.M. (1979). Inferring from language. Springer.
Politzer, G. (1996). A pragmatic account of a presuppositional
effect. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 543-551.
@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤@¤
>Hi all,
>
>I'm a linguistics undergrad at UCL. I've been thinking recently about the
>following puzzle, and would be interested to see other linguists' views on
>it. The puzzle goes something like this:
>
>
>"A boy and his father are walking along a path on the top of a cliff on a
>windy day. A loose stone causes them to loose their grip and they both
>tumble over the edge of the cliff. An ambulance soon arrives on the scene to
>examine the bodies. They conclude that the father is dead, but that the boy
>might still survive. The boy is rushed to hospital and into an operating
>theatre where a surgeon is waiting. Just before the operation is about to
>start, the surgeon looks at the boy and announces 'I cannot operate on this
>boy, he's my son!'"
>
>How can this be?
>
>(think about this and then scroll down to see the answer)
>
>
>Answer: The surgeon is the boy's mother!
>
>This is a fairly well known puzzle, and most people who are told it for the
>first time can't work out the answer. My question is, how does it work? I
>present three hypotheses:
>
>Hypothesis 1: We hold in our heads the stereotypical (you might say
>'sexist') idea that surgeons are mostly men. This idea is so steeped in our
>minds that we cannot imagine the surgeon being female.
>
>Hypothesis 2: When we read the story, as soon as we come across the surgeon
>character, we assign this some mental representation in our minds. All
>singular human characters MUST have a gender as the minimum characteristic.
>Based on our (stereotypical) knowledge of surgeons, we quickly assign the
>male gender to the mental character. We are given no reason to doubt this
>guess until we come to the final statement, at which point our deduction
>system isn't strong enough to shake off our previously-held assertion.
>
>Hypothesis 3: The answer might be partly due to stereotypical notions of
>surgeons, but we are also led astray by the wording of the question. In
>particular, the final utterance includes three male-gendered words: 'boy,
>'he' and 'son'. This use of the male gender requires us to access concepts
>of maleness in our minds which consequently spill over into our mental image
>of the surgeon.
>
>
>The three hypotheses carry quite different implications! It may be possible
>to test them using these tests:
>
>Test 1: Reverse the puzzle, using a stereotypically female occupation (eg
>nurse) and having the mother die.
>
>Test 2: Do some experimental work using some more neutral characters to see
>if people automatically assign tentative genders to mental characters.
>
>Test 3: Change the puzzle by having a girl walking along the cliff with her
>father so that the final line is 'I cannot operate on this girl, she's my
>daughter'.
>
>
>Comments/ideas welcome (either direct to me or shared with the list)!
>
>Cheers,
>
>Frankie Roberto,
>frankie.roberto@ucl.ac.uk
-- °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° Guy Politzer C.N.R.S. - Saint-Denis °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
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