The complicated business of reading signs

Even simple daily tasks can involve very sophisticated thinking.

One of our consultants regularly passes by a sign reading “French Oast.”  It’s quite obviously an error: the sign (all capitals in the original) has lost the initial letter of “toast.”  The fact that it stands outside a diner and that the other words on it are “eggs” and “bacon” make this interpretation secure.  Indeed, most people would make it without conscious thought.

However, “oast” is a legitimate English word, and the combination “French oast” could indeed occur in some account of farming in France.  The fact that no one is confused about this alternative while driving down a certain highway in Virginia comes from the several other clues that point to “toast” and a letter fallen out of a sign (as well as the fact that “oast” is a little-used word).  If a computer-translation program, for instance, were presented with the combination in a list of words it might well be bewildered.  Indeed, if there weren’t a provision in the program for errors in transcription, it would have no option but to choose the wrong answer.

This is not an isolated or unusual bit of daily life.  We meet regularly with situations in which possible interpretations and explanations are not even considered because of the context, and we’re often quite unaware of it.  This shows that our thinking is routinely rather sophisticated.  And it saves much time and trouble.

But not always.  As it happens, our consultant was on his way to a tutoring session, in which he was helping students learn mathematics and science at the High School level.  He passed through this stage long ago, and most of the material is very familiar to him.  Of course it’s not familiar to the students, who are seeing it for the first time.  And, more importantly, they don’t have the sophisticated structure of mathematical clues and scientific context that would point them in the right direction.  They lack the equivalent of the “eggs” on the sign, and the clue of the diner nearby.  It’s our consultant’s task to help them build that structure: to explain why he does what he does.  (Sometimes that requires some difficult examining of his own mental process.)  When there’s time he also explains why he doesn’t do it some different way, which can be even more illuminating.

Well, most of us are not teachers or tutors in a formal sense, and so don’t need to explain our thinking on a daily basis.  And rarely do we need to explore all the theoretical alternatives to a damaged breakfast menu.  But sometime we may indeed find ourselves in the equivalent of a French hop field.  Then examining our implicit assumptions may be essential.