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Comment on Løhre & Teigen (2016). “There is a 60% probability, but I am 70% certain: communicative consequences of external and internal expressions of uncertainty”. Thinking & Reasoning

A number of philosophers and psychologists have observed that uncertainty may take different forms. Perhaps the best known psychological account is an essay by Kahneman and Tversky (1982) called Variants of Uncertainty, in which the authors distinguish internal uncertainty, which is attributed to one’s mind (e.g., whether or not a trivia question was answered correctly), from external uncertainty, which is attributed to dispositions of causal systems in the world (e.g., whether or not the home team will win a football match). External uncertainty may further be characterised as either singular in which “probabilities are assessed by the propensities of the particular case at hand” (e.g., the relative strength of the teams and how they match up) or distributional in which “the case in question is seen as an instance of a class of similar cases, for which the relative frequencies of outcomes are known or can be estimated” (e.g., the proportion of times each team has prevailed over the other in the past; see Table 1, columns 1 and 2). In their essay, Kahneman and Tversky (1982) make an incidental observation concerning how external versus internal uncertainty tend to be expressed in natural language: “The attribution of uncertainty can sometimes be inferred from a simple linguistic test: Is it appropriate to describe the assessment of the uncertainty as ‘the probability is ...’ Or should one say my probability is ... ?’” (p. 151, italics in original). It is important to note that Kahneman and Tversky relied on reader intuitions and presented no empirical evidence of the relationship between language and their internal/external distinction. In this respect, Løhre and Teigen (2016) fill an important gap in the literature. In their paper, Løhre and Teigen (2016) distinguish internally focused expressions such as “I am X% certain” from externally focused expressions such as “It is X% certain” or “There is an X% probability”. They present five studies