Griceiana

Speranza

Allott, elsewhere was referring to

"questions about the psychological reality of mental representations"

and

"the importance or otherwise of a realist view of mental representation"

While I revise some notes on Grice on 'LF' (logical form) and 'ILF' (interpreted logical form) it may do to reconsider the keyword of this essay by Saul below: 'psychological reality

Saul, J., 2002b, "What is said and psychological reality: Grice's project and relevance theorists' criticisms", Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 347-372.

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Gibbs has focused on the issue of 'Logical Form' in online psycholinguistic processing. I would like to bring to the forum a quote by, you know who. No. I don't mean Grice. I mean Allott. In his online PhD Rationality and pragmatics Allott deals with an issue that has always interested Griceians -- 'and their ilk': criticisms of alleged lack of 'psychological reality'. I don't have Allott's PhD thesis to hand, but when I read it I made this note to myself about Grice's P. E. R. E.

This is the principle of economy of rational effort. When I read about it, in Grice's Reply to Richards, I was in the middle of some discussions of a philosophical sort with authors who were publishing on 'knowledge of a semantic theory' in the pages of _Mind_: Davies, and others. The issue was whether we should make sense of something like 'tacit' knowledge (of these things like 'logical form' or subpropositional logical forms in the enrichment of the input for implicature generation, and the like.

So, I was refreshed to hear of Grice, charmingly, referring to 'subterranean' here. The metaphor is clear. Grice (and I would claim, Griceians) need NEVER postulate 'subterranean' processes, which are then judged (by psycholinguists) to lack this or that degree of psychological reality. (And it is amusing that while Saul sees the RT as criticising Grice for 'lack of psychological reality', a similar claim has been made elsewhere regarding RT itself).

So, how does Grice express the thing?

So: Consider:

A: I'm _so_ hungry.
B: On the top shelf.

Now think Grice:

Grice writes:

"[The] ability to produce, without the aid of
overt ratiocination, transitions which accord
with approved standards of inference does NOT
demand that such rationacination be PRESENT
in an unconsciour OR COVERT form; it
requires at most that our propensity to
PRODUCE such transitions be dependent
in some way upon our acquisition or possession
of a capacity to reason explicitly. Similarly, our
ability to produce satisfactory utterances [thereby
meaning this or that] does NOT require a
*subterranean* ratiocination to account for
their satisfactory character; it needs only
be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a
rule-governed language."