Grice and Social Agreement: Using our Knowledge about Scalar Implicature to Accelerate Education

The Barner and Stiller readings were closely tied together, and raised a lot of interesting points about how younger children and adults interpret certain statements differently—both articles explored concepts around scalar implicature and the contrast between logical and pragmatic interpretation. I was particularly fascinated by the idea of interpreting examples like a professor stating that “some students passed the test.” While the readings pointed out that an adult would be able to construe the meaning of this use of scalar implicature, young children are not able to correctly make distinctions between words like “some” and “all.” 

The articles briefly mentioned Grice’s maxims, which is a central concept in the philosophy of language—much of my fascination focused around this concept. Grice’s maxims state that speakers’ contributions should be as informative as needed, and not more informative than needed. However, it seems that children do not have a good grasp of this kind of thinking—instead, they are more purely logical thinkers, obsessed only with truth values and unable to distinguish between scales of an idea. I’m interested in knowing more about how children acquire this sense of logic, and why it manifests itself in this way—are they able to think about other problems requiring purely logical interpretation? If presented with simple logic puzzles, would young children be able to understand these better than puzzles requiring greater knowledge about context, perhaps eventually tying in scalar implicature? Grice’s maxims also seem to require a kind of social agreement, relating to our previous discussions about sociolinguistics, where as we grow up, we learn how other people interpret language and consequently enter into this agreement to provide just enough information—but not too much. Is this an aspect of sociolinguistics that we can explore further to understand how social context and agreement may play a role in logical versus pragmatic interpretation? 

Consequently, I am interested in how we should be using this knowledge about the way children interpret statements like “some toys are on the table.” The Barner reading suggested different methods by which children learn (such as memorizing numerals)—however, I have had long-standing interest in education, and I feel as if there may be ways to further investigate children’s abilities to logically (but not pragmatically) interpret the world around them. Are there types of teaching that take advantage of these early abilities, and link them to a social context where children would be able to learn, earlier than otherwise, about scalar implicature? I noticed that the Stiller reading mentioned that some of their participants were from Stanford’s Bing Nursery School. There may be opportunity here to conduct further research about how these studies can be used, in a practical way, to accelerate early education and empower teachers with the tools to help their students understand different types of language.