Implicature in the Mental Asylum

J and I are criticising Greenhall's DPhil on Grice (Oxford, 2006). We think Greenhall underestimates what J and I refer to as "crazy talk".

In many quarters, what people say does NOT follow 'rational guidelines'. People usually underestimate this type of utterers. "They are crazy," they say.

So what?

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I would distinguish between 'mad' and 'crazy'. I once attended a full seminar on neurolinguistics. It was about Broca, and traumatism in the brain that may lead to loss of speech (if not life).

I was VERY disappointed when they called 'lack of names' -- anomie. Surely that's lack of 'rules' for Durkheim.

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In general, Gricean guidelines HAVE been applied to "Crazy talk". I forget the author of the book, but it basically deals with schizophrenic discourse. It tends to be repetitive (against Grice, 'be brief', 'don't repeat yourself') or irrelevant.

In general, medicals have to study this, since, hey, they get paid.

I notice that some medics don't know enough of predicate calculus to see if what a schizo has said is a scalar implicatum or merely a clausal implicatum.

I'm NOT being jocular. This IS a SERIOUS topic.

Grice saves the day -- because he is into the very LIMITS of rationality, so surely his model serves to understand deviances from that model.