Well, I certainly agree that it’s possible to generate a list of a hundred cases that 95% of people would agree on the classification of.
But if you followed me around for a week and picked samples randomly from that (both of cases where I tell people what to do, and cases where I could have told people what to do and didn’t), and you asked a hundred people, I expect you’d get <60% congruence. I work in an office full of Americans and Israelis, I am frequently amused and sometimes horrified by the spread of opinion on this sort of thing.
Of course, if you narrowed your sample to middle-class Americans, you might well get up above 90%.
Edit: I should explicitly admit, though, that I was not envisioning a randomly generated list of cases. It was a good question.
I had something a set of mundane cases in mind. My post was just meant to point out that discerning these sorts of situations is not something we use a set of rules or criteria for (at least no fixed set we could usefully enumerate), but most people are socially competant enough to tell the difference.
I agree that most people who share what you’re calling “social competence” within a given culture share a set of rules that determine acceptable utterances in that culture, and that those rules are difficult to enumerate.
Hm.
Well, I certainly agree that it’s possible to generate a list of a hundred cases that 95% of people would agree on the classification of.
But if you followed me around for a week and picked samples randomly from that (both of cases where I tell people what to do, and cases where I could have told people what to do and didn’t), and you asked a hundred people, I expect you’d get <60% congruence. I work in an office full of Americans and Israelis, I am frequently amused and sometimes horrified by the spread of opinion on this sort of thing.
Of course, if you narrowed your sample to middle-class Americans, you might well get up above 90%.
Edit: I should explicitly admit, though, that I was not envisioning a randomly generated list of cases. It was a good question.
I had something a set of mundane cases in mind. My post was just meant to point out that discerning these sorts of situations is not something we use a set of rules or criteria for (at least no fixed set we could usefully enumerate), but most people are socially competant enough to tell the difference.
I agree that most people who share what you’re calling “social competence” within a given culture share a set of rules that determine acceptable utterances in that culture, and that those rules are difficult to enumerate.