The Conceptual–Procedural Distinction: Past, Present and Future

My aim in this paper is to reassess the conceptual–procedural distinction in the light of the last twenty years of research, and to consider some possible revisions or extensions. Section 1 is a brief introduction. In section 2, I outline the rationale for drawing a conceptual– procedural distinction of the type proposed in relevance theory (Blakemore 1987, 2002; Wilson and Sperber 1993). In section 3, I discuss some current issues and objections, looking in particular at whether procedural meaning is properly regarded as semantic, and at whether a single item can encode both conceptual and procedural meaning. In section 4, I suggest some possible revisions and extensions in the light of recent research on lexical pragmatics (Wilson & Carston, 2007; Sperber & Wilson, 2008a). In section 5, I discuss the relation between the conceptual–procedural distinction and the ‘massive modularity’ hypothesis (Sperber, 2005; Carruthers, 2006), and suggest some further revisions or extensions. I conclude that the conceptual–procedural distinction is well founded, and may have much more general application than has previously been thought. .