A striking thing about language is that is composable in certain ways. I can make an argument in which each step of the argument is self-evident, yet the conclusion is a surprising (but true) consequence of the premises.
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It's also possible to make visual arguments of various kinds. For instance, the shortest route on a map. Locally, each step is obvious; collectively, you may be able to infer non-obvious things like fastest driving distance.pic.twitter.com/s2pBncQhrj
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You can think of Escher's Ascending and Descending as a visual argument. Locally, each piece makes sense as a simple, self-evident step. But globally it shows something impossible, a staircase which is cyclic, but which it's possible to ascend forever.pic.twitter.com/OXt2WAuxjM
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In essence, it's a visual argument, each step of which seems correct, and yet it arrives at an impossible conclusion.
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I wonder: is there a linguistic equivalent to Ascending and Descending? An argument of which each step is true, yet the conclusion does not follow from the premise?
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I've found it surprisingly tricky to unpack what's going on. In the case of Ascending and Descending part of the trouble is that our mind is solving an inverse inference problem to recover 3d geometry from a 2d projection. It's tempting to think that's the trouble.
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But we do similar kinds of inverse inference all the time with language.
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Perhaps the best analogue is jokes, which often rely on the same kind of multiple inverse inferences about the meaning of words.
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Or certain kinds of cognitive bias - like the Group Attribution Error - which also rely on faulty inverse inference.
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