Grice, "Ontogentetical Pragmatics"

--- No, Don't expect such academic rubbish from Grice's lips. At most: "children's language". A whole folder in the Archives: enjoy.

For Grice, children CAN converse. For his grandfather, they couldn't ("They should be seen, not heard").

There are two types of conversational moves by children: what they want to say, and what they say:

"I'm going to the bathroom to do poo-poo".

The explicature, 'to do poo-poo', Grice founds a breach of conversational informativeness ("be as informative as is required"). Surely we should be offended if an adult leaves us, during a meeting, or dinner, to tell us that he or she wants to do "number two" -- but children (or would-be persons) do that -- all the time.

Grice was also fascinated by the inabilit of children to understand (things).

He would approach the mates of his son Tim and Karen, with questions, when aged 11, like

"Can a sweater be red and green all over? No stripes allowed."

Apparently, Grice's idea of the synthetic a priori is NOT in children.

Etc.