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OK, I assume most of the readers here understand only English. From this assumed start point, consider then the follow scenario: If I were to show you two Chinese characters, one pair is correctly displayed and one uses the wrong encoding (so it displays improperly in the web browser), how would you tell which one is the correct one? For example:

  1. ؛ô­¶
  2. 網頁

So, I think most of you can tell that #1 is not Chinese, and 2 is. The question is — assuming you didn't recognize any of the wrongly encoded or Chinese characters — how did you guess the correct answer?

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    There is enough ambient information Chinese information around these days (the name of a local Chines restaurant, say) to make the distinction. On the other hand, if I had just arrived from Mars, I probably couldn't solve the puzzle. Why do you think this is interesting? Now which language does this belong to: 一 ? Maybe your knowledge of the Chinese language is more of a hindrance now because it (perhaps) makes to jump to a quick conclusion. 你好。
    – Drux
    Oct 1, 2013 at 9:43
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    Why is this on philosophy exchange????
    – Swami Vishwananda
    Oct 3, 2013 at 15:12
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about how humans currently operate (psychologically) rather than any established topic in philosophy.
    – stoicfury
    Oct 4, 2013 at 9:07
  • Thanks stoicfury for clarifying the question; I had misunderstood it originally. Thanks @Ryno for trying to beat the actual interpretation into me earlier today. I'm glad our disagreement got resolved, albeit posthumously.
    – Hunan Rostomyan
    Oct 4, 2013 at 11:12

2 Answers 2

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Although a casual English reader may not know any Chinese characters in detail, they are very likely familiar with the statistical properties of Chinese characters. In particular, they have a large number of strokes that intersect mostly at at angles between 45 and 90 degrees, they approximately fill squarish shapes, and they do not look like adorned versions of Latin characters.

So the reason we can do it is that we have enough context for basic pattern matching. There is nothing remarkable going on here with respect to human knowledge (except that humans are good pattern-matchers).

Remove the context and it is not possible to solve (for any human or machine). Indeed, one can make up a language and write a program where the top line would be "correct" and the bottom would be an encoding error. Without appropriate context you cannot know which is which.

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  • Just curious: can you please point to an example where two lines intersect at angles not between 45 and 90 degrees (in Chinese characters or elsewhere)?
    – Drux
    Oct 3, 2013 at 10:28
  • @Drux - A (at the top).
    – Rex Kerr
    Oct 4, 2013 at 1:05
  • Looks (also) as an angle of about 25 degree to me (but never mind :)
    – Drux
    Oct 4, 2013 at 6:35
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Simple answer is, most of us are "pattern matching" animals. We have limited information processing capacity, so we develop this "pattern matching" capacity.We do not process information at many times, instead just try to find a similiar pattern to act quickly.

The only guys that process information, instead of "pattern matching" are "autistic" guys. And they have big problems with real world.

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