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intensional knowledge and processing. The other towards
day-to-day, heuristic intensional knowledge and processing.
This notion of dual semantic processing modes arises from
several sources. Putnam (1975) has established that a term
can be used by people without them knowing the full
extension or the correct intension of the term. For
example, many people may use the word "gold" correctly, but
only a few experts know the real extension and the correct
intensional criteria for defining that extension. There is
no reason to believe that other concepts, including
"ownership", should be any different. Socio-linguistically
we can function in two semantic modes, the more informal,
casual way or the more formal exact way. Further, this
implies that a linguistic division of labor is necessary for
those "terms whose 'criteria' are known only to a substrate
of the speakers who acquire the terms, and whose use by the
other speakers depends upon a structured cooperation between
them and the speakers of the relevant subsets" (Putnam,
1975, pp. 146). With property, the experts probably are
property lawyers and "structured cooperation" probably is
legal proceed ings.
This would be consistent with Thorngate's (1976, 1979)
arguments that, generally, social cognitive processing
capitalizes on the strengths of long term memory and takes
advantage of heuristics, to avoid computational cognitive