Identity and difference (AKA More is More)

Chapter 4: Cognitive advantages (aka no other theory is as powerful)
Corfu, Aug 7, 2017. Image credit: RC.

“Thought of the day: Eggplants stuffed with ground meat and bechamel.” You can say it in English and you can say it in Greek. You will never check the translation (we did not, as we do not know enough Greek.) You can also say (part of) it in pictures, and this is a good way to show what you can cook, and to make it yummier for your customers. Pictures do not, to a point, speak in different languages; there is no English-pictorial version of the yummy eggplant course as opposed to the Greek-pictorial version. This means, one picture would have been enough.

But see how our relevance computing brain is twisted.

We know that one picture would have sufficed, and we also see that it would have been enough, as the second picture is (apparently) just a copy of the first. So, against the background of this powerful default, we are surprised by the replication of the same picture. The inferental machine is set loose. “The artist probably had some good reason to put two images. Maybe there some little difference between the two that we cannot notice. Maybe the English-speaking community is served a different plate. Maybe the two texts are different after all. Maybe they are ghettoing customers into locals and foreigners. Maybe...”

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