LA CONVERSAZIONE DI H. P. GRICE

This document provides a detailed philosophical and historical examination of H. P. Grice’s life, intellectual background, and his influential theory of conversation within the Oxford philosophical tradition. It explores Grice’s classical education, his role in ordinary-language philosophy, and the conceptual framework he developed to understand communication as a rational, cooperative activity. The document also reflects on the legacy and ongoing relevance of Grice’s ideas in contemporary philosophy of language and pragmatics, emphasizing the importance of his Oxonian milieu and the challenges in translating his work beyond it.

Grice’s Oxford Background

Grice’s philosophical approach is deeply rooted in his classical education at Oxford, where he studied Greek, Latin, and philosophy, influenced by figures like Aristotle and Cicero. He was affiliated with three Oxford colleges—Corpus Christi (his alma mater), Merton (scholarship), and St. John’s (tutorial fellowship)—and his academic career was largely shaped by Oxford’s distinctive tutorial system. His work was primarily directed toward an English-speaking academic audience, with limited publication aimed at broader readerships. Grice’s philosophical outlook was shaped by Oxonian empiricism and ordinary-language philosophy, contrasting with continental traditions. Despite his broad scholarly interests, his key philosophical concepts centered on intention and rationality, with meaning emerging as a later focus. His personal traits, such as chain smoking and untidy habits, and his wartime naval service, also contextualize his academic life. Grice’s interactions with contemporaries such as J. L. Austin, P. F. [1] [2].

The Theory of Conversation as a Rational Cooperative Game

Central to Grice’s philosophy is his substantive theory of conversation, which conceptualizes conversation as a rational, cooperative game involving interlocutors (players A and B) who take turns making conversational moves governed by principles or maxims. These include conversational helpfulness, benevolence, self-love, and clarity, which guide participants toward mutual understanding and information exchange. Conversation is seen not merely as the transmission of explicit meaning but as involving implicit communication through conversational implicature, where what is implied often exceeds what is explicitly said. Grice emphasized the role of abductive reasoning—both by speaker and listener—in interpreting and producing these conversational moves. His theory distinguishes between signification and meaning, focusing on the utterer’s intention to signify rather than classical notions of meaning. The conversational game presupposes rational interlocutors sharing a common goal of exchanging information and ma [3] [4].

Key Concepts in Grice’s Conversational Theory

• Conversational Implicature: The implicit meaning conveyed beyond what is explicitly stated, relying on context and shared rationality.

• Conversational Maxims: Norms such as helpfulness, clarity, benevolence, and self-love that regulate cooperative conversation.

• Conversational Moves and Turns: The structured actions participants take in the conversational game to convey information or intentions.

• Conversational Reason: The rational foundation underlying cooperative communication.

• The Conversational Immanuel: A Kantian ideal interlocutor representing the norm of rational cooperation in conversation.

The Oxonian Philosophical Milieu and Key Figures

Grice’s work is best understood within the tightly knit Oxford philosophical community, often known as Austin’s play group, which was central to the development of ordinary-language philosophy. His relationships with prominent philosophers such as J. L. Austin (mentor and leader), P. F. Strawson (tutee and critic), J. O. Urmson, G. J. Warnock, D. F. Pears, and others shaped his intellectual environment. The document highlights the social and hierarchical aspects of Oxford academic life, including class distinctions and the tutorial system, which influenced Grice’s interactions and philosophical style. His Oxonian empiricism contrasted with continental philosophical traditions, which limited the international appeal of his work. The document underscores the importance of Grice’s Oxford background and social context for fully appreciating his contributions and the challenges in extending his ideas beyond this milieu [5] [6].

Legacy and Prospects of Grice’s Philosophy

Although Grice’s work is often regarded as historically significant but somewhat dated in contemporary philosophy, his contributions remain a vital chapter in the philosophy of language and pragmatics. His insistence on being a philosopher simpliciter rather than solely a philosopher of language reflects his broader philosophical ambitions. Grice’s ideas continue to be relevant especially to scholars interested in the history of philosophy, ordinary-language analysis, and the Oxonian tradition. The document notes that his work is still “required reading” in some continental philosophy centers, though approached cautiously. The legacy includes ongoing scholarly engagement, with essays and seminars exploring themes such as conversational implicature, conversational reason, and the phenomenology of conversational moves. Challenges remain in interpreting some of Grice’s unpublished notes and handwriting, as well as in translating his Oxonian-specific ideas to wider philosophical contexts. Nonetheless, his theory [7] [8].

Indexes of Concepts and Philosophers

The document includes extensive indexes that catalog key concepts related to Grice’s philosophy—such as conversation, implicature, intention, maxim, meaning, move, principle, and reason—and notable philosophers connected to his intellectual circle. These indexes provide valuable biographical notes and contextual information on figures like J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, J. O. Urmson, G. J. Warnock, D. F. Pears, J. R. Searle, A. G. N. Flew, A. D. Woozley, and R. M. Hare. This comprehensive contextualization underscores Grice’s central role in mid-20th-century Oxford philosophy and the collaborative, sometimes contentious nature of his academic environment [9] [10].

In summary, this document offers a rich and nuanced exploration of H. P. Grice’s philosophical background, his innovative theory of conversation as a rational cooperative game, and his place within the Oxford philosophical tradition. It situates his work historically and socially while highlighting its continuing influence and the challenges faced by contemporary scholars in engaging with hislegacy [11] [12].

J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

While the importance of the play group has been overstressed, historians of philosophers, as we may call them, Grice included – he was the best historian of his own philosophy – have not dwelt much with Grice’s OWN interactions with the Play Group. When he reminisces on the group’s activities, none of the three anecdotes he recalls involve him. They do involve Austin, of course. Truth to tell, he does mention ONE occasion, in a slightier earlier passage of his ‘Prejudices and predilections,’ that involve him. And this had become a locus classicus of frivolity among the play group critics such as Gellner, but Gellner and others never cared to emphasise the point that it was Grice who was behind it all. We may reconstruct the conversation. While those conversations were usually triadic or tetradic or even more adic in  nature, I will provide a dyadic version. AUSTIN: So what were you saying? GRICE. I was wondering if we could mark a criterion between what is philosophically important from what is NOT philosophically important. AUSTIN. I don’t see your point. GRICE. You see, among non-practitioners of ordinary-language philosophy, people often wonder. AUSTIN. I see. GRICE. So, is there a criterion? Should we look for one? AUSTIN. I’m not sure. I’m never good at judging what is important. Can you give me an example. GRICE. Well consider the adjective ‘very’ and the adjective ‘highly’. I would say that the fact is, of ordinary-language, that is, that we can usually say ‘highly intelligent,’ and ‘very intelligent’, while I am ready to say ‘very idiotic,’ I would hardly feel comfortable with myself by uttering ‘He is highly idiotic.’ AUSTIN. I see your point. There may be a scale at work there, as Urmson called them in ‘Parenthetical verbs.’ GRICE. What do you mean? URMSON: There would be a scale with ‘very’ being neutral, and ‘highly’ highly less neutral. NOWELL-SMITH: Very true. AUSTIN. Very. – Very in French MEANS true. GRICE. So the point? AUSTIN. There is a philosophical importance attached to the rational choice speakers make when using ‘highly’ versus ‘very’. This is highly philocophical important.” Grice was less satisfied with Austin’s response and would tell us so!                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B. When we refer to the player, we refer to that symbol in Grice’s Meaning in ‘A’. He is discussing types of meaning, and he decides that ‘A means to x’ – where A is a human agent, and x is an action will fall under the natural cases. In a conversation then we have A and B, two human agents. In ‘The theory of context.’ Grice is methodological about it. He needs to specify to his tutees that he will only accept as evidence the dyad. As in the old days of ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ marked under ‘*’ or “?” and written in brackets (1). For Grice, the type of instance will always be a dyad. Consider his first example of ‘implicature’ A: How is C getting on at his new job at the bank. B: Oh quite nicely really. He likes his colleagues and he he hasn’t been to prison yet. When in “Vacuous Names’ he goes on to use predicate calculus, we would need to be able to subscript the operators A and B. So suppose we are talking of a judging. We would have JUDGE_A  . If we have a WILL ascribed to B, we will have WILL_{B .}. Easy as it seems, it isn’t. An option would be to use ‘U’ for utterer and ‘A’ for addressee. Another option would be to refer to each as the ‘Meaners’ – or significans – SIGNIFICANS_A and SIGNIFICANS_B Note that in Grice’s analysis of meaning, including implicature, involving A and B, the logical form can be quite complex. The first intention by A – as he makes move M1 – within his turn T1 – is to have B BELIEVE or JUDGE something IABB. INTA BELB. But that is not the end of the matter. Grice was adamant about his approach being exhibitive. The judging that A intends from A is one concerning a psychological attitude by A. So A intends B to think that A either judges or wills that p. While it is free prose to write ‘judges or wills’ Grice took the disjunction seriously. He did allow for willing being definable in terms of judging. But the only explicit definition he gave – in ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ was the inverse: judging defined as willing. In this case, no reference to co-conversationalist B is necessary. We are able to provide a definition of A JUDGES THAT P in terms of A WILLS THAT P provided we add some apparatus regarding the modulos, as Grice calls them. So if A judges that the flag is red and white, he wills that the flag being white and red will suppress a modulo where the flag is blue and white. England’s flag is red and white, Scotland’s flag is blue and white. We can thus define A’s JUDGING that England’s flag is red and white in terms of his willings. These are not willings about the flag being red and white, but about his willingness to have a match between his psychological attitudes and the state of the world. Within each turn, A is allowed to make as many moves as he likes. But given the common goal – common ground – of conversation, he is willing to exchange information and provide a way for the instditution of decisions. This is some sort of ‘actual’ uptake. As Collingwood would have it, conversation resolves conversando. And A expects B’s move. “Oh, he likes his colleagues and he hasn’t been to prison yet.” A was trying to elicit that information from B and B is more than keen to provide it. Grice does not elaborate on how B gets to retrieve A’s meaning in questioning. Which is a shame, since Grice loved an interrogative. ‘How is C getting on in his new job at the bank?’ This requires a lot of common ground, and it’s a ‘how’ question. Grice uses the variable ‘wh-‘ – Cicero qu- -- but here it won’t work since ‘how’ does not start with ‘who. So it’s best to treat it as an x-question. As opposed to what Girce calls a yes/no, or yes/no/truth-value gap (when he was on Strawsonian antimode) question. ‘How is he getting on?’ The answer is ‘Quite well, I think.’ That should provide the full answer? Nor really, B feels as if he feels like volunteering. This is Oxford? Not really? Hugh Grant, an Oxonian, always treasured the fact that his brother worked at a bank, and that his parents were often asked. ‘Oh my sons are doing ok. One is a film star and the other works in a bank.’ ‘Oh marvellous! And what bank is that?!’ So you never know with Oxonians. The emphasis is on B’s volunteered information, which involves a topic that obsessed him even as an undergraduate, Greek ‘ou,’ Latin ‘non’. ‘He has NOT been to prison.’ Add ‘yet’ for effect. The implicature work smoothly. ‘Not’ implicates that B thinks A is having the affirmative version in mind. The ‘yet’ adds to the drama. Again, the cognitive abilities diverge in SIGNIFICANS making the signifying move, and the SIGNIFICANS getting his co-conversationalist’s meaning ACROSS. The first is a simple goal-end directed behaviour, as Bennett would call it. Of the type that Kant would call ‘prudential,’ rather than moral. There is no algorithm, because it’s actions that are under consideration. But it is a bit like an Aristotelian practical syllogism – PRACTICAL being the key word --. Some are better conversationalists than other. And there are various levels to consider here. Was B’s GOAL to inform A that C is potentially dishonest, or that his colleagues are potentially treacherous. At this point, unfortunately, Grice could not care less. He is only bringing attention to the scenario to exemplify a case where what B EXPLICITLY CONVEYS or communicates, viz. that C hasn’t been to prison, DIFFERS FROM what B IMPLICITLY does – i. e. implicitly conveys or communicates. Grice adds two important features here. What B IMPLICITLY CONVEYS is both calculable yet indeterminate. Consider calculability first: this is nothing but a slate of A’s processing in uptake: A must reconstruct B’s goal and proceed to calculate the steps B had in mind to achieve it. But now bring in INDETERMINACY, and you’ll see that the two-turn exchange may require further one. A: What do you mean he hasn’t been to prison yet? This is the type of pedantic exchange that is constantly annulled at Oxford and signifies that you are an outsider. ‘Do you mean to say that he is PRONE to dishonesty, or are you suggesting that his colleagues are potentially dishonest.’ Most likely, if B is Oxonian: “Take your pick.’ This type of conversational exchange Grice saw as the basis for HIS type of ordinary-language philosophy. And he provides such conversations in essays like ‘Vacuous Names’ – the long elaborations on Marmaduke Bloggs – or ‘Intention and Uncertainty’. ‘What do you mean you intend to retire if you are not legally allowed do do it? It’s not like raising ducks in old age, you know.’ And the important thing to notice is Grice’s reliance on his OWN intutions as to what’s best conversational practice or etiquette. At most, he would call on them when refuting another Oxonian about them, as in his discussion with Hart on how to use ‘carefully’ carefully.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature. The idea of a ‘move’ is Austinian. How to DO THINGS with words was the topic of his slogan. He preferred the more austere ‘Words and deeds’ – a man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds’ for his Oxford seminars on this. But Austin went to great lengths to analyse the ‘active’ side to ‘making a move’. Was it a phatic, was it a rheme? Was it a phone, was it a phone with suprasegmenetal stress added to it. Grice considers all this, and eventually comes to adopt the Austinian piece of parlance ‘speech act.’ Grice considers that Austin minismises the role of minimal speech acts. There are some speech acts which are, Grice calls them, CENTRAL, such as informing or directing. But there are speech acts, such as ‘suggest’ or ‘hint,’ which are peripheral – those that full under the implicature. He goes on to provide further symbolism. He uses the Frege complex sign of the turnstile without considering its double nature: acceptance and assertion. So he uses the turnstile. In opposition he uses “!” for the buletic operator. He adds in earlier debate the ‘optative mode.’ Oh, for Smith to be happy. Smith is happy, Smith, be happy, Oh, for Smith to be happy. In ‘Intention and uncertainty’ he explores Oh that there be light; oh for a breath of fresh air, oh for a lovely spring. In general, we settles for a trichotomy. Moves are JUDICATIVE when they inolve the indicative or informative sub-modes. Or they are VOLITIVE, when they tend towards Kant’s sphere of imperatives, hypothetical or categorical – on which lectures when considering axiology. And third, there is the class of the INTERROGATIVES. They are a type of volitive. Grice goes on to consider the general format and the differential. Each move involves an M-intention on the part of the conversationalist A directed to co-conversationalist B, to the effect that B will acquire the JUDGEMENT that A WILLS something. And what A WILLS is that B JUDGES that A either WILLS or JUDGES that p. The rationale of conversation then proceeds along general lines. While talking of ‘conversational moves’ he makes a clear distinction with behaviour in general. His account will be useless if it cannot be seen as applying to dyadic interactions that do not require that type of expliciation. One of his earlier examples is his dropping the exact amount for the exact type of tobacco he buys on his tobacconists’s desk. Here a dyadic interaction takes place. Grice notes that DROPPING NOT the exact amount kills it all. There are other similar examples. A: Are you playing squash tonight. B displayes his bandaged leg. Hardly verbal or linguistic. Yet, two-sided. EXPLICITLY Grice is hesitant to allow that by displaying his bandaged leg, B means that his leg is bandaged. The type of ‘uptake’ required in THIS case is so automatic and primitive that defies reason. Everyone, or everything – a mouse, or rat, or a fly – can see that. He is more inclined to consider that the only thing that B MEANS or signifies is that he cannot play squash. I. e. Take ‘no’ as the answer. Grice never considered the apparatus of turn taking, which was elaborated elsewhere not by philosophers. Notably Harvey Sacks. Sacks managed to get a copy of Grice’s full lectures, but as Schegloff confesses, he never read them. One occasion where Grice considers turn-taking is in his progression, in pirotese, from ‘not’ to ‘and.’ What is the point of ‘and’. His example is: “It is raining and it is pouring.” Without the ‘and’ B would be at odds if willing to challenge A: What do you mean ‘and’?’ Only with the occurrence of ‘and’ can B challenge the conjunction, and challenge A into disproving that it is not the case that p and q. p and q may be seen as moves. ‘It is raining.’ It is pouring.’ Has ‘and’ been internalized. Grice plays with this. And he would conclude that if A’s turn consists of ‘It is raining. It is poruing’, it is two moves within his turn. However, if he uses the para-tactical device and utters, ‘It is raining AND it is pouring’ it is just ONE move within his turn. Economy of rational effort! Moving implies that you are going somewhere. But Grice was aware that even at Oxford in what he calls ‘across the wall’ interactions – say, when exchanging tidbits with the gardener at Trinity – conversation may seem to be going nowehere. Starting a conversation seems easy enough, although as Leech recalls us: “Don’t talk about your indigestion. How are you is a greeting, not a question. It is more difficult with pre-sequences leading to closure. But Grice is expedient about that. If the goal of conversation is psi-transfer, as he sometimes puts it – once such transfer has been facilited through verbal exchange or other, each pirot can proceed to stay away form each other until next time!

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel. Common ground, common goal. Grice uses ‘common ground’ profusely, and even introduces an operator to mark it: the square bracket – in earlier lectures, a subscript notation. What is the common ground? Grice is hesitant about how serious he is being here. The ground does not really need to be common. More like NONCONTROVERSIAL he adds. So within the common-ground, which philsoophers working on Grice’s programme took seriously only when dealing with that concoction of the presupposition or non-existence thereof – we can drop the common goal of conversation. In this regard, Grice is an evolutionist. He draws his pirots from Carnap – ealy pirots karulise elatically. And he refers to the lingo pirots talk as PIROTESE. He doesn’t use the thorn rune, but the ‘o’ for obble – an obble is being COTCHED and POTCHED by the pirots. In fact, the order is reverse: you first POTCH (perceive) and THEN you cotch (CONCEIVE). What do you conceive? That thorn-1 is in F relation with thorn-2. The grapes are over the vine. And you communicate that. His evolutionary inclination is obvious in ‘Meaning revisited,’ where he proposes SIX stages of PIROTESE. The first stage is the irrational one, where the outburst of a piece of behaviour by one pirot is UNDERSTOOD by the co-pirot as, say, a sign of pain – the pirot has just groaned miserably. By conceiving a ladder here, Grice beings to add levels of intentional behaviour, goal-directed in kind, towards the other pirot. There are puzzles to be solved by the co-pirot. Why is the pirot SIMULATING pain, now, and why does the pirot want me to rely on my recognition of HIS intention to express pain? Eventually, Grice reaches STAGE 6, available only to rational pirots, where the link between the manifested behaviour and the pain is ‘artificial’ – ‘any link will do,’ Grice says.. Non-rational non-human animals may find it trickier, but not necessarily. Grice has two important points on this issue. The first is the SYNTHETIC answer to the question about the non-human communication. It is not by fiat, that the philosopher decides that a non-human animal is not able to produce and detect m-intentions. It is just that they don’t. Their environments do not require it. The second important point is Grice’s constant reliance on the one-off scenario. A pirot may meet a pirot for the first time, in a jungle, and so there is no way to appeal to a procedure, basic or resultant, which the second pirot brings to the picture to process the behaviour of the first pirot. This type of one-off communication is common among non-human animals. By pointing to its centrality, Grice’s moral is obvious: conversation plays a role in what, to echo Vitters, is the HUMAN or PERSON form of life. Other forms of life are possible, and it is stupid to Androcles to ask the lion. He will not understand whatever answer the lion comes with! The point about PERSON brings us back to our ‘A’ under PLAYER. It is not ‘human agent’ simpliciter. It is PERSON. Grice spends some eschatological time here. He wants to diverge from Locke. Locke did play with ‘man’ – human’ and ‘person. For Grice what is at play is philosophically something only philosophers understand or need to understand – transubstantiation of the metaphysical type. A property which is only accidental for HUMAN pirots – rationality – understood as the ability to reason over the making and the interpreting of conversational moves – becomes ESSENTIAL in persons. In continental philosophy, what seems like demagoguery by Grice is common parlance!

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato! When Elinor Ochs studied Malagasy speakers she thought she had discovered something. Being under sponsorship, she hastened to publish the result in a non-philosophical journal, and titled it the Universality of Implicature. Universality is a topic that rings a bell to Kantians like Grice or Hare, since we are into universalizability. Grice considers the universabilisability under three guises: content, equality and application. These apply to the procedures themselves. Only a procedure – basic or resultant – that is universalizable in this respect counts. This is not the type of universality that Ochs thought she was taking about. But to a philosopher the puzzle is solved by allowing that the Kantian alleged universabilisability of the conversational Immanuel may not be changed by a mere cunning of conversational reason. Oxford makes this clear in distinguishing between Town and Gown, or Gown and Town, strictly. In Gown, a conversation of the type. A: He has beautiful handwriting, although I am far from allowing yourself to retrieve from that causal remark the judgement that my tutee is hopeless at philosophy. In Town, ‘he has beautiful handwriging’ JUST means that he has beautiful handwriting. The same common goal is maintained, and the same principle of conversational helpfulness, and the same set of maxims. But a conversationalist in TOWN knows what to expect from his co-conversationalist, whereas a conversationalist in GOWN never does!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

 

Bealer, J. F. Bealer thought he was being clever when in the only essay he published for Oxford Univeristy Press, the Clarendon Press, in the Library directed by L. J. Cohen (who else?) Bealer would quote from Grice, ‘Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular.” This is just a draft of the Urbana lecture where Grice analyses ‘The loyalty examiner won’t be examining you at any rate’ basically throwing through the window Strawson’s silly concept of the truth-value gap and offering a full Russellian account instead.

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Cohen, L. J. Grice never liked Cohen, but Cohen is at least polite in NOT quoting from Grice verbatim. Cohen became engaged with Walker, Bostock, and other in the Grice group at Oxford, and it was indeed in response to Walker, a colonial, that Cohen managed to still bring milk from the cow to fill a bucket: “Can the conversationalist hypothesis be defended?” which later made it to Cohen’s collected papers. He had dealt with Grice’s and Strawson’s earlier ‘In defense of a dogma’ in Cohen’s earlier ‘The Diversity of Meaning’ to no avail. While Grice easily made school at Oxford, Cohen, forever the outsider, never could, but found echoes in the work of Kasher!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Kant. Grice never had to study Kant seriously. The reason is double. His tutee, Strawson, had done all the work, and was indeed lecturing at Oxford on the bounds of sense – the marksheet of sinnlichkeit, to no avail. Grice discusses Kant briefly in “Metaphysics” where, echoing Strawson, Grice says that Kant speaks to us metaphysically, and rationally too, via practical reason. The rest is history. Grice created Kantotle to justify his classical upbringing. After all, Kant’s categories are based on Aristotle, and they are twelve, not four! But Grice liked the number four. To use the Ciceronianisms, qualitas, quantitas, relatio, and modus. Grice was amused that Kant’s original spelling of his (Kant’s, not Grice’s) surname was Cant, but the Hun would sybilise that as ‘Sunt’!

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Locke, Don. Not to be confused with John Locke. Grice quotes both. Don Locke wrote a little essay on ‘I,’ whereas John Locke essayed on the humane (sic) side to it!

Locke. Speranza has explored at length the Locke-Grice connection due to the fact that he had always had an interest in modern philosophy. In fact, Bennett has called Locke a proto-Griceian: an expression, by a parot, say, is supposed to ‘stand for’ an idea, only provided the parrot INTENDS the other parrot to get this. Speranza considers that the master here is Hall. Hall, educated at Oxford, cared to leave Oxford, and found The Locke Newsletter. Grice never took Locke so seriously, but he puns on this when invited to give the prestigious John Locke lectures at Oxford and confesses that he had applied TWICE to the prize that his tutee had won the Locke Prize, to no avail. Grice’s ‘Personal identy’ is Lockean in spirit. Locke should not be confused with Locke, who also wrote on ‘I’.

Nowell-Smith, P. H. Grice always found it amusing that the ‘Nowell’ was ornamental. “His father was Smith, and so is he!” No study of Grice can avoid not quoting Nowell-Smith, even though Grice never credited him in print. His views were too dissimilar. In ‘Ethics’, Nowell-Smith speaks of the conversational maxims of relation, trust, and informativeenss, to no avail. A scholar in Italy (Loghorn) tried to compare the ideas, but failed. Grice cites from Nowell-Smith’s interactions (two) with Austin on Saturday mornings. This are a good prophecy, since one can easily see how both Grice and Austin were the real cause why Nowell-Smith left Oxford for good – though he died at Oxford. On both occasions cited by Grice, Austin is making fun of Nowel-Smith’s idiocies. The first, that Donne is imcomprehensible, when he is not! The more serious one, one promsing, breaking promising, bribing and not accepting bribes ‘on principle,’ when ‘No thanks’ is so much more Oxonian and classy. Nowell-Smtih engaged in publications on Austin on ‘if’ but never took Grice too seriously, which was tit for tat, really!

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Over, D. E. The type of philosopher H. P. Grice loved to engage in discussion with: English to the fingertips. Over discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction.

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Potts, T. C. The type of English philosopher H. P. Grice loved to engage in philosophical discussion with. Potts was Grice’s tutee at St. John’s for one term only, since J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

Wiggins

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

Wiggins

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

Wiggins

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

Wiggins

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Bealer

Blackburn

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Holdcroft,

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Sainsbury, R. M.

Schiffer, S. R.

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

Wiggins

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

Wiggins

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Bealer,

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Holdcroft.

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

Wiggins

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim

Meaning

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity.

Reason, conversational reason

NAME INDEX

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

Wiggins

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

J. L. Speranza

La conversazione di H. P. Grice

 

In my “Grice Italo,” I have explored the intersection between the theories of H. P. Grice, the well-known full-time tutorial fellow at St. John’s and ITALY at large! In what follows, I’d rather consider his paradigm along three dimensions, which are reflected in the contents. The First is Grice’s Oxford – which I deem essential to understand his background, or where he was coming from, as the new idiom goes. The Second Part considers his proper theory of Conversation, or Conversazione. I have attempted to make his paradigm fluent for Continental Philosophers, rather than the more parochial milieu he encountered at Oxford. The Third Part is about Prospects.

CONTENTS

Grice’s Oxford

Conversazione

Prospect

In these pages, I will draw from that material, and elsewhere, to develop what he calls a ‘substantive theory of conversation.’ The only public occasion where he did that was in the mid-section of one of his lectures, but I will rely on other material, too.

The idea is to develop a PHILOSOPHICAL account of conversation along H. P. Grice’s lines. As such, it will be based around the idea of rationality, but we shall discuss what type of rationality is involved.

We will draw closely on Grice’s intimate milieu, which he described as Austin’s play group, or less informally, as that ‘school’ of ordinary-language philosophers monitored by Austin, the senior of them all.

The references will be of particular interest.

An autobiographical note may be of interest.

As I draw my autobiographical picture I will consider paragraph by paragraph and draw a comparison with H. P. Grice’s own memoir.

Grice learned Greek and Latin at Clifton. I did my classics too. We were drawn to philosophy from the classics.

In Grice’s case, this meant a scholarship. In my case, no scholarship was necessary. I suppose this gives me more freedom.

Grice’s studies for his first degree were thus classics-based. So were mine. In the continental philosophical tradition, ‘philosophy of language’ is usually a ‘cathedra’ and my studies were focused towards that discipline.

Grice does not say much about his own professors – in fact, the ‘professor’ is a bit of an absent figure at Oxford. In the continental philosophical tradition, the professor features larger!

Grice has a few words to say about his tutor – the continental philosophical tradition has no tutors!

The tutorial presence in Grice is important, because, tutor he had, and tutor he’d become. The absence of the tutorial system in the continental philosophical tradition marks a distinction with that.

Grice’s career was cut by the War. He was drafted to the Navy, became a Captain, and continued his tutorial career. In more recent generations, such involvement with the political scene is less heard of.

Grice’s topics, as they ranged from his research as tutee and tutor were many and varied, but they seldom touched ‘philosophy of language,’ as we know it – do we know it? – and less so ‘pragmatics.’ While pragmatism was all the rage at Oxford, it was different to CONFESS it. So Morris’ trichotomy of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Grice could see with a condescending attitude.

Full-time, or whole-time, as Warnock has it, tutorial fellow was a requisite. Scholars such as Gardiner, very much into pragmatics, but without the riff-raff of tutorial responsibilities led at Oxford a more quiet life.

If we are to survey the key words in Grice’s career they would include INTENTION and RATIONALITY. Meaning came later.

In the continental tradition, meaning has no exact correlate. Grice does play with ‘signify’. And ‘signify’ is usually the ONLY vehicle of the philosophical lexicon that a continental philosopher has at his disposal to elaborate views on communication. Even within the continental tradition, the difference is drawn between the ‘barbaric’ languages – such as Cicero called German – and the Latinate one. No such thing as ‘significare’ in the Germanic tradition!

The point about ‘intention’ is more Latinate, but again the traditions differ. Grice remains an empiricist of the Oxonian school who would regard intention alla, at most Prichard. His more specific ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is generally not even discussed by those practitioners – self-appointed – in philosophy of language and pragmatics. And the reason is obvious: it’s an obscure piece of work, meant by a philosopher to other philosophers, with references to Ramsey’s ramseyfications, and the devil of scientism! Surely someone who regards himself as a ‘scientist’ does not want to hear about that.

The empirical interface of Grice’s theory of communication is then basic. And I connect with his theory because I see it as an offshoot of the classical tradition, not as a branch of a science – asking for further inter-disciplinary unity!

From INTENTION to COMMUNICATION, and thus reason-governed CONVERSATION – qua co-operation – the path is a smooth one. Grice never had the time to explore formally the connection, since his appeal to a reason-governed cooperative activity such as he saw conversation, was rhetorical.

There are sections in, say, ‘Vacuous names,’ where he plays with a predicate calculus for pychological-attitudes like ‘want’, and that is the basis for a more formal approach. Only such an approach will dissect and shed light on the mechanisms by which Grice wants to connect, conceptually, the phenomeno of a human agent A signifying that p, and he’s making the conversational move that p.

The gist of his theory is an informal appeal – common-sense based, as all his views are – between two sides of the conversational move. He draws on the ambiguity of ‘imply’ for that. An agent A may signify that p, and yet also signify that q. Where q is implied by p.

Grice spent quite some time in building a taxonomy. Strictly, leaving ‘factive’ natural signifying apart, within the range of the ‘signification’ – primarily ascribed to the utterer, conversationalist, or ‘significans,’ as Cicero and de Saussure would have it – there is the EXPLICIT p, and the implicit q.

Reason plays a minor role, since it applies only to a specific set of the signification. When q is retrieved by appeal to what he dubs, alla Butler, the principle of conversational benevolence, or helpfulness. He grants that there are shades of what an agent A may signify which are non-conventional yet still NOT conversational --. A reliance on a maxim that does not get a universability guaranteed disqualifies it as being part of what A has conversationally implicated. In this way, Grice wants to keep the focus on ‘rational maneovures,’ and unlike Frege, never bother with the ‘colouring’ of particles within the utterance (‘and’ versus ‘but’) that defy conversational reason!

Grice’s Oxford. Grice never formally addressed his background. His ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy’ is a bit of a joke, in that it was delivered at a place where the audience would not interact much. I shall try to clarify his background, as I drop lines from my autobiography that connect. Both Grice and I had a classical background. Having a classical background at Oxford means one thing: the Lit. Hum. programme is supposed to be the most strict and demanding one. And we know that nowadays classics plays no role in a philosopher’s background. So in that respect Grice is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the idea of a sub-faculty of philosophy within the faculty of literae humaniores is a thing of the past. And should a scholar get a scholarship, as Grice did, for ‘classics’ – for how can you get a scholarship for _philosophy_ at Oxford? Unthinkable! – he would need to do Aristotle or Cicero! Plato would be okay, but Oxford’s fame rests on Aristotle. Aristotle, thus, does not qualify you to be a philosopher. Witness the case of Ackrill, one of Grice’s many tutees at Oxford. When Ackrill was made, like Grice had, a fellow of the British Academy and asked to deliver the annual lecture, Ackrill was asked to give on on the HISTORY of philosophy, not philosophy. Grice happened to like that lecture, and got a few good things about it, such as Ackrill’s comments on eudaimonia. The Lit. Hum. programme does not compare to the maximal degree offered by continental philosophy universities. Grice held only a B. A. which later became a M. A. Obtaining a D. Phil. was unheard of. Grice’s examinations in the classics served him no good in his career, only to drop a few quotes by Aristotle in the original Greek. But Grice knew that he was NOT delivering those lines as a classicist, or a historian of philosophy, but as a philosopher, so he never cared to give proof of the critical apparatus. If we think of his classical background proper, although a Cliftonian, he did not qualify as a typical Cliftonian, in that he entered Clifton already having been brought up by hi own mother back in Halborne. He entered Clifton at the age of 13, and was out by 18. He did learn the Greek and the Latin that got him the Oxfordship to the college meant to Midlands scholarship boys: Corpus. At Oxford, the collegiate structure is all that matters, and Grice’s connections were with only THREE colleges. His alma mater then Corpus, under the tutelage of Hardie, and for one term, a substitute teacher who hated him (for his obstinacy!). He became an honorary scholar later in life. His second affiliation was Merton – Merton is like Harvard: the name is a proper name, unlike Corpus, or St. John’s. Merton indeed does for Philosophy itself – and that’s where you can see today Grice’s photograph in the Philosophy Room, or Ryle Room. Grice was a Scholar at Merton for two years – one of those new scholars funded by Harmsworth. His next big step, after a failure as a classics schoolteacher at Rossall, was to apply to St. John’s. The governing body reunited, and it was found, that, as one referee said, Grice never returned library books at Merton or Corpus. He was however offered a lectureship. Soon enough, he was elected a tutorial fellow, which is the only academic post that matters at Oxford. When early in his career he was made a University Lecturer that meant extra responsibility for Grice with little economical reward. His habit of smoking, chain smoking, would be unheard of today. He died of emphysema and dropsy, and one wonders if chain smokers can adapt to the new environment required by universities. During his years as tutorial fellow and university lecturer he interacted with the tutors and other scholars he helped ‘examine’ – a classic failure being Armstrong (“Grice almost failed me!”) – and with colleagues. The post required no standard of validation. And you can see from a quick glimpse at his publications and unpublications, that he never articulated an essay with a view to a larger audience than the one he would encounter at Oxford. His paper on ‘Personal identity’ for “Mind” being perhaps the exception – but he never submitted a paper to any journal again. His “Causal Theory of Perception” was his only contribution to the Aristotelian Society, of which he was a member – he was not a member of the Mind Association – and therefore, his talk on sense data and implicature at Cambridge – where the symposium was held was ‘by invitation.’ Grice was aware that the point of the symposium was social. Yet, when he reprinted bits of it in Studies in the Way of Words he has no word to say about the co-symposiast, A. R. White, who was tortured with having to give a response to Grice – and Grice even cut the interlude on implication. The only Oxford colleague who saw the unity here was Warnock. When asked to compile a reader on the philosophy of perception, he published the whole thing! On the other hand, accustomed to weaker standards in the modern world, Grice would quote from Davis for the bit on Price’s Perception, out of which the source for his ‘Causal Thery of Perception’ came. There is a distinction between ‘Personal identity’ and the more conversational-style ‘Causal Theory.’ Personal identity’ is a paper in the history of philosophy – since he quotes verbatim from Locke, Reid, and Hume. To seduce the board at Mind, he quotes from Broad, and more contemporary Oxonians like Gallie. But his point is hardly argumentative. He is dealing with a classical problem in the history of modern philosophy. It was YEARS later, when Perry, one of his students, revived the paper, that Grice felt like having a second look at it. He had been reading more of Hume by then, and he was more serious about the background of the paper. He was after all, into a ‘logical construction’ of the self. So the topic acquired a contemporary aura that initially lacked. Indeed, it is rare to see the publication quoted at all. One big exception being Hamlyn’s entry on personal identity for the influential Encyclopaedia of Philosoophy edited by Edwards. ‘In defense of a dogma’ may count as a characteristic review submission type of thing, but it is not. It is very American, and triggered by Grice’s – and most notably, his tutee Strawson’s – encounter with the visiting Eastman professor at Oxford, Quine. As a joke, for the last day of his visit, on a Monday, Grice and Strawson presented Grice with ‘In defence of a dogma’ and this was published, at Strawson’s credit, in the Philosophical Review. This created a link between Grice and The Philosophical Review, so it is not surprising that when Strawson asked Grice for a copy of the handwritten ‘Meaning’ and had his wife typewrite it and send it to The Philosophical Review, Grice had little to do with it. The Philosophical Review will be the home for Grice’s second attempt at ‘utterer’s meaning’ – and having his handwritten implicature lectures typewritten, it is only natural that the one on ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ was eventually published (albeit in a cut version – eliminating the opening section on ‘saying and implicating’) in The Philosophical Review. A few other collaborations are noteworthy. His ‘Remarks about the senses’ is perhaps Grice’s most boring pieces – not to me, I love it! – but the site of publication is so Oxford it hurts! It is a Blackwell publication – Oxford university press did not consider ordinary-language philosophy high enough for publication – edited by an Oxonian: R. J. Butler who had by then cut all links with Oxford and was teaching in a redbrick – along the Thames, though. It received little review, but the title is telling, “Analytical philosophy.”

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME. Conversation as a game. Not just a metaphor.

At one point, Grice ceased to be the methodologist he wanted to be – to criticize other philosopher’s talk, and decides to provide a substantial theory of conversation. All he has to say is common-sense which is a compliment for him. It derives from his intention-based theory of meaning, which is also common-sense, but without the intricacies. Therefore, it is understanding that it received much less attention than those intricacies that philosophers worship and to which they impose Grice’s ‘Meaning’ – a thesis, in the words of B. J. Harrison, to come only second as one which had received the largest number of counterexamples to rule-utilitarianism. By contrast, his theory of conversation is a piece of cake, and the presuppositions it rests on Grice can comfortably ignore, since he knows he is not lecturing anyone on ethical communication or norms of etiquette. The piece of cake starts by some vocabulary. We will have the two conversationalists, which are really PLAYERS of the conversational game. This sounds easy, but an animal cannot play. Homo ludens. So the first presupposition is important. Grice is already presupposing the most serious presuppositions in philosophy. The players make moves, and take turns – conversational moves, and conversational turns. Grice knew that, as a philosopher, the only thing he could well ignore, is how conversations play at Oxford. When Harvey Sacks read the lectures he was surprised that Grice never had observed a conversation other than his own. So turn-taking is a bit of a joke. Grice is concerned with the ‘that’-clause, as Austin calls it. The cat is on the mat. He conveys explicitly that the cat is on the mat. This requires a formal supplementation in terms of predicate calculus. Grice designed one, which has been named by one of his colleagues System G, or system G-hp, a hopefully plausible, highly powerful version of System G. In System G, every bit counts, so ‘the cat is on the mat’ involves a term-forming iota operator, two predicates, one for cat, one for mat. But while in ‘Meaning,’ and its sequels he would explore the intricacies of what it means for a conversationalist to have SAID that the cat is on the mat (which would rely on ‘procedures’ both basic and resultant) in more informal terms, the big contrast is what the conversationalist has NOT explicitly conveyed. In a twist of a common philosophical idiom, Grice uses ‘imply,’ not as a variant of ‘implication,’ but as a synonym for ‘insinuate,’ a rhetorical term of art. So, if, as the Longman Dictionary says, ‘a cat’ may be metaphorical for ‘the nasty woman’ and to be on the mat, is to be beaten, the utterer may well be conversationally implying that the nasty woman is being beaten. At this point, Grice wants his audience to recapitulate and to reconsider the important philosophical point Grice is making. He is assuming both conversationalists to be rational. Even though the processes for the move-making and the move-construal involve DIFFERENT strategies or hermeneutical processes. The making of a move is a goal-directed piece of abductive reasoning. The understanding of a move involves an abductive piece of reasoning where the end now is to catch what the other conversationlist is trying to ‘communicate.’ While Grice uses ‘meaning’ informally, he is diverging from his classical background. No such thing as ‘meaning’ in the classics! Indeed, while Grice’s immediate source is Stevenson, Stevenson is clear that he will use ‘mean’ in a metaphorical way to represent what a barometer ‘means,’ for example. The classical parlance is into ‘signifying.’ In his lectures on ‘Meaning,’ Grice is clear that while the utterance is NOT a sign, it is the vehicle by which an utterer signifies. de Saussure had been using ‘signifier’ for a different thing, but the formation is the same: active participle of ‘signify’. It is the utterer who signifies. And it is the utterer, qua conversationalist, who signifies as per a conversational implicature. When M. M. Warner commented on all this, he was a purist, -- ‘Notes on Grice,’ Unpublished --. Grice is being a purist in that ‘implicature’ is not ‘implicatum’. The ‘implicature’ is in the making of the move. The implicatum is what has been communicated. It was, sadly, Strawson, in a piece meant to be critical of Grice – and presenting his ‘rat-infested’ alleged counterexample – who makes the point. What Grice is after is not really ‘meaning’ – or understanding – it is communication, simpliciter. The idea that the rational will can calibre the shades of meaning is a commonplace of rhetoric, but it is the commonplace on which Grice bases his theory. It is a flouting or abuse or manipulation of a procedure meant to be rational. In later stages of his career, when re-elaborating his theory with Warnock, Grice came to see the point more clearly. He is postulating a COMMON GOAL to conversation, which is the exchange of information AND the institution of DECISIONS – both aletic and buletic moves are being held as crucial. Things such as TRUST, on which Warnock had based his Morals in The Object of Morality, or Hampshire in his Thought and Action – are deemed essential. If we break them in jokes like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’, it is only a very silly philosopher who won’t see the light. So Grice can rest assured that there is long tradition, mainly along Kantian lines, which sees these ‘transcendental pragmatic’ conditions are making communication possible. It may be deemed a WEAK transcendental justification in that a move like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ IS possible. The conditions apply to the EXISTENCE of an APPROPRIATE conversational move, not to the existence of a conversational move as such. Grice never cared to provide an answer to Hegel’s challenge to the cunning of conversational reason. But in this respect Hegel proves more Kantian than Kant. And if Grice leaves his Conversational Immanuel as a given, it is one that gets deemed and redeemed in history, in local history, which I the Oxford of the days in which Grice lived.

THE PLAYERS. The two players in the dyad, Grice calls A and B.

THE CONVERSATIONAL MOVES. Those allowed are thus by virtue of their following what Grice calls the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness. These were the days when Grice was idenfitied as ‘the conversationalist’: who would tag every philosophism with ‘conversational’: conversational maxim, conversational principle, conversational implicature.

THE GOAL OF THE GAME. Only talk of goal introduces talk of REASON in the vocabulary. Grice was well aware of the intricacies this involved. He remained a Kantian, and thus would look for a transcendental justification of what he called the Conversational Immanuel.

THE OXONIAN CONTEXT. Grice was aware of the rigid hierarchical structures in Oxonian professional conversations of the type he engaged in most: those of a full-time or whole-time tutorial fellow. ‘He has beautiful handwriting.’ However, the intricacies of the Oxonian milieu can very well be regarded as a cunning of conversational reason. And his Kantotle becomes Heglato!

AUSTIN, J. L. – Lancashire-born philosopher, Like Grice, a scholarship boy at Oxford, but from a higher social class which allowed him to socialise at All Souls.

AYER, A. J. Anglo-Jewish. Grice made fun of the fact that, an outsider, Ayer fell for Grice to the point that he never caught the implicature behind: “Go to Vienna!” He did and the result was that he changed Oxford philosophy for good. Of course, Grice has to testify one and again that he never himself fell for Ayer. Oddly, the only contribution by Grice to the Aristotelian Society was a symposium on ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ Decades after, Ayer copied the title for HIS symposium!

COOPER. D. E. Quotes Grice in The nature of language. Moves to the North of England, Durham. He discusses Grice in the context of ‘Heintz means beans’!

FLEW, A. G. N. One of Grice’s first tutees at St. John’s. Flew became influential as recorder of the ordinary-language philosophy movement, typically with Blackwell, since the movement was not serious enough for Oxford University Press to take an interest in it, as it did in its critics: witness Mundle.

GRICE, G. R. No relation! But Grice, a Welshman, was Oxford educated before moving to East Anglia. Oddly, some searches may retrieve the wrong Grice if you are doing ‘contract.’ Since both Grice were contractualists, even if H. P., not G. R., calls himself a ‘quasi-contractualist’ of sorts, who never improved on his view of the contract as a mere myth – however inspirational!

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Of a higher class than Grice, he socialized at All Souls – “Grice never did!” – Their themes overlapped – intention, certainty, uncertainty – but Hampshire lacked the precision of an ordinary-language philosopher. Indeed, it was Hampshire’s whole point of his career to separate himself from the tradition, and see himself, and try to convince the world to see him, as the Oxonian Sartre. He failed!

HARE, R. M. Grice refers twice to the phrastic/neustic distinction without honouring Hare. On the other hand, when Speranza was asked to provide early citations of ‘conversational implicature’ for the OED, the paper in Mind by Hare came to mind. Interestingly, Grice shared with those who attended his seminars on meaning at Oxford a reference to Hare’s very early 1949 Mind paper on ‘imperative sentences.’

HART, H. L. A. Anglo-Jewish, and on top of that, older than Austin, so not stritly a member of Austin’s kindergarten. Hart felt intimidated by Grice, and cared to quote him in his review of Holloway’s ‘Language and Intelligence.’ Hart’s point being that he was philosophically clever enough, as Holloway wasn’t – a mere Eng. Lit. man! – to detect something behind those dark clouds that mean rain – something which no human agent can do! Meaning is ALWAYS defeasible with human agents!

HOLDCROFT, David. Underestimated at Oxford because a non-Oxonian, Holdcroft develops a Gricean theory of speech acts, and later engages in serious discussion on the cooperative principle for some local Leeds-based publications and the Philosophical Quarterly, a Scots publication that nobody reads.

KNEALE, W. C.  Grice would hardly interact with those groups at Oxford engaged in ordinary-language philosophy other than his own, and Kneale is mainly associated with the group Grice calls ‘over-age’, which rotated around Ryle. But he credits Kneale for his insights on probability in ‘Prejudices and predilections; which become: the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.’

OVER, D. E. Oxford educated, moved to the Grits. He discusses Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction. Grice couldn’t care less or more, I never know!

PAUL, G. A. A brilliant Scots philosopher, he wouldn’t qualify in Warnock’s ‘English philosophy.’ Grice quotes from him since they were both into sense data. An amateur sailor, he died soon after one frigid expedition to the North Sea!

PEACOCKE, C. A. B. The son of a theologian, Grice dismissed him because his first degree was from the New World, Harvard! Peacocke attended seminars on Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, and discusses a population of two: A and B in Grice.

PEARS, D. F. Another philosopher with whom Grice would engage in joint seminars. These were more private, and less disseminated. They were on the philosophy of action, by which Grice and Pears meant the verbs like ‘decide.’ Pears invited Grice to join the Third-Programme Lecture on ‘metaphysics’ he was being commissioned by Macmillan to let the masses knew what the movement was about!

POTTS, T. C. A tutee of Grice – for only one term – “An eccentric fellow!” Potts ends up crediting Grice in a lecture for a symposium at Cambridge.

PRICHARD, H. A. A Welshman, and thus not part of what Warnock calls ‘English Philosophy since 1900.’ But Grice cared to see his improvement from a Stoutian approach as allowing to describe himself as a neo-Prichardian. Seeing that Grice had not one drop of Welsh blood in him may have amused Prichard!

RYLE, Gilbert. Grice felt like he was at the top of the English-speaking philosophical game, thanks to Ryle, who had done his best to turn Oxford into a colonial, post-colonial varsity, where Grice was an official part. Grice would organize colloquia with visiting colonial philosophers as sponsored by the British Council. In his theory, Grice made constant scorn of Ryle’s ‘silly’ behaviourism, and attacked his reductionist views in ‘Concept of Mind.’ Grice never cared to elaborate on views by Ryle other than in The Concept of Mind, and rightly so, too!

SAINSBURY, R. M. An aristocrat, and he shows it. He discussed, Oxford-educated as he is, the identifcatory/non-identificatory distinction made by Grice in ‘Vacuous names.’ Grice couldn’t care less, or more, I never know!

STRAWSON, P. F. Grice’s tutee before the war. It is natural to see why Strawson spent his life criticizing his tutor. It is less spontaneous to see why Grice did the same!

THOMSON, J. F. An alcoholic, joined Grice for a joint seminar in the philosophy of action. There are Griceian echoes in some of Thomson’s publications, such as that on ‘if.’ The environment was too rigid for Thomson, and his associations with Grice remained private.

URMSON, J. O. Leeds-born philosopher. Like Grice, ‘scholarship boy’. Interestingly, Urmson ended his career as Grice’s Hardie, i. e. the classics tutor at Corpus. His connections with Grice were informal. Urmson and Warnock, in that order, were the official recorders of Austin’s paraphernalia, which did not help Urmson’s career. Grice cares to quote him in ‘Meaning,’ and in later recollections. For one, he lists Urmson as one of the only members of Austin’s play group that would take Flew’s paradigm-case argument seriously.

WARNOCK, G. J. He gave joint seminars on the philosophy of perception with Grice, where the idea of conversational implicature was first brought up. The format of the Oxford dual seminar helped Grice, since he was able to counter-oppose every theory – such as those on visa – by Warnock, for his own entertainment.

WOOD, O. P. While Ryle was ‘overage’ for Grice, cherubic Wood, of the Ryle group was okay. Wood and Grice would enjoy discussing ordinary-language philosophy. Wood elaborated on the implicatures of ‘or’ in a review in Mind, and the force of ‘procedures’ or rules. And Grice credits him for discussions in the subtlest topic in the philosophy of perception in ‘Some remarks about the senses’!

WOOZLEY, A. D. – of a higher class than Grice, he socialsed with Austin at All Souls. He later gave a seminar with Grice on common sense. When an expert was willing to get some information on conversational implicature, Woozley was still the source. His Oxford years were brief, since he preferred to educate the Scots!

My first encounter with the Grice group was through a manual in the history of philosophy that dedicated a passage to Austin’s group. The progress proceeded forward. The more I got into Grice as a philosopher the less interested I was into ‘advances’ in the field by those who neither I nor Grice would count as ‘philosophers’.

At present, the topic is historic, since Grice is long gone. But in some continental philosophy centres, Grice is still ‘required reading’, which is an oxymoron, since nothing is freer than reading!

Grice left many things unsaid, and the reflections are thus open ended. There are so many typos to correct! His handwriting left a lot to be desired, and then there are the tapes which are sometimes a torture to listen to, given his cataclysms of coughings!

 

Speranza, J. L. The sceptic’s implicature – I would never have experimented on this had it not been my committing to a seminar on the topic. I discuss the scale, as Urmson calls it, ‘believe, know.’

Speranza, J. L. Emic and etic. I discuss Grice’s appeal to relevance or relation as phenomenological way to distinguish between a conversational move as an emic move, in Pike’s terms, rather than mere etic. Grice deals with this in considering the realization of allophones in ‘soot’, differently pronounced, as the case may be.

Speranza, J. L. The conversational knack. I would never had explored this if not for my commitment to a seminar. It discusses Chomsky’s idioscies on ‘cognise,’ and how Grice’s Aunt Matilda deals with them!

 

 

 

FACIONE, P. A. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Facione reminsices on intention and believing and the lack of response by Grice when approached on this issue.

HAMPSHIRE, S. N. Notes on the New Play Group. Unpublished. Hampshire discusses Grice’s non-involvement with what he calls the Old Play Group, that met at All Souls for two years before the War.

KENNY, A. J. P. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Kenny discusses his ignorance of Grice’s treatment of him in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ where Grice quotes Kenny on voliting.

SEARLE, J. R. Notes on Grice and Grace. Unpublished. Searle reminisces on H. P. Grice, with special connection to his contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.

WOOZLEY, A. D. Notes on Grice. Unpublished. Woozley reminisces his lack of reminiscences on Grice.

 

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was interested in Davidson’s response: “You don’t know until I told you!” Flew refers to Humpty Dumpty as a semantical anarchist, so Speranza thought that this deserves more of a careful treatment. The essay is full of references, all of them Oxonian, in view of the fact that, if there is one philosopher more Oxonian than Austin, that is Lewis Carroll!

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics. I would never have engaged with Habermas had it not been that he is so overrated in continental philosophy! His treatment of Grice is jocular, and I make my best to show it! As Kemmerling said, ‘wishy-washy’! The result of a seminar. Habermas had read Grice, but not in the original. Speranza was fascinated by how wrong Habermas got it from Meggle!

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy. Contemporary issues it is. I present the Hegelian critique to Kant’s critique of conversational reason, and adds the pirots for good measure. The essay examines Grice’s three steps in the justification of conversational reason. The first, ‘dull and empiricist’ is taken seriously by Speranza, after authors like B. F. Loar who never stopped being empiricist. The second, quansi-contracualist view, is considered and refined in terms of a third step tworads a critique of conversational reason, a weakly transcendental justification of the existence of the appropriate conversational move. The full essay was published by some obscure publisher!

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy. The point was to discuss an intellectual issue. I consider Grice’s optimal switch. ‘He hasn’t been to prison yet’ explicates optimally that he hasn’t been to prison yet, and implicates less optimally that he is potentially dishonest. I gave this lecture in a non-safe environment, and I used Grice’s example, “I haven’t been mugged yet!” There is a reference to Bennett’s chronology of events. While ‘Meaning’ appeared in print just one year AFTER ‘In defense of a dogma,’ this gave Bennett the wrong idea that Strawson thought it would provide an answer to the problem in ‘In defense of a dogma’ of how to come out of the vicious circle of semantic concepts, by providing an analysis, reductive, if not reductionist, of ‘the semantic’ in terms of the psychological. Alas, Bennett’s hypothesis fails when we see that Grice rightly acknowledges 1948 as the date when he delivered ‘Meaning’ to the Oxford Philosophical Society – before anything that Ryle or Austin had ever written!

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason. I dissect different uses of reason. The first, being ‘Urmson-reason’ as per Grice’s torture example in ‘Meaning. Wrigley exposed it as twenty-five answers to ‘First time in Leeds?” The essay examines the uses of ‘rational’ and ‘reasonabe’ by Grice. The abstract was published in the Proceedings of the conference. A discussion was held with Taylor. The idea was to elaborate from the earliest use of ‘reason’ by Grice – with reference to Urmson in ‘Meaning’, via Prichard, and finally the transcendental type of reason invoked by Grice in dealing with the Conversational Immanuel.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls The Grice Club Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice is a new name for Grice’s Club.

Speranza, J. L. Biro’s mistakes. I would never have considered this had I not come across Biro’s misrepresentation of Grice, notably pointed out by Suppes, with whom Biro corresponded at a later stage.

Speranza, J. L. Humpty Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. In Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Speranza, J. L. Reading Habermas reading Grice, cited in Habermas, Pragmatics.

Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason, in Contemporary Issues in Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. On the way of conversational. International Congress of Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. Brooding over conversational reason. Abstracts in Discourse and Reason.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For the Grice Club. Speranza now calls the Grice club – Grice being so clubable – ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Grice claims to have first used ‘play group’ in Austin’s presence and not in Austin’s presence. The group was later led by Grice when Austin yielded to cancer.

Speranza, J. L. This and that. For ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.’ Speranza now calls The Grice Club, ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ to reflect the relevance of what Speranza calls ‘Grice italo.’

I have said that this study would be in three parts. In the first Part, I considered Grice’s Oxford: his classical background and philosophical at that, a background that is today a thing of the past. You don’t need to know about Broad anymore, or all the historical references that Grice cared to make. In the second Part, I addressed his substantive theory of conversation as communication as presupposing the ideal of reason – a regulative idea, in Kant’s parlance, and why Grice saw that as HIS philosophical contribution to the topic of the cathedra, the philosophy of language. He was not one who was going to be bothered about given a truth-conditional modal account of what a proposition is, for example. And we have now reached Part three. The Prospect. While a thing of the past, it would not be unusual if a student or scholar, as we call them at Oxford, encounters a tutor who requires him to know something about Grice. In general, due to the proliferation of published sources, nothing published by Grice now counts in that it is ‘dated’ and scholars are required to quote from a RECENT issue of a current philosophical journal. While his stuff is open-ended, this limits his echoes. The present scholar has open to him a historical avenue. Grice once contemplated the fact that there are two unities in philosophy: a latitudinal unity, which turns the epiteth ‘He is a philosopher of language’ into an insult. In  his own portraiture, Grice was always ready to say that he cannot be a philosopher of language if he is not a philosopher simpliciter, and was insulted when one colleague would publiclty say that he practices every branch of philosophy except ethics! But then there is the other unity: the longitudinal unity. Nowadays, to take a course in the history of philosophy is already full of reverberations. They make think you are a historian of philosophy, or that you intend to be a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher! And we don’t mean just Cicero, or Boethius, or Aquinas on signifiatio, or Locke on ideas standing for things, and words standing for ideas. We mean Grice. His co-ordinates: 1913-1988, make him a ‘twentieth-century philosopher’ – and today you need to move on. Katz in The Language of Thought, confessed that he never minded being a ‘Griceian’. But today some may! The keywords have even changed. While ‘Paul Grice’ was the keyword, his own way of self-reference, in his heyday, that is, in the days of Butler, was “H. P. Grice,” never Paul. Why would a reader need to know that he was a Paul? And the only qualification that mattered was ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, St. John’s College.’ It was given to be understood that he might just as well be a University Lecturer, but who cared? So the prospects apply first to English scholars who want to explore a fascinating chapter in the history of the university of Oxford. Grice only catered for those whose mother tongue is Oxonian. He had nothing to say about continental philosophers of his day – although he would cheer the good boys like Hume and Kant, and Leibniz (‘who after all, invented the analytic-synthetic distinction’) – but that was all. So it is less likely that his figure will attract those involved in the last chapters of continental philosophy, unless he is very eccentric and wants to explore what was going on mid-century twentieth century in the dreaming spires! His target is ordinary language, which Mundle has described as the ‘type of received pronounciation Establishment English of the type spoken by anyone who has a double first at Greats,’ and Mundle is thinking Austin, not Strawson. Like Austin, Grice qualifies, but Strawson doesn’t since he had a second at P. P. E. The redbrick scholar, or the scholar who finds himself in the OTHER place (as Cantabrians call his thing by the Cam) will rest assured that there ARE ways to still make Grice relevant to him, and I hope that the present pages have done part of his work for him!

CONCEPT INDEX

Conversation

Desideratum. The desideratum of conversational candour, the desideratum of conversational informativeness

Game, conversational game, cited by Grice.

Group pour la recherche de la inference e la compréhension elementaire. While Grice reigned suprême at Oxford, some Parisians at La Sorbonne thought that they needed a dose of Griceianism, and the group was created. Note the acronym soon became popular in Europe’s oldest university too at Bologna: Gruppo pella Ricerca dell’Inferenza e la Comprenzione Elementare, or GRICE for short. The hierarchy of European universities is important since there are really only three of them: Bologna, Sorbona and Oxford. And Eco did his best to turn Grice popular at Bologna – vide his reference to Grice in Cognitive constraint on communication. In Italy, Bologna does not aspire as the same prestige as Oxford does at England for the simple reason that there’s FIRENZE and more importantly, ROME to compare. And Western civilization, in the Latin and Italian languages, started with Rome, not with Bologna, in the middle of nowehere.

implicature, conversational implicature

Intention

Maxim, conversational maxim. While for Grice, ‘principle’ if more crucial, as a rational constraint of discourse, or conversational, notably his principle of conversational helpfulness, he found it useful to identify those ‘precepts’ of rhetoric related to perspicuity or clarity, and so on. At one point he would use ‘desideratum’ and ‘desiderata’ along wth principle, until he found that Strawson was doing the same thing but calling them platitudes – the principle of information, the principle of ignorance, the principle of relevance. Then Grice decided to go the whole Kantian log, hog, and refer to the Conversational Imperative as the principle of conversational helpfulness, under which different desiderata could be identified, called CATEGORIES of maxims. Interestingly, it was that one regulating THE STRENGTH or informativess that came first, as Strawson notes in that infamous footnote in “Introduction to logical theory.” Grice elaborates on this in the Interlude to “The Causal Theory of Perception” when discussing what he would later tag a GENRALISED conversational implicature: “My wife is in the kitchen or in the bedroom”. Strength cannot be understood in terms of entailment, because while p v q is entailed by p and q, the same cannot be said of HIS concern in that symposium, which was the less strong ‘That red pillar seems red to me’ --. Grice had been especially challenged on this by the third group of ordinary-language philosohers meeting at Oxford: not around Ryle, the senior group, or around Austin – Grice’s own group – but whose ‘more disciplined ones’ which rotated around Wittgenstein. For a case was made by Wittgensteinians that ‘That pillar box seems red’ was not just TRUE if conversationally inapt, but INCORRECT, INAPPROPRIATE, and FALSE, and possibly illegal. Witters was a stranger to Oxford, and all Austin and Grice knew about him was hidden by Anscombe until she submitted his bilingual edition to Blackwell, which is the edition Grice quotes in ‘Prolegomena.’ Grice never cared to respect Witters’s German on that, seeing that Anscombe had done all the dirty work!

Meaning. Continental philosophers cannot play with ‘meaning’ the way Grice does, since ‘meaning’ derives from mens, or from a common ancestor to Cicero’s mens. There are other Anglo-Saxon ways to express this notion, notably token, which gives German zeichen, and the science of semiotics. But Grice is happy with having replaced every reference to that very latinate coinage by Peirce of the sign – SIGNUM, Italian segno – as “… means that…’ And he is happy with it. It is up to the continental philosopher to proceed further. Note for example that in French, ‘signifier,’ while abused by de Saussure, would sound pedantic. Vouloir dire is the idiom, a very vulgar one, but which relies on Griceian cncepts, that of vouloir and dire! But few philosophers following Grice in France, or indeed Italy, had indeed care to provide literal translations of Grice’s pantomimes. What’s the good of an anglophone very Oxonian philosopher, if all you are going to do with his theory is STEAL HIS VOICE!?

Move, conversational move. Used by Grice. Deborah Franck, of Amsterdam, once published a little thing in a non-philosophical journal on the conversational move, since the search for the unit of analysis was always on the air. For Grice, a conversation is constituted by at least an exchange of moves. There may be more than one move by turn. But for conversation to exist, B has to uptake what A is up to, and respond accordingly. While Grice provides a multitude of examples which are NOT conversational in this manner, and thus not ‘conversational moves’ – the king of France is not bald – there is always the possibility of expanding that utterance and turn it into a move within a conversation. In his most elaborate essays – Vacuous Names, Intention and Uncertainty, and of course, the taxonomy of rule-breaking in the mid-section of ‘Logic and Conversation’ is all about that. While his first example is conversational-move based indeed. A: I’m out of petrol. B: There’s a garage round the corner. He proceeds to give examples for which the conversational context is lacking. And not just ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ or ‘War is war’ and “Women are women’ but ‘I broke a finger’ – is it a nurse in an operational room? And so on.

Principle, the principle of conversational helpfulness, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, the principle of conversational clarity. Grice plays with ‘principle’ and first philosophy, prima philosophy. Can there be more than one principle? Grice thinks not. Hence he fights for the appeal to ONE single comversational imperative, as he calls it. Yes, there seems to be a superficial breakdown of Occam razor, since ‘conversational reason’ looks like a qualification. In what way does the principle of conversational helpfulness constitute a DIFFERENT principle from Kant’s categorical imperative principle of the golden rule? Grice played with this in various seminars, notably on conversation. He is interested, almost as an empiricist sociologist alla Talcott Parsons would, on EXPECTATIONS. It’s, in Weber’s parlance, other-oriented action, in a conversational dyad. In what way do conversationalists bring expectations about a PRINCIPLE, i. e. about something as GRAND as a principle? Grice never considered the matter at depth. But with one exception. He thought that his reliance on the IMPLICATURE forced him to have a clear view on what NON-IMPLICATURE was all about. He came with a term, DICTIVENESS, and was unsure whether the defining characteric of central signification was dictiveness or formality. He seemed to have leaned for the former. In any case, analysing DICTIVENESS leads us to analyse the distinction between what the English has as ‘say’ versus ‘imply’. A parallel area concerns ‘signify’. While Grice takes as basic what an UTTERER signifies, he seems to think that his account of what an UTTER signifies VIA implicature rellies on having a clear notion on what the UTTERER has said. And an analysis of this notion he provides in “Utterer’s meaning, sentence meaning, and word meaning.’ In the opening paragraph of that essay, which he omitted when the thing was submitted to The Philosophical Review and published in 1969, but was reprinted in full in WoW, he analyses ‘Utterer has SAID that p’ in terms of what an utterance token, which he symbolizes as ‘u’ signifies. He is trying to give room for ‘signify’ as validly applicable to utterances, not just utterer. When discoursing on these matters, he went back to informal refelctions in his earlier, 1948, Meaning: the common-sense piece of wisdom that what a word means is what a population means by it. In analysing this population, Grice was fortunate in having at his disposal by 1967, a new coinage, that of IDIO-lect. So he is all obsessed about IDIO-syncrasies of the IDIO-matic of his IDIO-tes. An idiotic utterer can very well mean that p, and within his idio-syncratic repertoire, there will be procedures. They do not have to be ESTABILSHED procedures of the type Grice was starting to see flourish under the analyses of Lewis based on solutions to problems of coordination, aimed at simplyifing what being an ‘arbitrary’ token was. When idiots become familiar with each other, these procedures in each idiot’s repertoire, may well grow to be a PRINCIPLE. The expectation that the conversationalist is following a PRINCIPLE then is not given from above, top-bottom, but always with Grice bottom-top. Appealing to a principle and a RATIONAL principle at that, and a RATIONAL principle of cooperative conversation at that does not signify that Grice is immune or ignorant of the PRE-RATIONAL forces at play. He spent seminars and discussions on akrasia, which is nothing but one of those instances where a RATIONAL PRINCIPLE seems to be broken. Grice far from dismissing akrasia  as almost impossible, took the trouble to criticize Davidson specifically on that. The akratic conversationalist will NOT follow the rational principle of discourse. His lips will be sealed. And he will be a boor. It will be up to his co-conversatioanlist to deal with what, borrowing from Pears, Grice would call MOTIVATED IRRATIONALITY! With Judith Polsky Baker, Grice elaborated on this in terms further of INTEREST and DESIRE as providing an IMPURE MOTIVE for irrational action, but also the background of action as such, since, with Kant, not all motives do have to be pure, indeed rational.

Reason, conversational reason. Grice uses ‘reason’ at various points in his development of a programme in conversational pragmatics. The key word is in the Prolegomena which expands on his interlude in ‘Causal Theory of Perception.’ He is engaged at this point on a substantial theory of language, a substantive philosophy of language, as he puts it, and more specifically, a philosophy of conversation, o a theory of conversation – not an analysis of it (Grice makes a distinction between a theory, which is intuition-based, at best, and an analysis which cannot BUT rely on preconceived intuitions. In discussing how his substantive theory of conversation will differ from those on offer, Grice uses ‘rational’ as applied to various tags, most notably ‘principle,’ sic in singular. ‘Rational principle’? Yes, ‘rational constraint’ is another pet phrase of his. Of what? Of conversation. So his view is to build a substantive philosophy of language on the idea of ‘conversation as a ‘rational’ activity. This is commonsensical enough, since Aristotle for  whom Anthropos zoon logikon. Grice goes on the qualify this, and late enough in his career, in 1987. He died in 1988. When discussing the type of rationality (don’t bite more than you can chew) he distinguishes between a RATIONAL approach simpliciter, and one of HIS kind, which sees rational CO-OPERATION as the basis of conversation. He is clear about the fact that these are two independent theses. Earlier in his career, in a more cavalier way, he would often preclude further discussion on the topic by appealing to the voice of conversational reason, as it were. And when challenged, even going as far as to say that what he viewed as the epitome of the principle of conversational reason – all very pompous, since it’s a principle of conversational helpfulness – he would go as far as to say that it is the thing ‘a decent chap does.’ He knew at the core of this was Kant, and he had the good fortune of being able to deliver the Immanuel Kant memorial lectures, where he would expand on this. There are little allusions to ‘conversational reason’ in those Lectures, since the connection was clear in his mind, and he did not want to force his audience into thinking that all he could philosophise about was language. He had come to distance himself as ‘a philosopher of language’, which in the later part of his career was, to his view, being infected by an unnecessary formalism, when he viewed that the topics that were concerning him more and more where ‘less amenable to formal treatment.’ In Aspects of Reason, however, he further some symbolism he had initiated in a lecture on ‘Credibility, Desirability, and Mode Operators.’ The idea being AEQUI-vocality of reason. Every philosophy tutor will tell you that there is, at Oxford, the realm of epistemic reason, pure reason, of the type Strawsson lectured on in his Bounds of Sense. But there was a different realm, for which Oxford had instituted the White Chiar of Moral philosophy. Now, a mos, as Cicero well knew, is just a custom. So what is it that we make that mos moral? Why is custom co conceptually intricated with morality? The answer is clear to Grice. If we defend an aequi-vocal conception of reason, there are reasons in believing (ratio credenda) and reasons in willing, and even reasons in being (rationes essendi). His ‘rationes essendi’ don’t really touch Grice’s theory of conversation, but the alleged bifurcation of a syllogism (as piece of reasoning) into alethic (the value true) and buletic (the value good) very much does. Many other philosophers had dwelt with rationality as such, notably Rescher, who had a book published every other week. For Grice, this became a necessity.

NAME INDEX – In this name index, the same question will be asked all over. In what way did this or that Oxford philosopher contribute to the progress of Grice’s programme? The cross-reference will lead us to the thematic index of concepts. That is, in order to aoar above the anecdotal point of this or that particular transaction, usually random, since Grice never planned one, the point should be made about what progress it meant to the programme in pragmatics that Grice was exercising.

Ackrill, J. L.  The epitaph of Ackrill at Oxford reads: “Aristotelian.” Grice was cremated, but his epitaph would rather read, “Kantotelian’!

Austin, J. L. Grice had a fascination for Austin, especially post mortem. Grice saw himself as having been born ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and thus never socialized with the senior Austin before the phoney war. But they met soon enough post-war, and Austin invited Grice to the play group. These meetings were ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. Mrng.’ the card read. When Austin yielded to cancer, it was Grice who took the lead, but it was not the same. He did not have Austin’s lack of charisma! And his untidy meetings at mainly Corpus were a mess, no blackboard or anything. Grice was more combative, and the idea of a shared phenomenology of ordinary-language was too much associated with Austin’s old-fashioned views on the spirt de corps to appeal to both Grice and the survivors!

Butler, cited by Grice on self-love and benevolence. This is not R. J. Butler, who edited Grice’s Some remarks about the senses. This is the reverend! Grice does not credit him, but why should he? Who else did oppose self-love to benevolence? Let the tutee do the work!

Ewing, A. C. Oxford educated Cambridge philosopher. Grice relies on Ewing’s ‘Meaninglessness’ for Mind or Grice’s seminar on Meaning. Ewing is not interested in meaning – boring! – but in lack of it, as in Pirots karulise elatically. Grice came to love those pirots. Ealy pirots karulise elatically, indeed, but only on holidays!

Flew, A. G. N. One of Grice’s earliest – or is it latest, he was never on time – tutee! He loved St. John’s and would cross the street to socialise at the Bird and Baby with Lewis and Tolkien. He made fun of Jones, who couldn’t speak English and could not understand all that fuss Grice makes about the ‘I’ and the ‘self’!

Ghersi, A. M. Ghersi knew Grice well!

Grice, H. P. Born in Harborne, in what was once Staffordshire, then Warwickshire, and today, who knows! In a compilation in the philosophy of language, by Olshewsky, Grice is credited with having been born in “Brum”! No way. Grice left Harborne early enough and was imprisoned at Clifton for all his adolescence. And then imprisoned again at Corpus. Once the B. A. was obtained, he only had to pay extra to turn that into an M. A. A term or two at Rossall as classics school master did not work, and soon enough Grice was back at Oxford: this time Merton. He had the good sense of applying for a job at St. John’s and got it! Richardson recalls: “He was the only one of us with a public-school background, so he was bound to get the job even if a referee had testified to the fact that while at Merton Grice never returned library books!” Grice lectured extensively abroad, notably Cambridge, for the Causal Theory of Perception. He didn’t have to move for the Saturday mornings, which were held at HIS college! He got a copy of Butler’s Analytical Philosophy when it was published, and he got the copy at Blackwell’s, where it was published! Grice only interacted with other English philosophers, Oxonian, since he only spoke Oxonian, with a little Greek and less Latin! His abode was provided by St. John’s and was on Woodstock road, otherwise known as the road to Banbury Cross. His collegiate links are important. He became Honorary scholar of Corpus, and honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Demi-Johns love him because he founded the cricket team for them – which rented a cottage not far from campus. He was President of the Oxford Film Society, and competed in cricket matches at county level. A chess aficionado and auction bridge, too. A musical, he played the piano, a practice he had acquired at Harborne under the guidance of his father who played the piano, and his younger brother Derek who would join with the cello. Glorious trios!

Grice, G. R. A Welsh philosopher with the most philosophical first names, Geoffrey Russell. Often confused with Grice!

Grice, K. W.  Grice married the sister of his friend Watson, another Hammondsowrth scholar, -- in history, not philosophy, and thus, not competing with Grice – at Merton. When the war was declared Grice found it his duty to provide a descendancy, and K. W. was the proud mother of K. and T.!

Hampshire, S. N. He felt he was Oxford’s answer to Sartre, all because he spent most of his days during the phoney war around Paris. Grice liked him, and they share some views on intention. Alas, Hamsphire’s sense of humour is not Grice – and Grice would in fact go on to implicate that Hampshire LACKS one!

Hare, R. M. Grice cites Hare’s early 1949 ‘Indicative sentences’ in Grice’s seminar on ‘Meaning’ – but OSTENTATIOSULY fails to credit Hare with the invention of the phrastic and the neustic. In Bibliographical Bulletin, Speranza warns: do not multiply sub-atomic particles beyond necessity! Hare does: there’s the neustic, and the phrastic, and the clistic and the tropic! Enough to give GRICE a headache!

Hart, H. L. A.

Kenny, A. J. P.  Kenny was unaware that Grice had cited him on the opening paragraph of ‘Intention and ncertainty.’ A Liverpoodlian, Irish and Catholic, he felt an outsider at Oxford, and saw Rome as his home! His ‘Practical inferences’ can be inferential rather than practical!

Kneale, W. C. cited by Grice on probability

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

 

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

 

Ogden, C. K. cited by Grice as the co-author of ‘The Meaning of Meaning: a study in the science of symbolism,’ abbreviated by Grice as “MM.” Grice would not count Ogden as a philosopher, but in fact he found “MM” useful, and at least one quotation by Pierce to Lady Welby HAS to come from “MM”. Other than that, the study in the science of symbolism, Grice could care less! The semantic triangle he ventures in ‘Meaning revisited’ is reminiscent of Ogden, though. Pears hated Ogden so much that he joined McGuinness, a Geordie, to provide such a worse version of Witters! Ogden’s collaborator in MM is a Welshman by the name of I. A. Richards. If there is a reference to Grice in Richards’s collected papers, you can blame Speranza for it!

Paul, G. A. Grice never took the play group too seriously – hence the name! (Rowe thinks Lady Ann Martin Strawson coined the phrase). But in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ does mention ‘eminent minds’ with such ‘independence of spirit’ such as Paul. A Scot, he found himself at Oxford. Almost like an old Viking, he sailed the North Sea, and died soon afterwards.

Peacocke, C. A. B. My favourite Peacocke has to be his very Oxonian contribution to Evans/McDowell at Oxford – not so much for the brilliancy, since Peacocke can bore, but for the fact that he takes seriously Grice’s rural attempts to apply ‘meaning’ to a population – of speakers, that is!

Pears, D. F.  Yes, of the Pears encyclopaedia fame. Unlike Grice, who was an athletic tall cricketer, and looked that part, Pears is generally described by the tutees who suffered him as an ‘uncharacterstic little man.’ Grice would have HATED to witness all the time Pears wasted later in his career on a philosopher whose name Grice would never pronounce – just ‘Witters,’ with a hard ‘W’! Officially, as the records of the University of Oxford show, Grice and Pears gave joint seminars on the philosophy of action: viz. deciding. And they indeed collaborated on a written piece that nobody quotes except Hamlyn, and the occasional Italian philosopher, in the ‘Metaphysics’ entry in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Being a transcript of a lecture it is difficult to check. But one gathers that the first 1/3 is Grice, followed by 1/3 Strawson and 1/3 Pears. Pears typed the whole thing, and submitted to Macmillan. When Radio Days advertised the thing, it got all things wrong: for one, they say that ‘this fascinating series’ is organized by a fellow of Christ Church, when we know they don’t exist! My favourite Pears has to be his reference to Grice in ‘Motivated irrationality’ When witnessing that arid polemic between Grice and the New-World philosopher – from Springfield, Mass. – Davidson, Pears cared to recall Grice’s answer: “Conversational implicature!? Too social to be true!” When O. E. D. felt there as a need to fill the gap on implicature, I submitted Pears’s early reference to “H. P. Grice” properly on ‘conversational implicature’ on ‘if’ implicating ‘iff’ – and it made the mark! Good for good old D. F.! His most serious work is published by Duckworth. Like Grice, Pears finds the word ‘mind’ insulting: what they do is ‘philsoophical psychology.’ Grice indeed finishes up his British Academy lecture with a nod to Pears, who years his junior, had delivered the lecture years before the older one!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

 

Wilson, John Cook. Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!

 

Prichard. Prichard was a Welshman, but Grice loved him. The fact that Urmson was engaged in a new edition for Oxford University Press of Duty and Interest and other essays helped. It was the Prichard of ‘willing that…’ which Grice admired. An author that really you need to spend hours at the Bodleian even to be familiar with! But Grice did so, and would read Prichard’s short essay on ‘Willing’ to good effect. The final passage of Grice’s Intention and Uncertainty is totally neo-Prichardian in nature, and manages to provide an analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for Grice’s scratching his head, while willing that that is what he should do!

Sainsbury, R. M. The type of English philosopher H. P. Grice loved to engage in discussion with: English to the backbone. And an aristocrat. Sainsbury discussed Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory uses of stuff in papers. He was Oxford educated, but felt Oxford too boring to spend one’s life in and moved to the neighbourhoods of Piccadilly Circus, instead!

Schiffer, S. R. Grice met Schiffer as yet another Rhodeasian. But Grice was NOT Schiffer’s thesis advisor. As he had been for Searle, Strawson became Schiffer’s thesis advisor. Schiffer would reminisce on the occasions he would meet with Grice at St. John’s with fellow American B. F. Loar and spend the mornings over sherry. Schiffer’s counter-examples – ‘too clever,’ Grice confesses, using a trope – are modeled upon Strawson’s rat-infested one. Grice was disarmed when Schiffer became the apostate in ‘Remnants of meaning’ The contribution to the Grice festschrift, P. G. R. I. C. E. is however the wrong chapter!

Searle, J. R. Grice hated him, but this was late in Grice’s career. Grice met Searle, typical, as a colonial. Searle was one of the Rhodesian, of Rhodes who disqualified Colorado, where Searle hailed from, and after a stunt at Michigan, had Searle suffer all the colonialism that Oxford had to offer! Writing his D. Phil on Grice on ‘meaning’ they become good enemies!

Speranza, J. L. See below “J. L. Speranza – La conversazione di H. P. Grice” for his list of publications and unpubications, mainly for what Speranza calls ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’ where you can collaborate too, provided you are pompous and love Grice to death!

Stout. Grice loved to quote from Stout. He refers to Stout’s collection of essays in philosophy and psychology on the opening paragraph of his British Academy lecture. The reference is to Stout’s ‘Voluntary action’ in Mind, which Stout had cared to reprint in that collection. Typical of Grice, he spends half of the lecture, improving on himself, on his earlier version ‘Intention and Disposition’ where he had followed Stout ‘all through.’ Given the fact that Hart and Hampshire (indeed Hampshire – first author – and Hart) had debased the Stoutian approach in their joint essay in ‘Mind’ on ‘Intention, Certainty and Decision,’ Grice felt it was high time to rebuff Hampshire’s and Hart’s Stoutian approach, and turns his old neo-Stoutian approach into a neo-Prichardian one!

Strawson, P. F.  The essential tutee. Grice would never have elaborated his theories had it not ben for Strawson, which is odd, since it is not that common to have THAT tutee. In fact, Strawson was shared by both Mabbott and Grice, and Grice was pleasantly surprised when he was read that bit by Mabbott in “Oxford Memories” testifying to the excellency of both tuttee Strawson and colleague Grice, “Good old Mabb, I never thought he thought so highly of me!” Mabbott belonged to the overage Ryle Group, but it is a good thing that Grice won his sympathies over Strawson! Edgington, who dedicated her life to ‘if’, was unware that Strawson had indeed published his ‘if and >’ in P. G. R. I. C. E. Strawson also co-wrote the obituary for Grice for the British Academy with Wiggins.

Thomson, J. F.  An alcoholic, but let us be reminded that Grice died of emphysema and dropsy. He collaborated with Grice in joint seminars in the philosophy of action. Thomson left Corpus Christi early in his caeer and left Oxford for good. Grice did not.

Urmson, J. O. In what way did the transaction Urmson-Grice contribute to Grice’s progress in his programme? An essential English philosopher to understand Grice. Unlike Grice, who was a Midlander, Urmson hailed from the Grit, qualified as Harrowgate. Like Grice and Warnock, and Austin, and a few others – ‘few’ indeed – of Austin’s play group, a double first at greats, and junior to Grice, which matters, since Urmson revered Grice. Grice quotes Urmson in ‘Meaning’.  And beyond

Warnock, G. J. Mary Warncok said that unlike his ruddy brother, you would hardly say that Sir Geoffrey was Irish. But Leeds-born Irishman he was. He found himself an Egllishman and the author of ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, who cares to quote H. P. Grice. Grice would hardly compartmentilise philosophy, except when it came to others. For Grice, Warnock was ‘the philosopher of perception.’ And seminars on the philosophy of perception they gave. For Warnock, this was a breath of fresh air. Part of Warnock’s burden had been as executioner of Austin – literary, not literal! – and the burden of Sense and sensibilia was more than he could bear. His responsibility with Austin’s full manoply of Philosophical Papers at least was co-divided with Urmson in responsibility. With Grice it was all fun. How CLEVER language is! Grice would tell Warnock, and Warnock made the phrase immortal. It was one of those joint seminars that Hart makes fun of in a letter to Morton White: “Grice needs a prompt, so please give one to him when he visits!” – The weekly seminars rotated, and Grice had to undig what Warnock had dug. Their concern was VISA, and Grice saw in the visa more than Warnock did, notably a justification of critical realism. Once the pressures of the joint seminars was over, Grice lost all interest in Warnock! But Warnock did not and cared to quote Grice, his senior, his admired senior, in a totally obscure piece of ‘On what is seen’ for the Aristotelian Society – ‘acknoweldgement to H. P. Grice is hereby due!’ Warnock makes a passing remark about the hierarchy of collages. After his years at Corpus as his alma mater and at Merton as Harmonsdsowrth Scholar, Grice had applied, and obtained, a fewllowhsip at St. John’s, the sublime college on St. Giles, and this would have stayed at that, but it was THIS college that Austin preferred of all the others where they met for those infamous Saturday morning. Oddly, it was not the old building, but a new room, which made Austin and his kindergarten look like an imposing board of businessman. Warnock makes another passing remark. “How clever language is!” Grice did not utter IN FRONT of Austin. Austin’s Saturday mornings, indeed, re-elaborated by Grice after Austin yielded to cancer – were NOT PUBLIC occasions. ‘Engaging with Austin on the PUBLIC scene, as Grice and Hare may testify, was an altogether FLINTIER experience!” The reference is to a trio seminar Austin and Grice and Hare gave on Eth. Nic. and the better known seminar on Categories and De Interpretatione – just Austin and Grice – that Ackrill attended, and out of which he drew so little that the next project he set for himself was to render Aristotle intelligible and STEAL HIS VOICE totally from Balcanic to Oxonian!

White, A. R. In what way did White contribute to Grice’s progress in his programme. By being part of a general scheme: a prestigious symposium at England’s most prestigious (indeed only) philosophical society, The Aristotelian, White helped to diffuse Grice’s views, especially when Warnock reprinted the whole symposium in the Oxford reader on The Philosophy of Perception, which tutors and lecturers alike would recommend to their tutees for decades! Poor A. R. White, as H. P. Grice on a different occasion, was set in the role of ‘response.’ There is a ‘Reply to Anscombe’ that Grice delivered in reply to Anscombe. The man hated the woman! But Oxford is Oxford. It’s different with Whilte. A colonial, he found himself at Cambridge under Braithwiate as Chair having to respond to Grice’s never-ending ‘The Causal Theory of Perception. The sad thing is that, other than good old G. J. Warnock, who cared to edit the full symposium for an infuential Oxford reader in the philosophy of perception – and acknowledging Grice’s ‘ingenious and resourceful’ piece, and saying by damn praise nothing of White. Yet White does a white job. He hardly touches the topic which Grice found revolutionary at the time – and he always considered that interlude on implication as THE locus classicus – but sill, it is a readable piece. Grice interacted with other Australasian philoosphers, notably D. M. Armstrong, who Grice almost failed at Oxford, and from Kiwi land, J. F. Bennett, who would often feel that he was cleverer than Grice himself. But a colonial does not have the prestige that the Old School does, and Bennett became at most, a second-rate Griceian, even if his genitorial programme in “Rationality” predates Grice’s!

Wiggins. Strawson and Wiggins were the ones commissioned to reminisce on Grice for the British Academy and they did a good job. One can feel the input by Wiggins, who was less contrived in polemic with Grice, unlike Strawson. Wiggins had dealt with Grice on Plato on negation as alterity elsewhere, and when Grice had to choose an essay around which to organize a seminar, he chose Wiggins’s Sameness and substance, which obviously influenced him in the development of what Grice called the Grice-Myro theory of relative identity (time relative identity, that is). In the hierarchy of Oxford University, Wiggins features large as the Wykeham professor of logic. Nowadays, there is an institute of symbolic logic on St. Giles Street, but them were the days when logic was taught seriously at Oxford as from a philosophical point of view, and nobody could deny that to Wiggins!

Wilson, John Cook. In what way did the ‘transaction’ Cook-Wilson/Grice help Grice’s progress in his own programme? Cited on various occasions by Grice, Statement and Inference. Grice makes a systematic use of Wilson in a volume that Wilson never wanted to publish, but his Estate did: Statement and Inference. When considering the hypotactic operator ‘if’ Grice finds that if hardly compares to the paratactical ‘and’ and ‘or’ -- /\ and \/ respectively. So in “Who killed Cock Robin?” Grice NEEDS to apply Cook Wilson. This is Grice’s SERIOUS use of Cook-Wilson. His unserious use is double. He uses Cook Wilson in the epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words, for Cook-Wilson’s reliance, not on the Truth, but on The Taken-for-Granted. The other non-serious use reates to an anecdote he saw himself suffering while visiting Strawson’s college, Magdalen, and engaging in conversation in the common room with a former tutee of Cook Wilson. “What we know we know” he used to deliver enigmatically, and the echoes lasted! Cook Wilson is idenfified with that Oxonian historians of Oxonian philosophy refer to as the Realist Movement, something that never existed, but which they felt SHOULD have existed, only to demolish Collingwood’s overemphasis on Bosanquet and Bradley. There was a time, and a tyme, when the prestige of Oxford among continental philosophers was so great, because Oxford, unlike Cambridge, who never produced ONE philosopher, could claim a HEGELIAN school – an idealists school that even C. L. Dogdgson found appealing: it was a Boojum. Grice suffered the realist school as a scholar, yet he would still have occasion to pour scorn on Bradley and his elusive view of negation, and he does in the ‘Prolegomena’ to the Studies in the Way of Words. In Cook-Wilson’s early days, it was a matter of battle, not of reminiscence!

Woozley, A. D. In dealing with each entry to the name index, the question is the same. In what way did Woozley contribute to Grice’s progress – The phrase Grice’s progress is meant ironically, as he echoes Bunjam, On various fronts. At least two. By focusing on Reid, Woozley allowed Grice to see that a response on Reid’s alleged counterexample to Locke was something an Oxonian philosopher could focus on. The choice of a joint seminar on ‘comnon sense and scepticism’ also proved relevant, and a constant strand in Grice’s thinking. He came to regard common-sense as being incorporated in ‘ordinary language’ – before ‘ordinary language philosophy’ was still a vogu. And more importantly, a strong common-sense approach Grice saw as the only way out of the Sceptic. English-born philosopher. His status is special in that, unlike Grice, he suffered Austin twice: before and after the second world war. Woozley met with Austin and other four philosophers on Tuesday evenings at All Souls. The encountered would have gone unnoticed, had it not for the fact that Berlin, the Russian outsider émigré who corresponded profusely with Grice on this and that – Grice never opened his letters, though! – thought that he was witnessing the ‘beginnings’ of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy there. The funny thing is that Grice survived the phoney war, as did Austin, and as did Woozley. There are connections pre-war between Grice and Woozley in that Woozley had this historical interest in Reid, and was editing some of Reid’s essays by the time Grice was engaged in a response to Reid’s counterexample to Locke. After the war, Grice and Woozley collaborated on a joint seminar on common sense, which both of them lacked. The point was that an ordinary-language utterance – such as ‘The Dean has a corkscrew in his pocket’ – need to be common-sensical, not NON-SENSICAL! Unlike Woozley, Grice made a sport of this, just because, Grice was more English than Woozley. An English philosopher, Grice thought, is a philosopher who teaches philosophy to fellow Englishmen. But Woozley left Oxford for good and started to educate the Scots! That was the end of their connection. Decades later, when scholars would reminisce with Woozley he would have a thing or two to say about ‘implicature,’ but all very hazy!