Some elephants have trunks

From the readings on scalar implicature this week, the most thought provoking quote was from a study that Stiller cites, which states “87% of children accepted statements such as “some elephants have trunks” whereas only 41% of adults did”. Although it is very easy to blame reduced skills in scalar implicature in kids as opposed to those in adults for these results, the results are only true when you consider “some elephants have trunks” as the weaker answer. Both Stiller and Barner claim that instead of lacking the ability for processing scalar implicatures, children must do additional learning and accumulate world knowledge in order to derive implications of certain alternatives of sentences, and to know how to group semantically related lexical items as scale mates. But when you consider “some elephants have trunks” as the stronger answer than the alternative with “all”, the additional learning that adults have turns out to be irrelevant.

How many times have we heard about elephant poachers and how they cruelly remove tusks from elephants? Although elephants die from these activities most of the time, some survive and are bred in captivity. Taking this into consideration, the sentence “some elephants have trunks” is definitely stronger. While it would be misleading to claim then that children correctly identified this for the right reasons more than adults, how is it that adults, who know more about the possibility of trunk-less elephants as a cause of illegal poaching, will reject this sentence more often than not? I personally would be interested in a study in which both groups are told about illegal poaching. I am willing to bet that the sentence “some elephants have trunks” would probably be correct most of the time, if not close to all of the time, because the shared world knowledge between adults and children would be the same, and the information about this would be salient.

Something that also pops into my head after reading these articles is the relationship between implicatures and stereotypes, which is not hard to identify when we are dealing with absolutes, such as “all” and “none”, and in reading about studies where people think all things of one type have a certain feature just based on the fact that they have seen a subset of all animals, or a subset of all smiley faces, for example. Skills in identifying the consequences of implicative sentences are acquired by world knowledge, Barner and Stiller claim; so non-proficiency must be due to a very close-minded view of the world, the more extreme isolation from it resulting in the type of outlook bigoted people have when they lack the exposure to diversity in life. Although for obvious reasons this can be excused in 2 year olds, why do we have so many adults that reason like one? …

If there is a life mantra to take in this quarter, it is that talking in absolutes, such as “all” or “none”, is of very strong committal and should be avoided especially when making generalizations about people. Who can claim to have met everyone in a certain group?