Drawing connections from scalar implicature

This week's readings dealt with young children's failings in computing scalar implicatures. Earlier papers have proposed many reasons for these shortcomings (such limited working memory), but these papers suggested that scalar implicatures are built from a contextual knowledge and possibly other forms of learning to assess lexical alternatives.

I wonder how these effects would relate to the implicit bias and stereotyping issues we've talked about in this class. The readings talked about the need to consider scalar alternatives to understand implicature, such as taking "Some of the toys are on the table" to mean that "All of the toys are on the table" isn't true. Is there an analogous situation in which one must consider people of other races (racial alternatives)? Consider a question of the form "All people have X", where X is a certain facial structure genetically expressed by individuals of only some races. To answer this question correctly, one must consider people of other races – racial alternatives, per se. Is this a scenario in which implicit racial bias could affect situations discussed in the reading?

While the term "alternatives" is relevant both to answering this question and computing scalar implicatures, the situations are nonetheless very different. While "all" is a scalar term, no scalar implicature is involved in this question – in fact, it doesn't seem possible that any question could convey implicature. Second, the alternatives considered in this situation aren't scalar. An individual doesn't need to consider whether some people have X in order to answer the question of whether all people have X. Instead, he or she must directly consider people, a sort of semantic alternative rather than a linguistic alternative. Even though this scenario doesn't seem to be related to our readings, I'm curious to explore further the link between implicit bias and scalar implicature.

These readings also make me think of the notion that language is innate in humans. It is tempting to see that children often can't correctly compute scalar implicature even when they understand the relevant words and to conclude that language is not innate. But I don't think we can make this conclusion. First of all, that children learn some parts of language more slowly than they do others doesn't rule out the possibility that the capacity for learning all parts parts of language is innate. Second, we must consider the mechanisms by which individuals compute scalar implicature. If, for instance, it is true that children's inability to compute scalar implicature is due to limitations in working memory, this inability is not sufficient evidence that language is not innate.