I was simultaneously very confused and very intrigued by this week's readings.
At the onset I could not shake the question of "What could we possibly hope to learn from 4 year olds about language when they hardly have a handle on it?". Evidently we can learn a lot.
It seemed ridiculous to run these experiments on 4 year old (and even more strange to compare the results to adults when the task was something as simple as differentiating between 'some' and 'all') but we learned that children really can't handle fine-tuned semantics at this age. The Barner paper mentioned at the very beginning that children probably take things too literally while adults probably think through things in too many way leading to a difference in response time. And that seemed so intuitive as to not even warrant an investigation. But it really opened up a broader discussion.
At what point do we start to concern ourselves with the nuances of statements and qualifiers and do this nuances make our language less pure?
It's clearly not at age four that we start to use 'all' distinctly from 'some' but at the same time, these children are not wrong. To have all objects share a characteristic implies that some of them, at least, have that characteristic. So then is the distinction worth worrying about? These children seem to have a much more intuitive understanding, strictly speaking with respect to logical entailment, that at time the two words are interchangeable and it would appear as though as adults have grown we've developed our own nuances and possibly lost sight of the relation between quantifiers and statements.
In today's society people rely on sweeping generalizations (watch politics) and it's becoming more and more common that people lose sight of when 'some' is mutually exclusive from 'all' and vice versa. When people use language to persuade or dupe people into believing in their movement it forces the population to have multiple definitions for a quantifier depending on who's saying it but that's just not how first order logic works. Sure these kids get "tripped up" when varying degrees of the barnyard pals are partaking or exhibiting something as opposed to all, but that seems much more pure, much closer to the meaning of entailment that adults having to think through the thousand and one ways in which they've heard this word abused before being able to assign meaning to a statement. Who knows, maybe we have something to learn from the youth after all.
What an interesting idea point about how adults often conflate "some" and "all" when making sweeping generalizations, as in politics! I had wondered why young children's failure to distinguish between "some" and "all" was relevant to our lives, too, and your explanation makes a lot of sense. I wonder whether differentiating between "some" and "all" just isn't as natural of a skill as, say, differentiating between "one" and "two." In other words, perhaps even after we master the nuances of "some" and "all," we still need to think about them in the backs of our minds whenever we use these words. People often make sweeping generalizations about things like politics when they're in the heat of the moment, so maybe the sweeping generalizations could also be explained by a lack of "processing power" toward semantics on the adults' part.
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