Grice's Informants and Morley-Bunker's

Grice tested the playmates of his children, aged 7 and 9, with

"Nothing can be green and red all over".

Instead, Morley Bunker preferred philophy undergrads. Ain't that boring?

To give examples,


Summer follows Spring.


was judged ANALYTIC -- by Morley-Bunker's informants, as cited by Sampson, in "Making sense" (Clarendon) by highly significant majorities in each
group of subjects, while

We see with our eyes.


was given near-even split votes by each group.


Over all, the philosophers were somewhat more consistent
with each other than the non-philosophers.


But that global finding conceals results for individual
sentences that sometimes manifested the opposed tendency.
Thus


Tunderstors are electrical disturbances in the atmosphere.


was judged ANALYTIC by a highly significant majority of the non-
philosophers, while a (non-significant) majority of the
philosophers deemed it SYNTHETIC"


In this case, it seems, philosophical training induces the
realisation that well-established results of contemporary
science are not necessary truths.


In other caes, conversely, cliches of current philosophical
education impose their own mental blinkers on those who
undergo it:


Nothing can be completely red and green all over.


was judged ANALYTIC by a significant majority of philosophers
but only by a non-signficiant majority of non-philosophers.


All in all, Morley-Bunker's results argue strongly against the
notion that our inability to decide consistently whether or
not some statement is a necessary truth DERIVES FROM LACK OF
SKILL IN "ARTICULATING" OUR UNDERLYING KNOWLEDGE OF THE
RULES OF OUR LANGUAGE.


Rather, the inability comes from the fact that the question
as posed is UNREAL. We CHOOSE to treat a given statement as
open to question or as unchalleangeable
in the light of the overall structure of beliefs which we have
INDIVIDUALLY EVOLVED in order to make sense of our INDIVIDUAL
EXPERIENCE.


Even the cases which seem "clearly" analytic or synthetic are
cases which individuals judge alike because the relevant
experiences are SHARED by the whole community,


but even for such cases one can invent hypothetical future
experiences which, if they should be realised, would cause us
to revise our judgements.


Nota Bene. This is not intended to call into question the
special status of the "truths of logic", such as either


Either it is raining or it is not.


Unlike Katz, I am inclined to accept the traditional view
according to which "logical particles"
such as "not" and "or" are distinct from the
bulk of the vocabulary in that
the former REALLY are governed by clear-cut inference rules.


I shall not expand on this point here.
(Sampson, op. cit. p.70ff).