Re: RT list: experiments and the conceptual/procedural distinction

Interesting query, Mai. I wrote something about it in my blog,
griceclub.blogspots.com. I have not been able to find how posts get
archived as sub-domains, but I entitled my post, "Grice´s Shaggy Dog
Story" (*)
         For ´conceptual-procedural´ we need to rely on Allott, Key
terms in pragmatics. In my "Shaggy Dog" story I comment that, for
Grice, indeed all meaning, or rather all utterance-part (including
"word") expression meaning involves an appeal to a ´procedure´. It
would seem that the "procedural" versus "conceptual" corresponds then
to what Grice originally has as "basic" versus "resultant" procedure
(WoW, vi).
        Finally, a point about "experiment" when it comes to the mother
tongue involves the nature of one´s informants! Should they be properly
´naive´? Surely we don´t need our informants to be aware of this or
that "meta-linguistic´ categorisation. Grice would often experiment,
not with his children, since they were sophisticated, but with his
children´s playmates, on things as to how they would evaluate things
like "Nothing can be red and green all over" as ´synthetic a priori´ --
cited by Chapman, _Grice_.
        ((Procedural note: in other lists I´m a member of, the original
querier is expected to summarise replies they get. In any case, please
know that I for one would love to have the list be aware of any reply
you may have gotten to your query, or, more importantly, your further
considerations, if any, on the topic)).
     Cheers,

     J. L. Speranza
         griceclub.blogspots.com

* (Incidentally, re: the other thread, on the forthright negotiator
principle, my extended thougts are in the post, "There´s glory for
you!" where I discuss the broader impact of ´discourse´ in issues of
ethics alla Habermas which I´ve discussed in my "German Grice", RLF --
please use relevant header if commenting on this).

M. Z.: "I was wondering if you could tell me about any experimental
work that has been done to test native speakers whether they recognise
the difference between conceptual words and procedural words in their
own language. I am aware that there has been experimental work that has
looked into the difficulty of learning procedural words in L2 learners,
but I am interested in testing native speakers of a language"
Received on Sat Jan 23 17:57:53 2010