J. L. Speranza -- "H. P. Grice: la conversazione"

The document presents a comprehensive philosophical analysis of H. P. Grice’s theory of conversation, situating it within the broader context of Oxford philosophy and its historical development. It explores Grice’s lifelong project of developing a rationalist, intention-based account of communication and signification, emphasizing conversation as a reason-guided activity and a form of rational cooperation among interlocutors. The analysis covers Grice’s early works, his interactions with contemporaries, and his evolving conceptual framework, including his distinctions between explicit and implicit meaning, conversational moves, and the underlying theory-theory of rationality supporting conversation.

Part One: The Framework

Grice’s philosophical journey began with early works such as “Negation and Privation” and “Personal Identity,” where he grappled with concepts like the self and logical constructions, drawing from Locke and Broad. These works laid the groundwork for his later focus on conversational implicatures as a means to explicate ordinary discourse and communication [1] [2].

His Oxford education, including classical studies and logic at Merton College, shaped his analytical approach. Grice’s early academic environment was steeped in Aristotle and Plato, which influenced his later conceptualization of conversation and rationality [3] [2].

Grice’s theory of conversation is framed as a game involving two rational players (A and B) who make conversational moves guided by principles such as conversational benevolence and self-love. These moves are analyzed in terms of their explicit content (what is said) and implicit content (what is implied or meant), supported by a system of logical operators and modes (indicative, imperative, interrogative) that govern the structure and interpretation of utterances [4] [5].

He formalizes conversational exchanges using predicate calculus and introduces concepts like the “conversational dyad” to capture the interaction between speaker and listener. The principle of conversational helpfulness guides the appropriateness of moves, balancing informativeness with economy of effort [6] [7].

Part Two: The Conversations

The document details numerous conversational illustrations drawn from Grice’s publications and seminars, demonstrating how his theory applies to everyday and philosophical discourse. Examples include exchanges about personal identity, scepticism, implicature, and the use of language in social contexts [8] [9].

Notably, Grice’s interactions with colleagues such as Strawson, Austin, and others are recounted, highlighting debates over presupposition, meaning, and the nature of conversational implicatures. These dialogues reveal the development of key concepts like the cancellability of implicatures and the distinction between what is explicitly said and what is implicitly conveyed [10] [11].

The document also addresses the complexity of conversational categories—Quantitas, Qualitas, Relatio, and Modus—derived from Kantian and Aristotelian traditions, which structure the maxims governing conversation. Grice’s conversational maxims include clarity, candour, and economy, which regulate the cooperative principle underlying rational discourse [12] [13].

Part Three: The Framework Behind the Framework

Beyond the immediate theory of conversation, Grice develops a meta-theoretical “theory-theory” that situates conversation within a broader philosophical psychology. This framework encompasses intentions, rationality, categories, and ends, aiming to explain human communicative behavior as part of survival and reason-guided interaction [14] [15].

Grice introduces technical notions such as “disimplicature,” refining earlier analyses of implicature and addressing challenges posed by other philosophers like Davidson. His psycho-logical approach bridges semantic content and psychological states, emphasizing the role of judgement and volition in communication [16] [17].

The document also discusses Grice’s evolutionary perspective on communication, his concept of “pirotese” as a simplified code for rational agents (“pirots”) interacting, and the distinction between humans and other animals, such as squirrels, which lack the cooperative communicative capacities that Grice’s theory presupposes [18] [19].

Part Four: Conclusion

The concluding section reflects on Grice’s philosophical legacy and his central role in twentieth-century Oxford philosophy. It highlights the challenges he faced, including critical reception and debates with contemporaries, and underscores his contribution to understanding conversation as a rational, cooperative activity grounded in common sense and intention [20] [21].

Grice’s work is positioned as both a continuation and a reformulation of ordinary-language philosophy, enriched by his formal and informal analyses of communication, and his insistence on the importance of rationality and cooperation in conversational exchanges. His influence extends through his students and colleagues and remains vital in contemporary philosophy of language and pragmatics [22] [23].

This summary captures the document’s detailed exploration of H. P. Grice’s theory of conversation, integrating historical context, philosophical development, technical formalism, and illustrative dialogues that collectively elucidate his approach to meaning, communication, and rational interaction.

J. L. Speranza

H. P. GRICE: LA CONVERSAZIONE

CONTENTS

Conversazione

In the following notes – I am borrowing ‘note’ from Grice – vide his ‘Further notes on conversation’ – I shall attempt to develop a strand in Grice’s philosophy of signification and communication that is only presented in isolated contexts by Grice: his theory of conversation no less!

There is perhaps one telling example about the way Grice saw his own self as contributing to the longitudinal unity of philosophy – since the approach will maintain throughout these notes will be Oxonian and philosophical --. When trying to separate himself with Austin – and more distantly, ‘Vitters’ – he refers to his ‘idea of conversational implicature.’ The very fact that he qualifies this as ‘the idea’ is already telling – Lockean reminiscences! More to the point, Grice is in the middle of trying to make explicit the ‘theory’ underlying ordinary discourse, and add an exegetical remark, self-oriented. The historian of Oxford philosophy writing his own. In his own case, Grice confesses, the search for this underlying theory was something that had a bite much stronger than it had in Austin – who was notoriously anti-theory --. It was his work on the idea of the conversational implicature that Grice found his work distinguishing from that of Austin.

 

PART ONE: THE FRAMEWORK

At one point during that infamous trial, the King of Hearts advice the White Rabbit, in response to the White Rabbit’s nervous query: “Srat from the beginning – and then stop.”

I’m less sure three is a stop to Grice’s endless conversation, but there should be a beginning, or shouldn’t it?

Grice’s conversations with his Father apparently started it all. If called himself a dissident, conservative, irreverent rationalist, it was because the daily conversational routines he endured as a child:

HERBERT GRICE. Not the Trinity!

MATILDA FELTON. No, but something like it!

Gice confesses he suffered little close sentimental connection, and hardly missed him when he died while Grice was at Oxford, but Herbert Grice taught Herbert Paul Grice to be the rationalist he was. The lesson came direct from a non-conformist, Victorian-cum-Edwardian failed businessman, but fine musician, as he struggled to have reason prevail over the over-dogmatic Roman-catholic convert of his maternal aunt.

CLIFTON did not help. Grice arrived late in the career, and he was as engaged in cricket as he was in the general syllabus. His piano gave him good credit, too. But it was the Greek! The Grief, and the Laughing, as Lewis Carroll tells us in his other masterpiece.

On the final year at Clifton, Grice was offered a scholarship to Oxford. Did he have to consult his father about it?

Apparently he did – and Father said yes. What was HE going to do at Harborne anyway?

So off to Corpus he went, armed with the grief and his laughing. He wasn’t thinking philosophy then – nobody at Oxford who enrolls via scholarship or other – as Austin or Ayer had – is thinking about philosophy. As Ayer later recalled: “If I am a philosopher today, it was because I enrolled at the only programme that had the last bit of prestige at Oxford in those days. The Lit. Hum.”

Grice knew that, too, and so he excelled in further grief and laughing until the day would come – one can see how dreary those exercises were by browsing at the chapter on education in Rowe’s biography of J. L. Austin – translations from English to Latin, in metrical hexametes! –

And the day come after Mods, when Grice was introduced to philosophy – and his ‘serious study of philosophy,’ as he calls it, began. The syllabus was properly archaic, and there is no way he would discuss any LIVING philosopher. So it was mainly Aristotle – and a little less of Plato – by his classicist of a tutor Hardie – whose claim to fame, as Grice recalls were double: a masterpiece on Plato, and a useful guide to Aristotle of which Grice himself made avail when he became a tutor himself and had to Aristotelise the beasts of his own tutees, into lack of akrasia, search for friend-sufficent eudaimonia, and the rest!

The B. A. Lit. Hum. came quick, and Grice left for Rossall. At one point he thought that something like this might be his cup of tea.

GRICE: Anima animae anima animarum animis animarum

STUDENT. I don’t get the point.

His tenure at Rossall was short, and the Dreaming Spires welcome him back having now won that new scholarship – the senior scholarship at Merton – which was the Hammodswroth. Two years at Merton saw the logician in Grice grow. What is Merton without logic? What is logic without Merton. Grice was still a bit of a Bradleyan and Cook-Wilsonian then. His ‘Negation and privation,’ which he had typed while holidaying back in Harborne – the address of the home is typed at the end – testify to this. For each publication and unpublication that follow, the reader will have to keep in mind two questions. In what way did THIS particular piece help build towards Grice’s theory of conversation? The second question: Can you provide a conversational illustration.

There can be few drier pieces than ‘Negation and Privation’ that he designed for who knows. But the examples are interesting. He had been reading Gallie, who was discussing the philosophical idiocy of ‘I am hearing a noise.’ So as in much that follows is the conversational illustration that should precede the contribution of the piece to the larger theory of conversation.

FATHER. Did you do this?

SON: ‘I’ didn’t do anything. The self is an illusion.

Yes, Grice is concerned with the ‘I.’ Not because he feels like it, but because it was part of the required syllabus of dead philosophers: yes, Locke. He happened to have met Woozley who was editing Reid, which helped.

In ‘Negation and privation’ it is indeed NOT ‘I am hearing a noise’ that takes centre stage, but the antonym, as per:

A: Are you hearing a noise?

B: No.

Or, i. e. Grice is NOT hearing a noise. In fact Grice goes to provide a most curious taxonomy. Having not yet considered the implicatures behind an utterance like ‘It is raining’ or the parenthetical that one can add to it, ‘I guess’ (alla Urmson), Grice distinguishes between ‘The pillar box is not green’ and ‘I am not hearing a noise.’ The good thing, though, is that he unifies both types of utterance under one single logical form: A is B. Or more technically, A is not B. There is none of the formal operators with which he will become later engaged. No “~,” or anything. What Grice is at is the analysis of “A is not B” that does not mention “not.” He was getting familiar during the Merton tenureship with the ‘analysis’ of propositions – never ‘sentences.’ Phenomenalists – the only philoospohers who were alive at Oxford – were claiming to be providing noumenal utterances in phenomenal terms, so Grice thought the way was open. He concludes the essay by providing an analysis of the problematic “A is not B” in terms of incompatibility. He disregards the fact that ‘incompatibility’ already includes ‘non’, as Cicero would have it, in the ‘in-’ but then Shaffer was proposing p/p as the first thing to do in logic so who cared? But what sort of incompatibility is behind ‘A is not B.’ Grice’s empiricist tradition, which accompanied him his long life through – once an empiricist always an empiricist – shows off. It is the incompatibility, Grice states, of all HIS MENTAL states – no talk of ‘psychic’ – plain ‘mental’ states and acts. If Grice is sure that he is aware that none of his mental states include a reference to ‘A is B,’ he is justified in uttering ‘A is not B,’ which is merely short, in logical terms, or in terms of the logical construction of ‘A is not B’ – which does not include ‘not,’ but ‘incompatibible with my mental states.’

These were eventful years for Grice – he was free from Hardie, and free from the Logical-Lane constraints of Merton, and he was happy to accept the offer for a lectureship at St. John’s. In ‘Personal identity,’ he felt confident enough to submit it to Mind, and the thing did get publish! It was a piece that will make little history. It is not quoted in any bibliography. Well up to the year when Paul Edwards decided to edit an Encyclopaedia of Philosophy and had all different sorts of philosophers to provide entries for this or that. Under ‘Personal identity’ a reference to Grice is made. The piece was discussed in the 1950s by Quinton, which more or less respected Grice, and a new popular exposure came when one of Grice’s pupils, J. R. Perry, having written his own dissertation on the topic, felt like asking permission to Grice to publish it for The University of California Press, based at Berkeley. Conversations?

FATHER: Did you do this?

SON: ‘I’ did not do anything. The self is an illusion.

The son, unlike Grice, is careful to use the scare quotes – which Grice omits when the year before he died, declared that ‘false information is no information’ – versus the more pedantic: “So-called false ‘information’ is no information!” The son is not really right. This is Home’s position, that Grice quotes at length – The Scots cannot pronounce Home unless they spell it ‘Hume.’

Grice’s proposal is so convoluted that it hurts, and it would seem that it does not build on his theory of conversation. This theory of conversation is here referred to as THE BACKGROUND. But the explorations in Grice’s “Personal identity” do feature large in what I here call THE BAKCGROUND OF THE BACKGROUND or the frameowork of the framework, strictly. Grice dismisses not only Home, as he should – but he will discuss him again in “Hume on the vagaries of personal identity,” which he explored alongside with J. C. Haugerland – and the phrase, ‘the logical construction of…’ stuck with it. It was not Grice’s invention. He had taken the idea of ‘a logical construction of…’ from a book – some of which Grice was not returning to the library – by Broad, with some pompous title on Mind and the World. So he manages to dismiss Home, borrow (but never return) from Broad, and rebuff Gallie in the proceeding. For Gallie was saying, like the ‘Son’ in the conversation above, ‘that only the idiotic philosopher will refer to ‘I’ as a noun!”

Grice does not refer to “I” as a noun and grants with Gallie that this is a mistake. So his phrase is “Someone.” Having learned Grief and Laughing the right way, he was aware of Polyphemus’s answer to Ulysses: “Nobody did!” Aliquis, not aliquid. The conversation:

FATHER: Who did this? Did you?

SON: ‘I’ didn’t do anything. The self is an illusion.

FATHER: Well, SOME-ONE MUST have done it.

Gice finds ‘someone’ more acceptable than ‘I,’ and his final analysis is not of personal identity in abstract, about any THOUGHT or INTENTION – even though he gives the example, “I have a toothache, I am thinking of Hitler, and I shall be fighting soon!” – as the analysis of “Someone, viz. I, is HEARING a noise.” To Grice this makes perfect, if convoluted terms, in proper Lockean presuppositions. The self is an illusion, but it is a mnemonic illusion. And Reid was wrong in dismissing interlocking chains of Lockean mnemonic states, to which ‘personal identity’ reduces.

Locke’s obsession stayed for Grice for his whole life. Locke’s obsession was anthropological and ornithological. Grice’s idea of a necessity is ichtyological, rather. Locke was reporting a very unusual conversation between Prince Maurice, in Brazil, and his parrot.

MAURICE: Are you hungry?

PARROT: No.

MAURICE. I’m surprised.

Locke was arguing that ‘however ‘very intelligent, rational’ the parrot may converse like, the shape is not that of a man, so he is no man. It is in connection with ‘parrot’ and ‘man,’ that Locke, to avoid talk of ‘consciousness’ adds ‘PERSON.’ And the rest is Reidian history!

It is interesting for the historian of philosophy – and Grice was the best historian for his philosophy – to evoke the motivations behind the publications and unpublications as they scanned the decades as they did with Grice.

1930s Grice is then ‘Negation and privation’ and we have expanded on the motivation – provided a conversational illustration and summarized what the contribution might be to his framework – his theory of conversation – and the framework of his framework – his metaphysics.

The 1940s. start with an interest in ‘Personal identity,’ which we just have explored in those two respects. It continues with a piece with A. D. Woozley on ‘Common sense and scepticism’ which brings the topic of the sceptic attitude to ordinary language and life at large. Ripe with conversational illustdrations. Indeed, Grice’s piece is premonitory in that in it he incudes a bit of a rambling into what he sees as the self-contradictoin on the sceptical’s claim:

SCEPTIC: So you do have two hands, but does not not prove the external world.

MOORE. What does IT prove?

SCEPTIC. Nothing really.

MOORE. I’m not convinced. It seems you are willing me to come to believe both p and ~p, which not only would be immoral of you, but illogical of me!

This is followed by Grice’s most famous piece, “Meaning”. Without his “Meaning,” there would have been no William James Lecture. Granted, there would still have been “Causal theory of perception” – Grice’s second most famous article – considering “Logic and conversation” as part (if not parcel) of the William James, and only published by Grice as harassed by Davidson and Harman!

It is only too obvious to be true that ‘Meaning’ builds to Grice’s theory of conversation. But mind, none of the examples he gives there are part of what he later has a a ‘talk exchange.’ None is linguistic. His ‘frown’ may be an exception.

STRAWSON. And that’s what will do as we conclude our seminar on ‘Logical form’.

GRICE FROWNS

Strawson: I take it that you don’t like the idea.

Grice discusses his frowning as either natural evidence of an undesigned strain of his face muscles, or a designed ‘conversational move.’ In both cases, it does count as a conversational move. Grice is interested in clarifying the ‘logic’ – or logical grammar of such an ascription of ‘meaning.’ Or signification. For the mediaevals, it was all very easy, a frown can be a natural sign, or an arbitrary sign. But Grice wants to do without talk of ‘sign,’ even if allowing talk of ‘signification’.

The 1940s also saw Grice’s Intentions and dispositions, which is easy to date in that Grice makes an explicit reference to Ryle’s newly published ‘The Concept of Mind’ whose analysis of intention as disposition Grice dubs ‘silly.’ Ryle never read the thing, but most of Grice’s colleagues did, if not all of them agreed with Grice’s view – typical Oxford. But what WAS Grice’s view? In all his publications and unpublications this far he had been concerned with psychic – as the Italians would have it – if not psychological attitudes: “I have a tootache, I am thinking of Hitler, and I intend to fight soon” in Personal identity, predated by “It is not the case that I am hearing a noise as I utter this” in ‘Negation and Privation’ culminating with “I signify that p, if I intend my addressee to come to believe that I accept that p.” It was about time that Grice fought with the logical grammar, now, of ‘intend.’

The third person versus the first person approach was something that was starting to obsess him, and so he provides a general account of intention as based on a privileged access, incorrigible first-person perspective. When judging his own intention, Grice does not need to observe – not even from the preferred premium first row. He is on STAGE!

GRICE: I intend to raise ducks in my old age.

RYLE. That means you are disposed to it.

GRICE: It might. I wonder if the ducks will!

The publication history of Grice’s pieces may confuse the historian of philosophy. While ‘Meaning’ was cited by Hart in 1952, it only got published in 1957 – and only because Strawson submitted to the press.

The previous year, Grice and Strawson had collaborated on ‘In defence of a dogma’ whicvh naturally leads to and is indeed built on conversational practices;

SCENARIO I.

GRICE. Quine is wanting to say that the analytic-synthetic is spurious.

STRAWSON. Wait till you hear this. My neighbour’s three-year old son, have I told you this before, is an adult!

SCENARIO II.

GRICE. Quine is wanting us to believe that the analytic-syntheti distinction is spurious.

STRAWSON. Wait till you hear about this. Have I told you this before? My neighbour’s three-year old son understands Russell’s theory of types.

Grice and Strawson want to argue that in Scenario I there’s imcomprehension and conversational breakdown. In the Scenario II it’s just a bump on the road. It does build to the general theory of conversation and provides a building block to the framework’s framework too. Only on the assumption that rational beings are endowed with the capacity to distinguish things which are categorially meaningless (“My neighbour’s three-year old is an adult”) from those which are mere empirical falsehoods (“My neighbours three-year old understands Russell’s theory of types”) can we keep on surviving!

While 1957 is often identified and celebrated as the year of the forced publication (if not conception) of ‘Meaning’, that year also saw the publication of his joint piece with Strawson and Pears on “Metaphysics”. The conversational illustrations seem obvious.

MOORE: That’s once piece of nonsense you’ve just uttered.

WISDOM. INTERESTING piece of nonsesnse.

Grice, Strawson and Pears are concerned with ‘defining’ metaphysics, since their lecture opened the BBC series in the Third Programme and Pears’s volume with the proceedings. Does it build to the programme in conversational pragmatics? Yes, but more so to the framework’s framework (or theory theory) as Grice calls it. There is a distinction, within ‘metaphysics’ as understood at Oxford as ‘whatever the Waynflete professor professes on,’ between metaphysics itself – which is often indeed nonsensical, and the less fascinating branch of ONTOLOGY. So surely, that that talk about conversational moves and the players’s intentions behind them, lead to ontological discussion! It will be indeed Strawson who will succeed Ryle as the Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford. This seems to indicate that Strawson was separating his interests between the more trivial logical ones into deeper concerns. He had collaborated with Grice on a seminar entitled “Categories, Metaphysics, and Logical Form,” and the boundaries are often fuzzy. Grice thinks the fuzziness of the boundaries is indeed a good point. We will discuss that below under the topic of conversational category, in the framework.

That pretty much closed the 1950s. Typical Grice he is credited with promoting post-war Oxford before anyone else. I have discussed this elsewhere, and I am pleased that one quote from Post-war Oxford philosophy made it to the press. But the fact is that Grice NEVER circulated this 1958 piece on ‘Post-war Oxford philosophy.’ It was published for the first time in 1989, the year after Grice died. What is interesting is that while Grice usually finds drawbacks in all his previous writings, he deems this piece pretty perfect as it is, even if he allows himself to write a post-script, which he entitles, rather pretentiously, knowing that he was discussing by then the definition of philosophy as one of providing a theory-theory, ‘Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy.’ Does it build to his theory of conversational pragmatics? What about the illustrations. We may kill two birds with the same stone if we just consider the conversational illustrations to his previous joint effort, “In defence of a dogma” – an insult to Quine – and “Post-war Oxford philosophy.” In “Post-war Oxford philosophy” he states his liberalist, individualistic, almost anarchic in Flew’s and Spencer’s spirit, of his type of linguistic botanising, while allowing that the search for conceptual analysis need not be constrained to the ‘province of philosophy’ (what is mathematics, quantum theory, or projective geometry if not conceptual analysis? What is HEALTH science without conceptual analysis or concept analysis? He knew that, Austin notwithstanding, Grice could not be credited with the whole enterprise!). But more importantly, his liberal attitude is reflected in the passing remark that his analysis of say, concept E (for expression) is moved by his own problems with E – it is a personal effort. This is the passage that made it to the press. But he goes on to allow that one can engage in a piece of collaborative concept analysis. But can he? Can one sincerely cooperate, A, with B, in B’s concerns with the analysis of concept E, when A does not share such an analysis. It is exactly Quine’s point about Carnap’s inability to provide a meaning (never mind conversational) postulate to married bachelors. So the variants for the conversational illustrations for ‘In defence of a dogma’ need to be rephrased alla bootstrap. GRICE and STRAWSON are now talking about concepts. First analysis, then synthesis.

SCENARIO I.

STRAWSON. Did  I tell you that my neighbour’s three-year old is an adult?

GRICE: You now have. I never knew you knew Latin.

STRAWSON. What do you mean?

GRICE. Well, Cicero says that adultus is something that your neighbour’s three-year old can very well be!

SCENARIO II.

Strawson. Did I tell you that, difficult as I thought it was, my neighbour’s three-year old understands Russell’s theory of types?

GRICE. I suppose you helped him with the drawings.

STRAWSON. It was more of a vocalising experience. I observed that some of his babbling was supracategorial, and referred to the type that Russell calls heterological!

The 1960s, like for La nouvelle vague in France, was Grice’s decade. Not so much for the protests, which he avoided and minismed as a mere pose. The repositioning of Grice was, like most of his career, both casual and causal. Austin had yielded to cancer not long before, and Grice saw himself at the head of the ordinary-language philosophy of the type as practiced by the play group. Grice was well aware that there were at least two other groups at Oxford that claimed the cutting edge title on that: the Ryleans, which were evanescing the less English English Oxford was becoming by the panoply of foreign students from both the colonies and the New World, and whom Grice called ‘The Mystics,’ which relied heavily on the strict Wittgensteinian discipline. It would seem that if you had a double loyalty in those days – as Pears did – you better hide it in front of Grice. There were also figures that Grice did not know where to place. One case being Dummett. Michael Wrigley, a scholar at Trinity, approached Grice with a view of Grice advising him in a project around Dummett’s frehly published “Frege: The philosophy of language.’ “I never read that book,” was Grice’s curt response. “And I hope I won’t.” Wrigley thought it best to look for ANOTHER thesis advisor!

But of course, Grice’s main interactions were with the Play Group, and as he notes, it was THIS play group – rather than the more senior Ryle group or the more secretive Wittgenstein group that invited the hardest criticism, which surprised Grice. By rule, the criticism was held by those who were NOT part of the group (although, say, Gellner, had been a tutee of Austin), and those who would distance from him. A good case in point being Mundle who managed to have the FIRST edition of his ‘Critique of linguistic philosophy’ – most notably on Strawson’s anglo-linguistics – published by The Clarendon Press, and where he characterizes the practitioners of ordinary-language philosophy, types like Austin and Grice, but also Urmson and Warnock, not just as ANY philosopher at Oxford, but as those who were giving lessons on what ordinary language consisted of, them having a double first at Greats!

Early in 1961 Grice was ready to circulate his views on implicature – in the safeness of Cambidge. So he accepted the invitation to propose a theme for a symposium at The Aristotelian Society. All that Grice knew was that he had to be there in March, that the Chair would be Braithwaite, and that he’ll get a reply, but that he did not need to worry. That was the only contribution to The Aristotleian Society by Grice, which is the common practice. Since it is very rare for a philosopher to have TWO pieces in the august proceedings.

The conversational illustrations of ‘Causal Theory of Perception’ concern the pillar box that seems red to Grice.

GRICE: Red.

PRICE. Red it is?

GRICE: No. Red it SEEMS.

Grice’s only reference is to Price’s PERCEPTION, a heavy if unreadable book. Grice had made his arduous way through only one chapter of it, entitled, ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ In general, he couldn’t care less about Price was saying. All Grice cared was his response to the Wittgensteinian challenge. If Pears was a closet Wittgensteinian, Grice knew the type early on, in interacting with the Scot philosopher, and also loyal member of the Play Group, G. A. Paul, whose claim to fame is the rhetorical question posed in the annals of Mind: “Is there a problem about sense data?” Paul never answered it. Grice thought there wasn’t, and that the Wittgensteinians were making much ado about nothing. Does the machinery built to his substantive theory or project or programe – stage-divided – in conversational pramatics? It surely does. And Grice makes it clear that after a short coffee break, he will have an INTERLUDE just about that. He entitled the interlude ‘Implication.’ But of course it is not about ‘implication’ as Philonius used the word and Cicero translated (‘implicatio’). It was about conversation. Besides the SIX CONVERSATIONAL SCENARIOS for the SIX PHILOSOPHICAL problems came the non-philosophical illustrations. The PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS all allow for conversational exapansion.

PROBLEM I

WITTGENSTEIN: That’s not possible: it’s actual.

GRICE. But what is actual is possible.

This is a mere modal version, as Burton-Roberts has aptly noted, of the Square of Opposition, and Grice, and all deontic logicians with him, are right, and Wttgenstein is wrong.

PROBLEM 2

MOORE: I feel there’s something wrong with you. I actually seem to KNOW that there is something wrong with you, my dear Malcolm.

MALCOLM. Well, after immersing myself in Wittgenstein, I’m starting to think that you don’t know how to use the word ‘know.’

PROBLEM 3

HART. That wasn’t illegal?

HONORE. But it was immoral!

HART. Are we going to say it was caused?

HONORE. Should we? I’m not sure good old Cliftonians like myself or Grice will follow suit. If an illegal or immoral act is caused, then every act is caused, for that matter.

HART. But dear Tony, recall we are in the middle of submitting ‘Causation and the law’ to the press!

PROBLEM 4.

WITTGENSTEIN. That horse doesn’t look like a horse.

GRICE. But it IS a horse.

WITTGENSTEIN. Still.

Wittgenstein was finding it bad Vienesse to apply ‘look like’ in German to obvious identifications. Being the Continental that he was, he thought ‘looking like’ requires some reference to imagination, a GELSSTAT or a BAUHAUS. A spoon can look like a flower, and a knife like a branch. But one wouldn’t say that a spoon and a knife look like a spoon and a knife.

Problem 5.

WOOZLEY. The Scpetic knows it.

GRICE. You mean the sceptic believes it.

Variant II

WOOZLEY. The sceptc believes it.

GRICE. And knows it.

Variant III.

WOOZLEY. The sceptic knows it, but does not believe it!

Grice. Stuff and nonsense.

And right Grice is too, if you know something to be true, there may be a simple cancellable implicature to the effect that you do not believe it, but you surely can be more logical than that and don’t let ordinary language confuse you! Or keep you in a prison.

To these set of PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS Grice presented in “Causal Theory of Perception” and to add to the ‘red pillar box’ that is the centre of his concern – the D—or—D implicature that makes the most of one full chapter in M. D. B. Platts’s Ways of Meaning – another Griceian echo in more contemporary Oxford – Grice adds four illustrations.

CASE I

Grice (at Collections) He has beautiful handwriting.

(Silence from rest of the board of examiners)

Grice goes on: “I do not mean of course to imply that he is hopeless at philosophy.”

Grice’s gloss or rather exegetical advice is admirable: “I still could not be said to have IMPLIED that, to wit: that my tutee is hopeless at philosophy, even if, after my cancellation of the particularised conversational implicature and all, that is all that the Board of Examiners will have concluded!

CASE II

HERBERT GRICE (whistilign). ‘Tis the same the whole world over!

His mate: Tis the poor that get the blame.

HERBERT GRICE: Well she met a city fella, and she lost her honest name.

Grice is providing variants of ‘but’ in the well-known Tommy tune, ‘She was poor, but she was honest.” Grice’s variant: “She was poor, AND she was honest” makes, he says more sense. In any case, ‘but’ only adds ‘colour’ (Frege’s Farbung) and shouldn’t be taken seriously. If anything is implied, even by convention and in a non-detachable manner, let it be. There is nothing in it that touches on the validity of your reasoning as you utter the word. Strawson became fascinated with the phenomenon and went on to argue that if a conventional implicature like this attaches to ‘so’ or ‘therefore’ (as in Jill’s ‘Jack is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave’) it will also attach to ‘if’ in a non-asserted hypotactical clause – while adamant Grice kept thinking that the whole thing is merely conversational!

CASE III

Strawson. I thought you did.

GRICE. Did what?

STRAWSON. Stop eating iron.

Grice’s stock example concerns the well-known schoolboy joke (“Have you stopped beating your wife?”) which had bee discussed since the Middle Ages concerning ‘cesare’ to cease to eat iron. This is not a conventional implicature, but Grice will rephrase the alleged ‘presupposition’ – or just ‘suppositio’ in Mediaeval paralance – as a version of a conversational implicature whose calculuation depends on the tenth conversational maxim that makes his CONVERSATIONAL IMMANUEL a CONVERSATIONAL DECALOGUE: Frame whatever you have to say in the form that most likely will elicit your co-conversationalist’s potential subsequent remark.

CASE IV is the one that has all of Grice’s interest. For the four examples, he considers TESTS, which replicate his earlier tests on natural meaning versus non-natural meaning (is it factive, what is the vehicle, is a that-clause allowable?) and his later tests for the identification of an implicature as conversational rather than anything else (nonconversational, conventional): vehicle, detachability, calculability.

Case IV concerns then Grice’s then very small apartment on Woodstock road.

STRAWSON: I didn’t see Kathleen.

GRICE. Did you check the bedroom?

STRAWSON. I did.

GRICE: Did you check the kitchen.

STRAWSON. I did.

GRICE. Then don’t ask ME!

Grice is concerned with the instantiation of ‘p; therefore p v q’. “My wife is in the kitchen; therefore, my wife is in the kitchen or in the garden.” His whole point is to look for an utterance that SOUNDS under-informative in the circumstances, and in this he is replicating that infamous footnote in ‘Introduction to Logical theory’ “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couln’t put Humpty together again.” “I only meant SOME!”. While Strawson’s original example is controversial in that a quantifier is not really truth-functional and algorithmically so, Grice’s case of the disjunction is. Grice is not so much interested in the details of the case, but in his ability to identify what expectation from conversationalists we can retrieve that have them expecting the stronger conversational move, all things being equal. Grice spent the rest of the life realizing that all things are NOT equal, and implicature happens!

Grice’s decade proceeded with some mention of ‘implicature’ in his Oxford seminar. This is important since this citation pre-dates the one on file with the O. E. D. by a few years, and turns the concoction into a truly Oxonian one!

In 1962, R. J. Butler, an Oxford graduate who was now doing the redbricks in Reading, invited Grice to contribute a piece for the Blackwell volume ‘Analytical Philosophy.’ It was a breath of fresh air to contrast with Flew’s more heavily edited volumes, and those coming from the New World or from Royaumont on philosophie analytique, which were not detailed enough. Gice’s essay, “Some remarks about the senses” did not precisely change the course in the philosophy of perception – the volume itself received little attention, with half of a paragraph dedicated to Grice – but it attracted the attention of colonial Coady, who thought that Grice’s encounter with the Martians overlooked their conversational implicaturalness.

GRICE. I am SO GLAD to realise that you speak Oxonian, like me!

MARTIAN. We do – blame it on the BBC!

Grice. And I’m so GLAD that we are able to see each other face to face for the first time!

MARTIAN. I’m not sure I see you. I know I x you, and I know that I z you, but we don’t have ‘see’ in Martian.

This is only one of the many points raised by Grice in that memorable contribution. Another one was picked by Pitcher and concerns the location of pain, as opposed to the location of a smell. Grice is clearest on this the year before he died, and he was submitting material to Harvard University Press. In the course of having to justify such a THICK volume, he was justifying the pieces for himself, and organizing them in strands. The idea that the senses are five, and five only does not seem to touch on the architectonics of his project in conversational pragmatics, but it does. It is humans who are the epiteome of the talking pirot, and Homo sapiens sapiens has binocular vision, and four other senses. So what is Grice after? Is this an examination on the categories underlying ordinary language? All that, and more! The contribution touches then not only on the FRAMEWORK (the theory of conversation as background to his methodology) but on the framework of the framework – his theory theory of which his theory of conversation is a subset of his programme in philosophical psychology or psychologia rationalis. And it’s about survival.

In the 1960s, Grice found himself engaged in exploring a topic to which he’ll return in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’: to wit: CERTAINTY. Grice is discussing Descartes and wants to provide two conversational scenarios for the use of ‘certain’

THE GRICEIAN SCENARIO: “Certain” as applied to the agent.

A: Are you sure the dean’s shaggy cat shed her hair as she sat on the mat?

B: Most certain.

THE DESCARTES SCENARIO – on which Chomsky based his ‘Cartesian linguistics’

A: Are you certain that the dean’s shaggy cat has been shedding her long airs over the dean’s old ‘welcome’ mat?

B: I am not, but it is certain, though.

Grice wants to say that Descartes fails to distinguish between what Grice calls ‘subjective certainty’ which is the one that matters in conversation (“I am certain”) and which may become ‘inter-subjective’ as the conversation proceeds – and OBJECTIVE certainty – “it is certain that p” – which is at best left out of any OXONIAN conversation. This was an Oxford seminar, so the scholars knew! (When reprinting the essay the year before he died, he cared to add a footnote to the effect that when he wrote the piece, it was ‘very much in the air’ that Descartes held such opinions; but ‘Cartesian scholars’ – which Grice would rather see from a distance – now tell him at the time of writing – 1987 – that the former views were historically mistaken.

By early 1967, Grice knew he had been appointed the William James lecturer. Of the six William James lectures two of them he submitted to the press: “Utterers’s meaning and intentions,” a sequel to his 1948 “Meaning” that Strawson had submitted to “The Philosophical Review” found publication in the same venue in 1969 – two years after delivery, but that was normal practice even then. “Utterer’s meanining, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning,” the lecture that followed, saw publication in the new European (Dutch) journal edited by his colleague J. F. Staal, Foundation of Langauge – and got a handy reprint in 1971 in Searle’s influential THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, for Oxford University Press. “Logic and Conversation,” the second lecture, was eventually published, after a long cajoling, by Davidson and Harman in “LOGIC AND GRAMMAR” for Encino, California – along with the more disaminated volume 3 on speech acts targeted to grammarians in the Syntax and Semantics series published by Academic Press and edited by Cole and Morgan (a venue Grice never cited). The third lecture, “Further notes on logic and conversation” got published by Cole, this time, in the volume for Pragmatics in the same series. It seemed philosophers were no longer interested. So when Grice got to send his revision to Harvard University Press it was only the fist, fourth and sixth lecture that had not been published before: “Prolegomena,” “Indicative Conditionals,” and “Some models for implicature.”

Of course there is plenty of material for conversational illustrations here and most of the concepts do help build into his project of conversational pragmatics.

One of the most interesting samples comes from the first ‘Prolegomena.’ In it, Grice attempts a second shot at what he had done in ‘Causal Theory of Perception’ when listing the six PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS aimed to be solved – along with the specific sense-data and the D-or-D implication example of the body of the essay – using his technique. A few years had passed and Grice felt the need to warn the audience that the examples he was about to give were passe, but still of some interest. He does not provide conversational illustrations for most of them, but they can easily acquire them. The important thing to notice is the source: not just Grice himself – he quotes his own endeavour in “The Causal Theory of Perception” and not just members of the Play Group – he quotes Austin, and Strawson, and suggests he is thinking about Hare on ‘good’ – but members of an earlier Oxford generation – the opening example concerns Ryle. There is one about Hart on ‘carefully’ (Hart strictly did not belong to Austin’s play group being Austin’s senior). And figures like Witters, and Benjamin.

More importantly for the present notes, Grice contrives the framework for his theory of conversation as a REASON-GUIDED activity in the ‘Prolegomena’ – and thus relatively new to the scene, since it pre-dates the more widely read ‘Logic and Conversation.’ One finds out, for example, that the immediate MOTIVATION for Grice to turn his rationalist credentials out in the open was his growing opposition to J. R. Searle as becoming THE FIGURE who was going to provide all the answers for the relatively innovative discipline of the philosophy of language. Grice just thought Searle’s outlook was mistaken, being a replica, and a bad one at that, of all that was wrong about Austin and his obsession with ritualistic aspects of conversational exchange.

In the second lecture, “Logic and Conversation” we can see that his use of ‘conversational’ as applied to ‘maxim’ or ‘move’ or ‘implicature’ is an extended one and meant to mean ‘communicative.’ He gives examples out of a conversational context. Which surely can be adapted to a conversational milieu.

He considers the PUNCH rhyme, “Peccavi, I’ve Scince” – Surely not a conversation. He quotes a review in a musical journal on a performance of “Home, Sweet Home.” Surely not conversational. Grice’s point is etymological. ‘Conversatio’ does not mean what ‘conversation’ means – just witness the Bible. What he means is ‘communicative’ and yet prefers to stick to this new idea of tagging some implicatures as ‘conversational’ rather than nonconversational, or conventional. In his ‘Causal Theory of Perception’ indeed he does not even use ‘implicature’ – never mind ‘conversational’ but sticks with ‘implication.’ ‘Implicature’ but not ‘conversational implicature’ was used in seminars between ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ and the published lecture.

This can best be summarized in Grice’s recounting his agreement with Hampshire who suffered those rituals stoically. In one play group session were Austin had warned the members that they were going to discuss ‘pleasure,’ Austin opened the meeting by exploring what thing a speaker was doing with words when uttering ‘I have the pleasure of…’ Hamsphire commented to Grice aftwards over a beer at the Lamb and Flag: “You might just as well approach the topic of faith by providing the implicatures of the way women close their French letters: “Yours faithfully!”

The second ‘Logic and Conversation’ lecture perhaps offers the most taxonomic Grice can get, and his examples are, as Leech has noted, mainly instantiations that prove that Grice’s project in conversational pragmatics is a rehash of old rhetorics – conversational rhetoric, Leech calls it for courtesy. Meiosis, litotes, metaphor, and so on. Each figure is explained in terms of conversational category. Dyads abound. Examples

A: I’ve run out of fuel (used earlier by Grice to mean metaphorically: I have nothing else to say)

B: There’s a garage round the corner.

Implicature: “… which may be open with petrol to sell.

A: Smith doesn’t seem to be having a girlfriend these days

B: He’s been paying a lot of visits to Paris recently.

(Perhaps he is too busy for one?)

A: And where does He live anyway?

B: Somewhere between Rapallo and La Spezia.

(“not sure where”)

A: Smith is meeting a woman this evening.

B: He’s meeting her own spouse. It’s their anniversary.

B: Who said it wasn’t?

Or a flout to relation

A: Mrs Smith is a windbag.

B: The weather has been delightful for this time of the year.

Grice specifies that of the FOUR conversational categories, that of MODVS applies to the WAY what is said has been said – or more strictly: the way what is explicitly conveyed has been explicitly conveyed – since ‘gestures’ played a role in Grice’s conversation as early as his 1948 – where he elaborates at large on his own frowning. The other THREE categories relate to the CONTENT. So, in an extended form, we have to allow that indeed B is talking about the weather. The content of the remark if how nice the weather has been. The content does not quite link with Mrs. Smith’s being a windbag, and it is this breach that triggers the implicature that a gaffe has been committed.

The fourth lecture, “Further notes on logic and conversation” is important in numerous respects. A special one being the profussion of conversational illustrations, and the spontaneity of it all. It starts by Grice sharing with his audience some Q and A interaction that had taken place after the previous lecture (the previous week) on ‘Logic and Conversation’. The interesting thing about this excursus is that, for one, Grice does not credit the source. The second interesting thing is that it is NOT philosophical – in the way that one would think Grice’s theory of conversation is a methodological manoeuvre, as it is, to dissolve philoosphoical problems. The example intrigued Grice because it was precisely intended to his theory of conversation SIMPLICITER and not just as a method of solving philosophical problems. It concerns a blackout in London.

A: Did you see Monty Python yesterday?

B: I was in London!

Grice’s point being that in his conversational move, B implicates that he hasn’t seen the programme, because he was at London, and everyone knows that London suffered the GREATEST blackout on that night. Grice considers the variants presented by his interlocutor that turned B’s conversational move into a roundabout ticket that clearly violates THE PRINCIPLE OF ECONOMY OF RATIONAL EFFORT, or P. E. R. E. ,as he abbreviates it.

A: Did you watch Monty Python yesterday?

B: There was a blackout.

This is a more explicit response and therefore sillier.

The fifth lecture, “Utterer’s meaning and intentions” is a sequel to “Meaning.” Again, ‘conversation’ is used loosely, if at all. As in the earlier ‘Meaning,’ to which this is a sequel, it is hard to find a ‘converational’ example – even ‘linguistic’ or ‘verbal’ proper – his emphasis is on communication as such. And this poses a little interesting problem to the Griceian analyst. When in “Logic and Conversation” he provides the example:

A: How is C getting on in his new job at the bank.

B: Oh, quite well, I think. He likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet.

The point is to elucidate the remark with which we opened these notes about Austin neglecting a distinction between utterer and expression, and explicitly conveying and implicitly conveying. In terms of the ‘that’ clause two claims can be made here – which is Grice’s point: That B has EXPLICILTY CONVEYED (‘said,’ even) that C has not been to prison yet. What he has suggested, meant, indicated, implied, hinted, insinuated – using ‘implicated’ as dummy to spare Grice a choice) is something else. Grice does not care to specify what this something else is. That is not the point of the example. It can be that his colleagues are treacherous, or that he is C is potentially dishonest.

In his “Some forms of indirect communication” Holdcroft – before Leech – has it all right. Grice is into the ‘rhetoric’ by which the old philosophers divided all that his scholar needed to know because he came to see him: grammatica/dialectica/rhetorica. For what is the ‘damn by faint prasise’ if not Grice’s ‘Beautiful handwriting’ example? (Intersitngly, in Logic and Conversation, Grice was so fed up with having to provide a conversational dyad just to follow his advice to his scholars in the earlier ‘The theory of context’ that he allows the ‘Beautiful handwriting’ to become a more formal letter of recommendation – where the conversation is addressed to ‘whom it may concern’ – none in Grice’s acquaintance.

In the lecture that follows, “Further notes on logic and conversation” Grice proceeds to discuss such rhetorical devices – notably IRONY – but by adding a discussion on TRUTH, Grice is proving the relevance of the “Prolegomena.” The earliest “Prolegomena” – the opening lecture, indeed – he echoed the essay he himself cites there his own “Causal Theory of Perception” where he had provided a LIST OF SIX PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS (e. g. ‘What is actual is not possible’) amenable for the implicature treatment – in terms of what Winch calls the ‘point’ not the nature of truth – he is proposing.

By taking up a special section on ‘TRUTH’ in “Further notes in logic and conversation” he is nodding at that list of PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS amenable to be treated with the aid of his theory of conversation. Grice had indeed referred to Strawson’s own treatment of ‘Truth’ in that infamous Bristol colloquium with Austin – vide Warnock, “Bristol revisited” – Typically, in “Prolegomena,’ as he had done in “Causal Theory of Perception” it was hardly Grice’s point to put himself to task in solving each problem. He felt confident enough by just, in ‘Prolegomena’ – the suspect philosopher who HAD committed the mistake (as Malcolm explicitly does as cited by Grice in ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’) and adding himself as ‘suspect’ in “The Causal Theory of Perception”. He had been very explicit about who Grice was thinking: Ryle in “The Concept of Mind,” Austin in “A plea for excuses” as reprinted by Urmson and Warnock in “Philosophical Papers,” Strawson in Introduction to Logical Theory”, Strawson in Truth, Hart in conversation on ‘carefully’ –cf. Grice’s seminar on ‘Trying’ --, Benjamin (the only colonial Grice quotes) in “Remembering – an echo of Grice’s interest in Broad in “Personal identity”), Wittgenstein on ‘looking like’ in Philosophical Investgations – all the layers of the big cake to be topped by a disrespectful hasty treatment by Grice of the aberration that Searle had offered himself as a Briton in his “Aberrations and Mofifications” (mis-expoiting Austin’s ‘no modiication with aberration’ cri de battle!

When dealing with ‘Truth’ in ‘Further notes on logic and conversation” it is the strategy followed by Grice that he is interested in deploying. It is not that all of a sudden he has grown an inborn interest for the deployment of a Tarski-type theory of correspondence for truth to supersede Strawson’s Ramsey-type redundancy theory. Grice is merely pointing out that with the aid of his theory of conversation, what Strawson has identified as what would be a ‘sense’ or ‘use’ – not ‘meaning’ – of ‘true’ can easily be explained away by sticking to an underdogma and trashing the colloquial observation as a ‘conversational’ ‘shade’ of meaning which should count as nothing more than that!

When he uses one of those communicative examples in ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ the reference is almost Sraffa. Sraffa, the Italo-hebrew philosopher who got on pretty well with Wittgenstein famously elicited from Witters a change of theory:

WITTGENSTEIN. And each proposition has a logical form.

SRAFFA: What is the logical form of THIS? [gesture].

Grice took Sraffa’s gesture seriously. His ‘utterance’ is meant to include a gesture – indeed the lecture following ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ builds into the system of communication devices from a handwave meaning ‘I know the route.’ The example in the earlier ‘Uttere’s meaning and intentions’ can be given a conversational illustration, where ‘conversation’ is thus understood vaguely to mean ‘expressive’ or ‘communicative’

A: Are we playing squash tonight?

B displays bandaged leg.

Grice elaborates on this. His concern is with what B has suggested, hinted, insinuated, meant, indicated – not as opposed to what he has said, since he hasn’t said anything. As opposed then to what he is EXPLICITLY conveying, to wit: that his leg is bandaged. Grice is reluctant to count this as a case of B having explicitly conveyed VIA COMMUNICATION that his leg is bandaged. He seems to want to go straight to the ‘implicature,’ i. e. a negative answer to the posed question.

One would think Grice was ready to drop many names in ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ but he fails to quote from Ziff (on purpose). He does rely on URMSON. Conversational illustration of the bribery

A: Are you bribing me?

B: No.

This is in the opening section regarding the NECESSITY in the analysis of ‘communication’ provided in ‘Meaning.’ The remaining philsoophers he quotes are all Oxonian, but relate to the SUFFICIENCY of the analysis, which Grice found a piece of cake to deal with. They all start with the example by his tutee Strawson in “Intention and convention in speech acts”

A: Are you saying the house is rat-infested?

B: By the look of it.

The example Grice next quotes, by Stampe, involves a ‘gesture’ – at a game of poker, not bridge – so the ‘conversation,’ while not needed to be taken ‘metaphorically’ is best specific in terms of the form of ascription

VOLAJUDBVOLA(I have a good hand)

A: (gesture displaying a good hand)

B: (gesture allowing: Thank you I get your point).

Grice wants to disqualify this as a case of ‘communication.’

Schiffer was finishing his D. Phil – like Searle, under Strawson – and sings ‘Tipperary’.

A: Please stop: your rendition of ‘Tipperary’ is just too much to bear

B: “But my heart lays there!”

Grice again disqualifies this as a case of ‘communication.’

Grice goes on then to discuss what he calls one of the most absurd alleged counterexamples to ‘my account of communciation’ ever proposed. And Searle had explored it in his early D. Phil dissertation too:

ITALIAN: [in Italian] STOP! Please identify yourself

AMERICAN SOLDIER: Kennst du das land wo die Kitronene bluen.

Grice feels offended by the example which so obviously DOES not constitute a ‘conversation’ but feels inspired to provide two conversational illustrations that DO, and like Searle’s (if we are going to play his game) involve a communication system which is foreign enough to both utterer and addressee.

The first is topical. After British involvement in the Canal of Suez, Grice sees himself as a sailor being insulted by an Arabian prostitute

PROSTITUTE (in arabic): You pig of an Englishman.

SAILOR follows the lead to the brothel.

Grice wants to allow that a ‘converation’ has taken place. The sailor has MISTAKENLY taken an insult (‘You pig of an Englishman’) for an injury (‘Come have sex with me’).

The second example Grice provides involves ontogenesis of conversation, and has Grice as a friendly companion at tea time with a little girl who Grice knows is actively engaged in some intense French tutorials by her French nanny.

GRICE (in French): The Vichy republic was bound to fall

LITTLE GIRL: Thank you.

In Grice’s paraphrase: in the first move, the conversationalist utters, in French, an utterance, with the accompanying gesture of allowing the little girl to help herself with a scone. The girl proceeds, since she takes Grice’s conversational move as a SIGN by the vehicle of which Grice is CONVEYING that he is offering the little help permission to help herself with s scone. The girl proceeds, and aptly thanks Grice for that.

 

In the same 1960s. decade Grice was able to explore Marmaduke Bloggs in “Vacuous Names.” This was commissioned by Davidson and Hintikka, for a festschrift for Quine. (Grice will contribute to antoerh festschrift, for Davidson – in both he got apt responses. When he got his own festcrhfit, he aptly excused from providing replies, as the etiquette went, for reasons of health.

But the Marmaduke Bloggs are one type of example

A: I’m so excited we will be meeting the climber of Mt. Everest on hands and knees.

B: He will not be attending, I’ll tell you.

A: Why?

B: He doesn’t exist.

The second group involve ‘descriptions’ and involve cocktail parties where BILL is present. Bill is the host of the party’s GARDENER, dressed as a butler.

A: Smith’s butler got our coats and coats mixed up.

B: It’s not his butler; it’s his GARDENER dressed as one.

The topic concerns Strawson’s obsessions with IDENTIFYING as being the criterion for successful reference. The conversation is a variant of another one. At a funeral.

A: Well, Smith’s butler, whoever he is, will be looking for a new job.

B: Did you know he never had one – apparently he dressed his gardener as a butler for specific occasions!

And so on.

The 1970s was not exactly Grice’s decade but he was prolific in it.

In 1971 in ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ he presents Grice presents  his case for Prichard, having abandoned the more passee Stout for good. The conversational illustrations are numerous.

A I am so glad you shal be attending the concert on Tuesday.

B. will I?

A. That’s what you told me you intended to do.

B. Yes, that IS what I intend to do. But the Police is summoning me on Wednesday night, so I might be in jail by Thursday.

Grice’s point is that B is ‘misusing’ “intention” seeing that intention  can be uncertain, but not THAT uncertain.

A: Why are you complaining?

B. I want to scratch my head. Indeed, I intend to scratch my head, and I will THAT I will scratch my head!

During this time he was exploring the notion of DISIMPLICATURE for cases like “Bloggs intends to climb Mt. Everest on hands and knees – IF HE CAN” “You are the cream in my coffee, if I can utter a falsehood” and so on.

All the notions around these conversational illustrations help build his project in conversational pragmatics, and some of them belong indeed to the framework’s framework, that is the theory theory behind the theory of conversation.

In 1975 he delivered “Method in philosophical psychology” that got properly published the same year in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association. A long lecture, it mainly concerns theory theory: the pirots as talking or willing to talk pirotese. The conversational illustrations have to be built around these more theoretical notions. He deals with topics like akrasia, incorrigibility, rationality, and freedom, and indeed, the conception of rationality. When he delivered The conception of value, Grice is clear what he means by this Humean twist of a phrase: it’s not the CONCEPT of value – but its conception. In a similar fashion, “Method in philosophical psychology” provides his CONCEPTION of REASON – more so that he does so in the specific lectures on the topic delivered at Stanford as the Immanuel Kant lectures, and later reduplicated as the John Locke lectures at Oxford.

A few years before the “Method in philoosphoical psychology” he had delivered a conference on ‘Probability, desirability, and mood operators’ which is conversational in nature, as it expands on the FORCE of the conversational move as being JUDICATIVE and thus concerned with CREDIBILITY or VOLITIVE and thus concerned with DESIRABILITY. There should be a conceptual way to link each of these two directions of fit with some operator in the utterance or conversational move that marks it at such.

A Can I go to the bathroom?

B: You can but you may not.

Credibility concerns the ‘can’ – desirability concerns the ‘may.’

Early in the 1970s he had specifically approached his attempt to dissolve Strawson’s claim to fame – his presupposition – as a mere fantasy of a conversational implicature.

A The Loyalty Examiner won’t be examining you at any rate

B I’m so relieved.

He doesn’t  exist. Grice spends some time with different conversational illlustrations. In ALL his cases, his point prevails. The AFFIRMATIVE version of the conversational move indeed ENTAILS the existence of the subject (as in ‘the cat’ in ‘the cat is on the mat’ – a substantial type). The negative version merely IMPLICATES it. He relies on the representation of this existential import by improving on his earlier complex numerical subscript in ‘Vacuous Names’ and uses ‘square brackets instead. In the reformulated versions, the existential import has disappeared, which worries Grice not: what the eye no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for, as he puts it.

The 1980s was an interesting decade for Grice, not just because Christ claimed him. He gave the Paul Carus lectures on The Conception of Value – a full set of three – all quite distinct in character, and each prone to their own conversational illustrations and provision of concepts for both his theory of conversation (the frameowork) and his theory theory (the framework of the framework). The first is concerned with Mackie’s pamphlet citing Hare on against the objectivity of values – a topic that as far as Grice’s alma mater of Corpus Christi goes, goes back to Hartmann’s first discussion of axiology and the birth of emotivism in the work of Barnes, and Duncan-Jones both of whom Grice knew personally. The second is concerned with Bosanquet’s influential ‘Relative hypothetical’ which she included in her own MORAL THEORIES for Oxford University Press. And the third is a very relevant for theory theory exploration of what makes a person’s ends – as he engages in conversation – something that is NOT mechanisistically replaceable.

This was the time VALUE was featuiring large, as his contribution to a symposium organized by British grammarians at Sussex under Smith. When Grice started talking about Plato, Pareto optimality and the myth of the phylogenesis, the grammarians felt justifiably diminished no end! There are many conversational illustrations and this ‘Meaning revisited’ brings many conceptual tools for his framework of the theory of conversation which is becoming closer and closer to the kernel of his theory of theory which was his enduring philosophical legacy.

He found time to rebut Davidson on akrasia and Davidson’s generally automatic account of agency in a joint paper with his fomer student J. Polsky Baker, ‘Davidson on weakness of the will.’ He had discussed Davidson before in “Davidson on intending’ insulting him for daring to say that intention merely IMPLICATES belief, when it entails him. This amused Pears.

If the causal and the casual go hand in hand this is most illustrated by the fact that he was tortured to provide a response to Anscombe on this and that!

The 1980s saw him providing one of the most entertaining memoirs a philosopher – an English one, and Oxford educated at that – has ever supplied: “Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice” which was justly praised by Bennett for the pages of the popular Times Literary Review.

And he managed to complete a very thick version for Studies in the Way of Words knowing that Harvard University Press would pay for it. It came out just after his death – but it’s not posthumous.

In between Loar managed to send for publication in 1988 – the year of Grice’s death ‘Aristotle on the multiplicity of being’ for the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (published by the Southern California University) with which Grice was associated via tehe American Philosophical Associattion. Two years earlier he himself had submitted “Actions and events” to the venue, not so much because he wanted to see his name in print, but because he was growing increasingly tired and fastidious about the idolatry that Davidson was starting to receive when it was not credited! All these publications allow for conversational illutrations, concepts in the framework of the theory of conversation and bootstrapping to theory theory.

In Retrospective epilogue, a bit out of the blue Grice refers to ‘conversational remedial action’ – which he lists as a phenomnenon to consider. And indeed in ‘Actions and Events’ he makes the effort to LIST a number of ‘anaphotical’ misuses which are common in ordinary language but LOGICALLY inconsistent. (Grice’s obsession was this idea that the analytic-synthetic distinction will provide him with a tool to distinguish those cases). Each of the ‘anaphoric’ misfires he quotes allows for a conversational illustration in the light of what he refers to as ‘remedial action’. What is ‘remedial action’. Conversationalist A makes a move M1 – or a couple of moves M1 and M2 within his turn. He has occasion to remedy it in the SAME turn – “It is raining, but I don’t believe it” – or let his co-conversationalist ask for remedial action – “Raining and you don’t believe it? I don’t get it” – or let his co-conversatioanlist provide the remedial action himself: “I won’t play your perverse Moorean games.”

The unpublications always surpassed his publications, but they rest assured they have made the mark!

Grice goes on to explore the reason behind this in more condescending notes. It was behind the idea a distinction: the way he formulates the distinction is complex. But in a way it unifies his vast output in the theory (or analysis) of signification along with his corresponding vast output in the theory of conversation. The idea rests on distinguishing between a human agent A and his expression – call it E --. The distinction Grice is making is one ‘all too often neglecgted by Austin’ (never mind it being ‘seemingly ignored’ by Witters. It is a distinction also between two sides of the conversational coin. His way of describing these two sides underwent some modification, but the kernel of it is that there is one side which refers to the DICTIVENESS, or the explicit conveyance. At this point, he is allowing that this may apply to either the human agent A or his expression E. More importantly, his focus is here on the OTHER side: the IMPLICITNESS. Provided we are considering that the Expression E is meaningful – or significant – that entails that E is being the VEHICLE by which the human agent A SIGNIFIES – let us say, that p. This other side then adds a q – his model is inferential. Q is a consequence of P. And the distinction amounts then to this idea that a human agent A may, by uttering E qua move of a conversational game, be signifying TWO THINGS: explicitly, that p; implicitly, that q.

AUSTIN and GRICE would hardly involve themselves in substantive questions in the philosophy of language at Oxford. There were various reasons for this. Grice’s ‘Meaning’ had circulated since 1948 and eventually saw the print in 1957, yet another reason why Austin would discourage discussion! So let us imagine the conversation that may have occurred should Grice presented Austin with this dichotomy he holds Grice is ‘all too often ignoring’:

GRICE. What I mean.

AUSTIN. What do you mean?

GRICE. I mean, that’s not what my EXPRESSION mean. My ‘if’ is still ‘Philonian.’

AUSTIN. I don’t get your point.

GRICE. It is one thing to specify what I mean or signify or imply by making the conversational move that I make, and quite another to go on and apply these verbal locutions to the expression itself. I would even argue that an ‘expression’ does not ‘signify’ or ‘imply’ per se – it is primarily persons, like you and me, that do!

AUSTIN. I see your point.

A little further excursus about the passage where Grice expresses that difference of opinion with Austin is relevant. It is part of a large draft written by Grice, which he authored as “H. P. Grice” and entitled, “Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.” It comes from a time when Grice is reminiscing on his days with Austin. By ‘days with Austin’ Grice was clear what it was all about. Austin is indeed credited with being the founder of so-called (as Grice self-pompously put it) the Founder of the Oxford School of Ordinary-Language Philosophy. The claim has been challenged, and Grice s willing to accept the challenge. In Post-War Oxford, there were at least TWO other movements led by figures who had the same right to count as founders. The first one Grice mentions is RYLE, who had appointed himself, only post-War (pre-war Ryle is a different animal) as leader in the field – and his group consisted of what Grice called the over-age: Mabbott, Kneale, and a few juniors like Owen, and O. P. Wood (with whom Grice interacted with higher frequency). And then there’s ‘Vitters’ himself. Not so much for himself, who was gone, but by the fact that his literary executor had submitted his Philosophiscche Untersuchungen to be published bilingually by Blackwell.

More importantly, Grice, who knew Berlin well – they both shared the alma mater of Corpus Christi, and naturally, the tutelage of Hardie – (Berling being two years Grice’s senior) and was aware of this rather abrupt claim by Berlin that ordinary-language philosophy had originated PRE-War. The sad thing, as Grice notes, is for the very fact that he (Grice, not Berlin) had been born on the wrong side of the tracks, entailed that he never socialized with Austin pre-war, by which Berlin is referring specifically to the Tuesday evening meetings of what Hamphsire calls the ‘old play group.’

In retrospect, as Grice also mentions in the same ‘Prejudices and predilections,’ Grice knew that he had done his best to keep the ‘new’ play group thriving. When Austin yielded to cancer in his fifties, Searle informs us that Grice was desolate and grieved the man for a year or two. But soon enough he was, indeed the next Saturday, Grice was appointing himself as the new leader of the new-new play group. They would meet mainly at Corpus – but the point was more vague. The new play group campaign by Austin was motivated by the fact that he wanted to provide an insitituional setting and milieu to this generation of philosophers who would be willing to follow him – ‘If they don’t follow me, WHO would they follow?’. In retrospect, Grice confessed that the meetings were social than anything else. Even Warnock commented that, for all Austin’s praise for linguistic botanising and the dictionary, he seldom carried one. The anecdotes Grice retells of the minutes of the new play group are conversational and anecdotal in kind, with Nowell-Smith usually playing the straight man to Austin who is then in a position to supply a master class in ordinary language performance.

By the time Grice found himself the leader of the new new play group, the philosopohers had aged, and had already some bit of publication track behind him, and they had less of the time to engage in this type of ‘para-philosophy.’ One requirement for Austin’s new play group is that every member – ‘whose class has no other class,’ as Grice joked – would be a whole-time (as Warnock’s old fashioned prose has it) tutorial fellows – in philosophy, need I say? By the time Grice inherited the post, some of the members have evolved into professorships, and so on.

But the methodological aspect of the conversation between Austin and Grice on what a conversationalist means by making the conversational move that he is making, and ANYTHING ELSE remains significant, and what Grice saw as HIS OWN contribution to the longitudinal unity of Oxford philosophy, as the twentieth-century experienced it.

THE CONVERSATIONAL GAME.

Conversation as a game.

Not just a metaphor.

The phrases ‘conversational move,’ ‘conversational game,’ ‘the rules of the conversational game,’ and so on – appear late in Grice’s career, usually in precis of his theory. It is never addressed as a methodological or substantive point as such in the philosophy of language. It is always SOMETHING OTHER than conversation (never mind as a game) that Grice has in mind. This is important, because he would not be bothered with providing a substantive theory of conversation along those lines – it was not his motivation. His motivation was the approach to traditional philosophical problems – notably, as he notes, first in the philosophy of perception. If the solution to those problems INVOLVED indirectly an indication as to how conversation proceeds, then he may feel the need to expand on this in paragraph or two. So what we are doing is isolating those side remarks by Grice, always aimed at A PROBLEM OTHER than conversation. And why would we care?

The justification of our move concerns not just the LONGITUDINAL UNITY of philosophy – how Grice saw himself vis-à-vis not just Austin, but Kantotle – but its LATITUDINAL UNITY of philosophy. It was clear to Grice that the same parameters that guided him in discussions as arid as metaphysical eschatology or axiology would have a parallel in what he called ‘psychologia rationalis’ a branch of which is the theory of communication – an offshoot of his theory of expression – how pirots express.

A point should be made about a distinction Grice makes that is usually underestimated. Grice relies on intuitions, his own, and the best way those intuitions get out there for critical examination is the provision of an ANALYSIS, not a theory.

When J. M. Rowntree challenged Grice with reductionism, that was precisely Grice’s point in his reply. He is not into THEORY construction when it comes to his intuitions about ‘signification’ and communication. Rather, he is giving shape to his own intuitions. And the result is an analysis, which, yes, may be deemed ‘reductive’ if not ‘reductionist.’ So those who embrace the phrase ‘theory of communication’ or ‘theory of conversation’ should take that caveat into account. It is a theory, but a folksy, informal, caeteris paribus one. And it is meant as a TOOL to DIRECT to the ‘traditional’ philosophical problems – with the solution o dissolution of which he would be professionally involved as a tutorial fellow at St. John’s and university lecturer for Oxford at large. Professionally involved does not necessarily refer to those students under his supervision, but those under his examination. As a member of the board of examiners, Grice was in close contact with the rest of the faculty: they were looking for a unified field where the same problems would be posed, and while divergent solutions would be accepted, it was up to the examinee to be able to REASON his choice of a solution out.

It may seem, and must have seemed on occasion ridiculous to Grice to be lecturing on the etiquette of conversation to grown-up philosophers.

An Oxonian tutor considers his tutee a grown-up philosopher.

His brain is formed.

Grice’s examples involving children are another piece of cake. I leave the china my daughter broke. Can she catch the implicature? Grice doubts it.

In the occasions where he lectured on conversation at Oxford in seminar format, he knew he was dealing more or less with grown-ups (Boris Johnson was never his tutee). AND THERE IS A REASON for this.

His theory is commonsense. This has a double side to Grice. His earliest publications involve indeed a defence of common sense over the challenge of scepticism. (His joint seminar with A. D. Woozley, who, as it happened, had socialized with Austin in the old play group that met Tuesday evenings at All Souls). But a most important link is provided by philsophers like J. F. Bennett, who have defended the correctness of Grice’s sophisticated views on m-intentions and defeasibility aspects of generalized implicature as mere offshoots of what is ALWAYS a common-sense theory, or theory based on common-sense. We may lay the blame for this on Oxford’s revolt against Bradley and his inaccuracies when it came to providing an exegesis of Hegel: nothing far from common sense than that. In contract, the philosophers of Grice’s generation – from Austin up to Grice – Hamsphire is another beast – were ‘realists’ of the Cook-Wilson school, and common sense was the weapon they shielded.

Unlike Austin, who has to rely on Scots law and the idea of an operational procedure, which is performatory in nature, with the phatic before the rheme, there is none of such nonsense in Grice. All he says about conversation makes sense because his intended audience can very well recongnise that it is a common-sense idea that springs from ordinary-language and how ordinary-language deals with conversation.

This is not Wizeman on ELIZA, or Minsky and his frames, and goals, that captivated Thomason and other New-World pragmaticisits.

This is good old Old World in the dreaming spires. It is the type of thing that conversation was meant to be at Rome, as they copied the Athenian dialectic that seduced the circle of the Scipioni, and the type of dialectica that thirved at Europe’s first university.

The interesting thing is that good philosophers have ALWAYS recognized that. Grice’s theory is based on commonplaces that belong to common sense. Not just about conversation, but about meaning as a class of intending. What can be less intuitive than that? J. F. Bennett, who as a New-Zealander never got to converse in Maori, knew this well enough. As acolonial, like Armstrong, who was another Australasian to come within Grice’s circle, he knew that there was this ‘colonial’ uptake projected on them. Armstrong makes it al the more vivid. He recalls one of those pre-patterned conversations between Grice and Strawon in their weekly speaker-rotated seminars on ‘meanning, logical form, and categories. As it happened another Australasian was part of the game. What is going on? No idea, Armstrong said. Having just witenessing the retreat by O. P. Wood who had challenged Grice at one of the rare points where Grice even allowed such a challenge, Armstrong oracled: “I don’t know what game they are playing but whatever the game is, it seems that Strawson and Grice are winning.”

Against Quine, no doubt. A few weeks later, Amonstrong was able to interact conversationally prma facie viva voce with Grice and Austin who were examining him with a view of allowing him to go back down under. Armonstrong did his best to explain Smart’s very smart physicalist identity theory. Austin just nodded with approval, and gave him a pass. Grice confuted, and not only found Armtrong’s thesis unacceptable, but he had witnessed that if Armstorng was at point P2 of the conversation, making the conversational M2, this was totally inconsisting with Armstrong having made move M1 prior, at point P1. ‘In other words, you are self-contracting – yourself, that is.’ A recess took place, and under the threat that failing Armstrong would mean that he would have to see him on campus, he allowed him to pass, and move directly to the London pier, where he could catch a boat to Down Under!

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.

The easiest way to put this in practice is via Toulmin. In presenting his picture theory of meaning he draws a cat that sat on the mat. ‘Th cat is on the mat’ or ‘The cat sat on the mat’ became Grice’s dyad as in:

A: Where did the cat sit?

B: On the mat.

If Collingwood was saying in this “Idea of Language” – a sequel to his better known “The idea of history” that conversation resolves in conversando – a point also approached at Oxford by Gardiner, Entwistle, and Sayce – Grice knew what he was talking about. He happens to feel the need to specify his position the year before he died. When discussing ‘utterer’s meaning’ in the “Retrospective epilogue” Grice does consider an objection to the effect that a true behaviourist should rather focus on the INTERPRETANT. But by making the DYAD the unit of analysis:

A: Where did the cat sit?

B: On the mat

Grice had a an easy way out. His analysis of ONE single conversational move – consider B’s response here, “The cat sat on the mat” already INCORPORATES the ‘interpretant,’interpreted as the interpretation that the conversationalist is aiming it will be the one his co-conversatioanlist will come along. In symbols

VOLBJUDAJUDB(the cat sat on the mat)

The utterer has, we assume, perceived that the cat sat on the mat, and he has consequently conceived that the cat sat on the mat – Grice’s potching and cotching in the pirotese that is the framework for his philosophical psychology .

This means, in terms of the transcendental philosophical psychology that Peacocke will popularise as Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy, that inter-subjectivity is a possibility. The utterer is INTENDING his addressee to, if not perceive, trust the utterer’s perceptions, but at least CONCEIVE that the cat is on the mat.

Grice jocularly refers to Austin’s uptake – which is the closest Austin, a behaviourist at heart – witness the silly title for his Harvard lectures: how to do things with words – would go to define Locke’s understanding (Grice in contrast, refers ‘understands’ as one of the primary consequences for a subject of analysis once his intention-based account of communication is accepted). Grice’s answer is that some form of ‘uptake’ is already then present in EVERY conversational move worth the making.

Grice’s CONVERSATIONAL dyad, or better, his choice of the CONVERSATIONAL DYAD as the unit of analysis – and not JUST the conversational move – secures this uptake. For Austin, securing of uptake was only necessary in betting.

AUSTIN. I bet he won’t come.

GRICE. Who?

AUSTIN. Hampshire, who else?

Austin wants to say that Austin cannot be judged as having ‘bet’ anything – unless Grice takes up his bet – it is the ONLY conversational scenario that Austin allows as REQUIRING some form of securing of upake for even DEEMING the conversationalist to have made the conversational move he has alleged to have made.

The sequence in the dyad then marks the passage from INTENDED uptake to ACTUAL uptake. We are still talking philosophese so do not expect any interest in these philosophers, aptly, as to what actually goes on or will go on!

GRICE offers a nice metaphor here when referring not to the CONVERSATIONAL TAILORING principle but the expectation of CONVERSATIONAL DOVETAILING. In the dyad,

A: M1

B: M2

“M1” and “M2” dovetail. Grice discusses this at length. And, as is his penchant, in terms not only of verbal (‘linguistic’) TALK echanges but ‘conversations’ of the Biblical type, involving just gestures. He provides FOUR SCENARIOS for each of the conversational categories – thereby proving that ‘four’ seems like a good number – in none of this discussion he cares to disseminate each of the FOUR and four only conversational categories – into the gamut of more specific behavioural guidelines within the scope of each conversationalist’s expectations regarding the helpfulness of his co-conversatioanlist.

FIRST SCENARIO. The DOVETAILING of QUANTITAS

A: Pass me two screws

B passes two screws – not one, not three

SECOND SCENARIO: The DOVETAILING of Qualitas

A: Pass me a spoon

B passes a real spoon, not a trick one made of rubber.

THIRD SCENARIO: the DOVETAILING of Relatio

A: I’ll plant the seeds

B: And I’ll water them

FOURTH SCENARIO: the dovetailing of Modus

A: He went to bed

B: And took off his trousers

Grice must accept that the narration of events is still true if ‘he’ actually took off his trousers BEFORE going to bed (He is borrowing the example from Urmson’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s truth-functionality of ‘and’ in ‘Philosophical analysis: its development between the two wars).

Grice’s considerations on embedded uptake already in the conversationalist’s initial move (“Where did the cat sit?”) even before it gets realised or actualised by his co-conversationalist confirmation in the second move in the dyad is also reflected in an important taxonomy he presents for the anatomy of a single conversational move.

A conversational move need only be ‘exhibitive,’ not protreptic. These are the technical tags he uses in ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions.’ While the joint insitutiton of a joint decision, which results in a joint action by conversatioanlists – other than the one they ARE undertaking by their very engaging in conversation – is a plus, but not the specific goal of each specific move.

In “Utterer’s meaning and intentions” – willing to appease the formalists in his audience – and annoying some formalists that have capriciously turned informalists – such as Putnam, rerpoted by Grice:

PUTNAM: You know, Grice, I like you, and what you do: but you are, if you ask me, WAY TOO FORMAL.

GRICE. We don’t say WAY TO at Oxford! +> We should have lunch together sometime.

So Grice allows for a formal variance in the fulfilment of the prongs indicating the necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘Conversationalist A has CONVEYED to conversationalist B that p’ – exhibtive in all cases:

VOLAJUDBACCA(*(Ex)FxGx

Protreptic in only some cases:

VOLAJUDBACCB(*(Ex)FxGx

He realises that this causal refinement proves CRUCIAL when dealing with modes.

A: Where did the cat sit?

B: On the mat.

A’s first move is in the INTERROGATIVE MODE – MODVS INTERROGATIVS of the modistae. B’s answer is the modistae MODVS INDICATIVVS

A: Where did the cat sit?

B: On the mat.

A: Well, politely disallow her!

It is after all, an extremely refined map and that shaggy cat should not be shedding her long hairs on it – as I’m sure the dean should agree.

A’s second move is in the MODVS IMPERATIVS.

Grice at one point played with MODVS OPTATIVS

A: Ah!

B: Ah what?

A: Ah, for that Smith be happy!

In “Utterers’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning” he is allowing that his dummy for ‘mood’ (*psi – read asterisk sub psi) should stand for ‘indicative,’ ‘imperative’ ‘optative’ what have you.

In Intention and Uncertainty he played with

A: Let there be light?

B: Latin, please

A: Fiat lux.

He is considering the future, as per future intentional (“I shall, you will”) and the future factual (“I will, you shall”). He allows that not even the most ordinary-language speakers at Oxford – those like him with a double first in the greats and Austin – are sure how to use them. Careful English speakers, as he puts it – “as most of us are NOT” – will hardly make the mistake of taking one sub-mode by another.

Because this is what Grice is after. The idea of a conversational move is easy enough to digest. But the game of conversation is such that MOVES can be made IN A VARIETY OF MODES – MODUS is after all the fourth conversational category – and what is worse, there are MIXED-MODE conversational moves, too, such as:

A: Touch the beast and it will bite you

B: Do serpents bite?

B’s point is that Cicero uses ‘mordere’ NOT for ‘serpent.’ But A’s original conversational move seems mixed-mode in that the first conjunctum seems imperative ‘Touch the beast!’ while the second is future factual (“The beast will bite you”).

Grice is concerned at this point – in “Aspects of reason” with developing two points previous in his career. In “Logic and conversation” he had resumed his earlier “Negation and privation” and “Negative propositions,” especifcally on “~” – and inspired by the inadqacies by Strawon on ‘>’ – that Grice presented in Prolegomena’ Grice provides the list: one unitary operator, “not” – two dyadic paratactical ones: “and” and “or” – one dyadic hypotactical: “if.”

It is to the dyadic hypotatictcal that he’ll dedicate most of his attention on now on. He has, after all, formulated his principle of conversational benevolence (a. k. a. the principle of conversational helpfulness) as a ‘Conversational Imperative’ – following  not only Kantotle, but Hare, who couldn’t think in NON-imperative terms – and now in the second Paul Carus lecture he feels like torturing his audience with ways in which the phrastic mode operator applies either to the protasis or he apodosis.

A: Do it!

B: What if not?

A categorical imperative is self-justified in context, but need not be.

The modes and submodes play thus a key role in conversation. The Conversational Move is allowed to display a mode, and it may be up to the co-conversationalist to get clarification as to what sub-mode that is. Grice is not so much concerned –as others have – studying how uptake gets realised in elaborate conversational sequences – but his taxonomy he thought was a good proof that he was working along the right lines in philosophical psychology.

Each mode and its submodes is aptly analysed with the aid of the VOL and JUD operator, where sometimes a reference has to be made to a neutral psychological attitude of ACC to cover EITHER VOL or JUD.

There is such a thing as a MODUS INDICATIVUS that a move may display so the modistae were not necessarily wrong. But surely if we take the exhibition/protrepsis divide seriously, some moves are just displays of one’s BELIEFS – a display of a desire is the rudiment of an ORDER, rather -, whereas other moves carry an implicated ‘For your information’ – or the occasional vocative. To use Austin’s example

A: A goldfinch!

B: I see. Great!

Versus

A: A goldfinch, Grice!

B: I see, thanks!

By using the vocative, Austin’s conversational move carries the implicature of the SUB-MODE: not MODVS INDICATIVVS but SVB-MODVS INFORMATIVS.

A parallel springs in the imperative realm. The mere display of a VOLIT is enough to count as an order:
QUEEN OF HEARTS: RED, NOT WHITE

KING OF HEARTS: I’ll inform them immediately.

(And sends the pack of cards to paint the white roses red). Grice relies on Austin’s and Ansombe (cited in Intention and Uncertaitny) direction of fit. In the direction of fit proper of the VOLITIVE mode, two big groups are in contrast. The direction of fit may involve the utterer himself, or his co-conversationalist. In one case – the typical conversatonal move – one is ordering; in the second, less obviously conversational, unless we take ‘Grice without an audience’ more seriously than we should – one is exhorting oneself. Grice’s caveat in Aspects of reason tries to simplify the scheme by disallowing a long elaboration of conversational moves proper seeing that he is becoming more and more concerned with self-deliberation that may lead to self-acceptation of one’s own judgements and volitions – with a view of instilling them into one’s conversational partner at a later stage.

If Grice was initially attracted to Cook-Wilson’s treatment of the MODVS INTERROGATIVS in ‘Statement and Inference’ – where the ‘statement’ is hyperbolic – he finds such a realm of crucial importance now. INTERROGATION is the mode of deliberation. And again this comes in two varieties or submodes. The typically conversational dyad illustrates one:

A: Where did the cat sit?

B: On the mat.

But a question may be addressed to the utterer himself, even conversationally:
A: Where did I say that the cat was sitting?

B: On the mat.

A: I was talking to myself! Sorry about that.

Again, the VOL/JUD – two sides of the same coin of of conversational rationality – apply when it comes to MODVS INTERROGATIVES. In B’s answer above, ‘The cat is on the mat,” B is merely complying with an INFORMATION-SEEKING conversational move – of the JUD type. It may not always be so:

A: What shall we do about it?

B: Well, get her OUT of the mat, if you say the Dean adores that mat!

In A’s conversational move here, the ‘force’ – illocutionary force’ or mode, as Grice prefers, or ‘tropic, as Hare does – his is a tetralogy of sub-atomic particles: the phrastic, the neustic, the tropic, and the clistic – A is not expecting an ANSWER – it’s not a JUD type of a question, it is a question elicitng an ACTION or at least VOLITIVE effect in one’s conversationalist.

Most typically, this type of interrogative can also be self-directed:

A: Shall I have rings in my finger?

B: Wherever you go!

A: I wasn’t expecting YOUR answer. That was rude. It was a self-directed exhortation.

Grice can be liberal, and aptly so, when it comes to MODVS, so don’t expect to be having other than the Oxonian philosopher at hand:

CAPTAIN: The soldiers are to muster at dawn

SARGEANT: Yes sir.

Grice – having read Prichard to tears – knows this, whatever the modistae would say, counts as a PERFEFT imperative!

Grice happened to expand on felinology at some point. On TWO occasions he used Oxford as a paradigm for language change. He is referring to the Dean of Hartford, whose dog was deemed a _cat_ for college regulations. Grice treasured the clipping from THE TIMES when the successor to the dean’s post addressed the Editor with a simple “My cat is not a dog.”

Grice selects such a conversastional move not out of the blue, but because the formalisation (or ‘logical form,’ as he prefers – these were the days when he was giving a joint seminar with his former tutee P. F. Strawson on ‘Meaning, categories, and logical form’) involves one of Grice’s favourite operators, the inverted iota, introduced by Peano. The logical form of ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ here simplified to ‘The cat IS on the mat’ – terms: ‘the cat’, ‘being on the mat’ – joined by the copula – involves such an operator and the predicates C for cat, and M for ‘to sit on the mat’. (ix)Cx & Mx. Note that the gambit in the conversational game is an utterance by A in the interrogative mode – Grice disregarded the English variant ‘mood’ – And it is a simple one at that: an x- or wh-question. The rudiments of the logical form are maintained. And the VOLITION behind the making of the move is that B supplied the incognitum. ‘Where?’ ‘On the mat’. In other words. A is presenting B with an open formula, without truth or any other value satisfactoriness, and is pleading B to supply the required information. So it is to the answer to which we should direct our attention now. ‘The cat sat on the mat.’ That is a factually satisfactory response, as Grice has it, which gets factually SATISFIED if the cat happens to sat on the mat. If the underlying psychological attitude expressed by the question was the questioner’s VOLITION, the central psychological attitude in B’s response is the expression of a BELIEF, or JUDGEMENT. And B is offering his judgement. Under the circumstances where the principle of conversational helpfulness operates, and we see the exchange as vital to both A’s and B’s survivals, we can imagine that B EXPECTS to be believed. This would still have B’s response count as an EXHIBITIVE move – he is merely expressing his belief – this is part of what is entailed by saying that he engages in a conversational move in the INDICATIVE, now, not interrogative, mode. Grice distinguishes two sub-modes under this modality. Indicative is just the self-centred mode. Informative is the tag Grice uses to label the mood when addressed to the utterer’s addressee. ‘For your information, she sat on the mat.’ Whether A happens to JUDICATE that the cat sat on the mat is beyond B’s capabilities, and not really part of the conversational game!

The Dean of Hertford’s cat requires a tweak here and there. Why was Grice so obsessed with the linguistic idiosyncrasy of just ONE Oxford college. Deep down, it boils down to Cratylus’s distinction physei/thesei. There is nothing in the NATURE of the Dean’s dog that makes it a cat – or rather, alternatively, it is ALL about NATURE – as experienced at Oxford – that allows us to refer to ‘the cat’ – a nominal, when both conversationalists are aware that the denotatum is a _dog_.

Grice liked a shaggy-dog story, too. The only linguistic example he gives in ‘Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning’ for analysis – as opposed as for illustration (“If I shall then be helping the grass to grow I shall have no time for reading,” “Smith is a philosopher,” “Smith beat Nowell” – concerns Smith’s dog, Fido, who happens to be hirsute. Grice spends the final fragment of the conference on the M-intention behind an ascription of hairy-coatedness to Fido. We can illustrate that conversationally at Hertford.

A: She doesn’t look shaggy to me.

B. But she is!

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.

Grice’s reference to ‘shaggy =def hairy-coated’ is the ONLY example where Grice explores what philsoophers at Oxford were dubbing ‘semantics,’ so it is worth expanding.

A Where did the cat sit?

B: What cat?

A: The shaggy one.

In “Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning” – reprinted by Searle in The philosophy of language only to give foil to Chomsky insulting Grice as an unredeemable behaviourist – Grice is concerned with the topic of his joint seminar with Strawson on ‘Meaning, categories, and logical form’: the referential and the attributive. For ‘referential’, pouring scorn on Ryle’s ‘Fido’-Fido theory of meaning (later relabelled by Aftershave Schiffer as Fido-Fido theory of psychological attitudes Grice does not care to provide a NOUN SUBSTANTIVM proper – like ‘dog’ or ‘cat’ – but a NOMEN SUBSANTIVM PROPER, ‘Fido’ – Smith’s cat. Anyone familiar with the Little Oxford Dictionary is aware that ‘Fido’ is NOT part of a language – so it cannot be ‘Fido’ that Grice is seriously thinking when dealing with ‘word-meaning.’ He was aware that providing an analysis of the NOMINAL PHRASE ‘the dog’ would have complicated the discussion infinitely and he only had a few more minutes to spare.

It is his choice of the NOMEN ADJECTIVUM that becomes the semantic piece then, the attribute to the substantial type – Searle had been so obsessed by Strawson’s obsession with this that he could not get out of Oxford with a degree unless it were on ‘Problems of meaning, regarding the sense and reference distinction’ (deposited at the Bodleian library – and relying mainly on Grice). The NOMEN ADJECTIVUM Grice chooses is ‘hirsute’ or ‘shaggy.’ This is sematnic enough. ‘Shaggy’ involves the suffix -y which featured in Grice’s favourite poem (“Twas brillig and…’): a mere sequel to the brillig. There is shag, and there is shaggy. And cats at Hertford, as owned by the Dean, can be shaggy.

A: Did you see her?

B: See who?

A: The cat – the dean’s cat: the shaggiest I’ve ever seen.

B: And shedding all that hair on the old mat, I assume.

If Grice disallows ‘the cat’ or ‘the dog’ but opts for a proper name – ‘Fido’ – he knew what he was doing. It is in ‘Vacuous name’ that he deals with the ‘the’. In ‘Logic and Conversation’ he merely presents ‘the’ as equivant to the Peano inverted iota, and the course of the lecture he gives examples providing a contrast with the choice of ‘a’ – which falls under ‘some (at least one) rather.

A: Smith is meeting a woman this evening.

B: You mean THE wife!

A: Indeed. His own one!

In ‘Vacuous names,’ he is considering definite descriptions in general, and has used the delta symbolism to represent them: the δ versus THE δ. This is perhaps the least imaginative of Grice’s formalisms, since people abuse capitals regardless. Grice didn’t. To use ‘the δ’ versus ‘THE δ’ made all the difference in the world to him. What he means is more difficult to grasp.

Posssesives don’t help. When a δ is prefaced by a possessive as in Smith’s butler or Smith’s staberbasher, the ‘the’ has mysteriously disappeared. But not the phenomenon of definitely describing.

In listing ‘all,’ ‘some (at least one),’ ‘the’ – in that order, Grice knew what he was doing. The second amounts to an INDEFINITE description; the third is the DEFINITE DESCRIPTION proper, which eventually gets ‘reduced’ by Peano in terms of the ‘all’.

Grice specifically applies the square-brackets here

A: The king of France is not bald.

B. I never said he was.

A. I know. But we are disagreeing on different grounds. I just claim that he is not bald for the simple reason that France has long NOT been a monarchy.

In symbols

~[((x)Fx] & Gx

The inverted iota operator is thus reducible – as Russell knew from Peano – on account of the fact that to utter ‘the’ is a roundabout way of engaging oneself into a longer, more otiose, conversationally inappropriate move featuring only the universal quantifier and the horseshoe.

Does this relate to ‘the δ’ versus ‘THE  δ‘? It does. But in a subtler way. The way Grice defines a dossier has Urmsonian reverberations. Urmson had been discussing for The Aristotelian Society, under the topic of ‘Intensionality’:

URMSON:  Mrs. Smith’s husband just passed by.

MRS. URMSON: You mean the postman!

Urmson notes that there is conversational desideratum of what he calls not relation – as Grice does – or relevance – as Nowell-Smith and Strawson do (Strawson’s platitude of conversational relevance) – but APPOSITENESS. You choose the predicate following the definite descriptor that fits best. In Urmson’s conversation, the ‘the’ in “Mrs. Smith’s huband” is obscured by the presence of the possessive, but IT IS there in terms of logical form.

For Grice, ‘the δ’ is the standard, DEFAULT, use of a definite description. It does not indicate anything about the utterer’s ACQUAINTANCE (alla Russell, by ‘description’ that is) with the denotatum of ‘the δ.’

In contrast, ‘THE δ’ is used ONLY when the utterer is ACQUAINTED not just by description but by direct perception, with the denotatum of ‘THE δ,’ and HOPES that his co-conversationalist will too.

Borrowing (but not returning – he was his own tutee, after all) from Strawson, Grice uses variants of ‘identifying.’ Strawson had after all pre-dated Grice in circulating (without Grice’s consent) such platitudes as the desideratum of conversational knowledge, the desideratum of conversational ignorance (‘you only make conversational moves which are meant to INFORM your co-conversationalist) and the desideratum of conversational relevance. What more do you want? Strawson feels we still want ‘IDENFITYING’: it’s IDENTIFYING reference that we require. In their joint seminar on ‘Meaning, categories, and logical form’ Grice and Strawson had presented four contrasting scenarios: involving the identifying-reference for a substantial type in a first-order predicate calculus and an identifying-reference for a substantial type (i. .e. still occupying the subject slot) in the more Platonist talk. Their examples concern Bunbury and disinterestedness.

A: I never met anyone more disinterested than Bunbury.

B: You should go to a church sometime.

In his move, A is ascribing disinterestedness to Bunbury, and proves an IDENTIFYING reference for it.

The second scenario concerns an alleged identifying reference to ‘disinterestedness.’

At this point, Grice and Strawson use ‘exist’ as ‘… is a spatio-temporal continuant’ for substantial types (subject-slot) in a first-order predicate calculus.

A: Bunbury doesn’t exist.

B: He does. He is in the next room.

This Grice and Strawson contrast with the issue at hand:

A Real disinterestedness doesn’t exist.

B. It does. Bunbury is disinterested.

Grice and Strawson consider that B’s move above does not quite offer an IDENTIFYING REFERENCE that will allow the conversationalist to ‘VERIFY’ the denotatum. It totally contrasts with ‘Bunbury is in the next room’. ‘Bunbury is really disinterestedness’ does not help verify that real disinterestedness can be occupy the subject-lot in a conversational move that will prove to be SATISFACTORY (factually or alethically satisfactory) or SATISFIED (verified) especially in the context of one of Wilde’s silliest saloon comedies!

It is these references to the mechanism of ‘IDENTIFYING’ that Grice is reviving when looking for a tag for ‘the ‘ versus ‘THE ‘.

The fact that Donnellan was making some noise with ‘referential’ and attribute’ did not help, and Grice is adamant about his distancing from Donnellan. Grice could see where Donnellan was going. A non-Oxonian if ever there was one, worshipped by equally non-Oxonians like Dummett, it would not be long, Grice rightly foresaw, before Donnellan’s alleged distinction is taken as ‘semantic,’ not ‘pragamtics’ – or ‘definable in logical form’ rather than in a mere conversational illustration via implicature, as Grice would have it (He detested the semantic/pragmatic distinction, so-called).

Hence his rather ugly-sounding, admittedly, of ‘the ‘ as NON-IDENTIFICATORY (by default) and ‘THE ‘ as IDENTIFICATORY.

It will take a generation of philosophers at Oxford, led by Sainsbury and Over, predated by Evans in ‘Varieties of reference’ to turn Grice’s ‘identificatory’/’non-identificatory’ distinction into the mainstream.

 

In “Vacuous Names,” aware of the developments in the logic of belief and desire, Grice attempts a formalism. His task to hand then is ‘Peter wants to marry Paul’s sister – who doesn’t really exist.’ ‘want’ or ‘desire’ is thus external to the scope of a ‘vacuous’ predicate. When it comes to our basic dyad, the formalism is different.

For B’s move ‘The cat sat on the mat’, we would have

VOLIT_AJUDGE_B(ix)CxMx

This is the first clause in Grice’s analysis of ‘Meaning,’ already proferred for the Oxford Philosophical Society in 1948. Not enough, though. We need a second VOLIT, or intention, as applies to (i) itself. The combination yields:

VOLIT_AJUDGE_B(ix)CxMx & VOLIT_AJUDGE_BVOLIT_AJUDGE_B(ix)CxMx

What the elongated formula does is merely express the fact that a necessary condition if not sufficient for the conversational player to have made the conversational move he did intend to make is that his co-conversationalist will recognise the intention – is this enough for the m-intention, as Grice rather circularly calls the intention that CONSTITUTES ‘meaning’ or signification’? One would think so. But Strawson did not.

It is sad to think that ‘Meaning’ was submitted to The Philosophical Review by Strawson, only to have it criticised in his own submission a couple of years later. In ‘Intention and Convention in speech acts,’ the former tutee strikes back. The rat-infested case, as the locus classicus came to be known, was the first move in an intricate series of challenges with ‘alleged counter-examples’ to Grice’s analysis which he coped the best way he could. Eventually, he gives up and has to recourse to the negation of an existential clause (Ex). This (Ex) now applies to an VOLIT by the conversationalist, but unlike the iota operator, it does not apply to the DICTUM, the cat sat on the mat.

Rather the negation of the existential clause notably applies to the conversationalist’s VOLITing that there should be no inference element in the calculation of what has been signified by the conversationalist SUCH THAT he intends himself, but not his co-conversationalist, to rely on. If A is a real estate agent, and guiding B through the house.

A: The house is neat.

B. I don’t like the sight of that dead rat there.

This is the first type of Strawson-type of alleged counter-example. Strawson fabricates the scenario such that A is AWARE that the rat has been placed there as a ‘natural’ sign of the house being rat-infested. It is an inference element that A has but does not with B to share.

The obvious response, and apt one at that, is that in communication – never mind conversation – all should be above board – to use Blackburn’s colloquialism in Speading the words: groundings in the philosophy of language. Grice is expansive on this in a paper he wrote the year before he died. He is considering ‘hinting’ and ‘suggesting.’ If the ‘hint’ is so weak, such that the conversationalist cannot rely on the fact that his co-conversationalist will get it, nothing has been HINTED. Nothing has been communicated. The formal way to deal with this – in a way that annoyd Putnam (“You are too formal, Grice!”) was via the negation of an existential clause whose scope would be those inference elements which build up to BOTH the planning and the processing of a single conversational move.

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. In the ALPHABETICAL INDEX TO CONCEPTS we will consider the intricacies of some of the conceptual machinery adopted by Grice, notably as it comes to the types of expectation in behaviour: the desideratum of conversational clarity, the desideratum of candour, the principle of conversational self-love, the principle of conversational benevolence, and the principle of conversational helpfulness. All these technicisms are meant ironically by Grice, as is his fastidious taxonomy of what is explicitly conveyed – the expliciture-cum-explicature – and what is merely implicitly conveyed – the implicature/implicature, it being conventional or non-conventional all non-natural, and if non-conventional, only conversational when calculable in terms of those procedures that make conversation a type of RATIONAL COOPERATION, and not, say, an exercise in a Renaissance court by Castiglione!

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.  Grice was into sociological expectations of cooperation in other-oriented dyads. Add to that his emphasis on role and class. As tutee to Hardie, Grice’s role was submissive. As tutor to Strawson, Grice’s role was dominant. These lack of balance in conversational power is instituted at Oxford, so the players are very much UNLIKE cricketers – usually all undergraduates, -- Grice was also captain of the football team at Corpus. Tutorial exchanges are all the difference and they don’t even compare to that otiose, go-to-nowwhere chitchat in the common room! Grice treasured one where the conversational move to concsider was: “Well, he said that what we know we know, so he must know!”

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.

And in a way, perhaps it was a good thing he never did. Those who did read them were stuck with them. They (especially the non-philosophers, since every philosopher who referred to them provided an informal rendition of the contents) were more willing to provide their own input to the thing, rather than even trying to provide a critical exegesis of it.

Those scholars at Oxford who suffered Grice’s year-long seminars on ‘Conversation’ were another beast. Not everyone was invited. While the O. E. D. has 1967 as the first citation for ‘implicature’, Grice was using it in seminars dating from a couple years earlier than that. R. M. Hare, who credits Grice on conversational implicature in his essay in Mind sems to be suggesting that he is aware of what is going on.

Hare was one of the few members of Austin’s (new) play group that made it to Grice’s own play group – Aune witnessed him almost on every occasion. ‘He never uttered a word. But blame it on his shyness.’

Hare would NOT need to attend Grice’s seminar on ‘Conversation.’ They were meant as optional for the ‘scholar’, which is the technical Oxnianism for ‘student.’ – Only the poor learn at Oxford. Attendance to a seminar is quite a world of difference with attendance to tutorials. Grice could be good at both. Indeed attending his own tutorials became the talk of St. John’s at one point, and Grice – Richardson reminisces – ‘we called ‘Godot’’ – as his tutees were piling up the stairs to his office.

Attendance to a seminar was something that for those unfamiliar with the Oxonian ‘method’ – which traces back to Bologna and Sorbona, the two other oldER universities in Europe --. Attendance was never required. The scholar is FREE, and should LET his lecturer FREE. Don’t expect we’ll mark attendance, or grade. Grading is up to the Board of Examiners. With such loose requirements, Grice would not be surprised if only four scholars would attend his weekly seminar meetings on conversation, ‘if that much.’

In those seminars, Grice was adamant at throwing as much as he could in terms of what he called ‘expectations’ a conversationalist has towards his partner. He would make a few methodological remarks.

If Chomsky was playing with ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously,’ and Carnap with ‘Ealy pirots karulise elastically,’ Grice knew that HIS thing was the DYAD:

A: Where did that cat sit?

B: On the mat.

At his most prolific, Grice would need a radix to deal with all this. His example in Aspects of Reason at Stanford – repeated as Locke lectures at Oxford – is: √three little piggies went to market. In our scenario this becomes:

√the cat sat on the mat

When discussing Blake’s ‘Never seek to tell thy love,’ Grice finds the imperative oppressive, and requires his audience’s condescendence ‘if he would treat it as an indicative’: I sought to tell my love’. The past tense of ‘The cat sat on the mat’ may be similarly irritating. And Grice’s simplification goes

√the cat is on the mat.

Which is back to Toulmin’s drawing of the diagramme at Cambridge from Witters’s room, and transported to the Oxford environs by Anscombe.

Hare was never that clear. Hare (who Grice does not care to mention on the TWO occasons – the first in ‘Aspects of Reason’ itself, and the second in ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ written the year before Grice died – when Grice refesr to ‘authors who would talk of phrastics and neustics’. For the radix is a bit in between. In the original Oxford Thesis formulation, Hare has a dictor and a dictum. This become in “Language and Morals’: the pair

The door is closed, yes.

The door is closed, please.

By ‘please,’ Hare aptly refers to the Oxonian conversational scenario that allows you to UTTER an imperative. Grice would have none of that. He dismisses the blue-collar invention of the turnstile as a double Janus-like symbol, involving first ACCEPTANCE and then JUDGEMENT, and treats it as a unit

├the cat is on the mat

To that, Grice simply opposes

?The cat is on the mat

And if we are to credit a few philosophers:

├?The cat is on the mat

only when Grice is feeling ‘quessertive’ – Quessertive being the talk around Grice when discussing these topics with the self-appointed generative semanticists!

The important thing is to be able to ex-troduce the mode operators as Grice calls them – and which he symbolises in toto as “*” and specifically as ‘asterisk sub psi’ *_ψ where the subscript is supposed to link each mode with some psychological attitude or other (fear, emotion, belief, desire, concuspiscence, akrasia, what have you). The resultant procedures, as Grice calls them – they are hardly basic, which Grice restricts to pure Kantian terminology only – become:

├√the cat is on the mat

!√the cat is on the mat (in vulgar English: put that cat on that mat!)

?√the cat is on the mat

Note that

?√the cat is on the mat

represents only – ‘represent’ is the keyword – just ask Chomsky! – the boring yes/no question, since in such a conversational move as “Is the cat on the mat?” the utterer is already providing all the information that his co-conversationalist only needs to confirm or not. It’s quite a gap from Cook-Wilson’s sequences of sub-ordinated interogations, such as:

A: I have a question for you.

B: I’m ready – mind: I have a train to catch.

A: I saw it yesterday on the mat – and the dean was starting to show signs of disattistaction. The cat’s the shaggiest creature at Hertford, and the hairs on the mat are not easy to vacuum of.

B: So what’s the question?

A: When was the last time when you saw WHAT on what shedding what?

B: The cat sat on the mat, shedding hair, yes, if that’s what you are asking.

Note that, in contrast with ‘Is the cat on the mat?’ – ‘Where did the cat sit?’ asks the co-conversationalist to fill a variable. To turn a variable of the form

‘The cat sat on X’

With the definite description ‘the mat’.

As such, ‘The cat sat on X’ is neither true nor false. In fact, as Grice aptly observes, even the yes/no, or x-question involves a variable that turns the conversational move neither true nor false, not even in terms of volitive implicatures.

A: Is the cat on the mat?

B: Yes.

By uttering ‘Is the cat on the mat’ – what does A (qua conversationalist) mean. Grice relies on transformational syntax here even if he wants to keep transformations to the minimum. What A means is that his co-conversationalist has to be able to supply an answer of the form of either ‘The cat is on the mat’ or ‘the cat is not on the mat.’ The first, abbreviated with ‘Yes;’ the second with ‘No.’ It is slightly different with Bosanquet’s query as to whether the King of Ruritania is wise! – which had been discussed by Bradley and others at Oxford to tears in the previous Oxford generation that predated Mabbott – vide Mabbott/Ryle, Symposium on Negation, The Aristotelian Society.

So in

A: Is the cat on the mat?

B: I have a train to catch/My lips are sealed.

A is not really committing himself, by definition to any proposition involving the radix

√the cat is on the mat

but merely suggesting that his co-conversationalist does so!

The topics of radixes and stuff become existential to Grice late in his career when he defies the world to follow him in seeing his Conversational Imperative (“Try to make your conversational contribution one that fits the common goal of the exchange in which you are engaged” – out of wich a commandment, and not just a conversational commandment like ‘Thou shalt not provide false testimony’ is a mere corollary) as operative, in not the world over, at Oxford and environs. The conversational reason has its cunnings, and its manifestations in Town may not be its manifestations in Gown.

In the Paul Carus second lecture then Grice plays with the horseshoe in items like

!√the cat is on the mat Ↄ the cat is sleeping

In conversational illustration

A: Where is the cat?

B: I know exactly where it is and what she is doing, but all I’ll say is that if she is NOT on the mat, she is well awake –and looking for a bone.

Unlike regular cats, the Hartford cat detested sardines, and would rather bury a bone on the college campus anyday, to the defeat of the governing body, who were all to happy when the first measure of the new dean was to inform THE TIMES: “My cat is not a dog.”

The type of radicalization – the use of √ in embedded clauses – was irritating philosophers like L. J. Cohen at New College, and would irritate the successor as philosophy don at St. John’s itself: P. M. S. Hacker. In his co-written extended essay on the topic: “Nonsense,” he criticises philosophers like Grice who should be slightly more respectful about the prison in which, if Witters is right, Oxonian English places you!

 

 

There is more methodology behind that meets the eye.

And to deal with it we don’t need to proceed chronologically, since Grice drops bits which prove inspirational at different stages of his philosophical development. And usually those who have received less treatment in the philosophical literature prove the more interesting.

Just consider the ‘sat on.’ It was only in ‘Actions and Events’ that Grice approached the very topic. A. What has been the prisoner been doing all day?

B. Oh, nothing, he just sat there.

Grice considers that a type of action. The important bit for our reconstruction of what I keep calling his MINIMAL conversational pragmatics comes aftweards. He is discussing categories, and finds that while for Aristotle, ‘action’ (versus ‘passion’) was indeed a category – abused by grammarians who speak of the active voice – Grice’s example: Paris loved Helen – truth-conditionally equivalent to the passive – Helen was loved by Paris --, it is something different Grice is after. He is finding that while wh- words (where, when, why) answer to different categories in an ascription of an action such as ‘The Dean’s shaggy cat sat on the old mat,” there is no variable for ‘sat’ other than an ‘auxiliary’ which Grice detested: ‘do’ He was familiar with the insufficiencies of Greek and Latin in that respect too.

So Grice feels like coining the ‘whatting’. ‘Whatting’ – in a move reminiscent of C. J. Williams on the matter – is the general verb to represent any action, such as ‘sit on’. The conversational expansion would go:

A Where did the cat sit?

B. On the mat

A And I expected she didn’t further somewhat.

This is supposed to apply to our scenario Grice’s example concerning Socrates.

GRICE. Today I’ll test you on the longitudinal history of philosophy.

STRAWSON. Fair enough.

GRICE: What whatted Socrates in 390 B. C.?

STRAWSON. Drank the hemlock.

Echoing a testing by a schoolteacher

SCHOOLTEACHER. Rubicon Caesar

SCHOOLBOY: crossed it.

SCHOOLTEACHER. I knew he somewhatted in 45 A. D.!

It resonates with the idea that communication is between rational agents, within a context. And Grice wished to restrict that context to the minum. The title of this seminar was indeed ‘The theory of context.’ Gardiner (who lived at Oxford, being single in the quarters of Magdalen) was saying a few things about ‘context of utterance,’ as was Firth and others, and Grice had to have his say on the matter. The MINIMAL CONTEXT – ‘if we are going to take ‘context’ out of context,’ he adds – is the dyad between rational agents. Both see each other as rational. The type of RATIONALITY is of the type Habermas will call ‘communicative’ – never ‘instrumental’. Means-end is involved, but in such a way that each conversationalist treats the other as a rational agent.

Grice was familiar with Weber-type of other-oriented interactions, and by this time, a linguist had coined ‘idio-lect,’ which Grice liked. There is no need to rely on something like the System of Oxonian --. In an one-off interaction, if A supposes B is rational, there can be a conversation. Recall that in The Bible, to ‘converse’ is merely to have sexual intercourse!

What are the types of ‘expectations’ that a conversationalist brings to the table – the board of the conversational game – to the game? Grice seems to have been clear from the start: BENEVOLENCE. This is a type of BENEVOLENCE that is not meant in the theological way the Reverend Butler used it when he opposed benevolence to self-love. This is CONVERSATIONAL benevolence. It is the PRINCIPLE of conversational BENEVOLENCE.

Grice thought that such a scheme was necessary since his earliest attempts at using the theory of conversation to dissolve some problems in the theory of perception – already present in that footnote in P. F. Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory – the thing was murky. There was an insistence on the STREGHT of the conversational move – in terms of informativeness? – but it was never clear why the conversationalist NEEDED to be informative in the first place!

Grice is leaving all evolutionary justification for a latter stage, and he will when he provides more ‘folksy’ caeteris paribus laws within his theory of philosophical pychology. For now, this principle of conversational benevolence seems to be all he needs.

Grice is aware that Oxonians can be selfish. So he balances the principle of conversational benevolence with ANOTHER principle, the principle of CONVERSATIONAL SELF-LOVE. It would not concern the cat on the mat, but something like:

A: Where are the biscuits?

B: On the cupboard.

A cannot expect that B will BRING A the biscuits. There’s benevolence, but there’s self-love. So the interface of the balance is clear: one is benevolent to the point it does not obstruct the conversationalist’s need for his own space, his little self-love.

Where does the earlier ‘strength’ or informativeness – already qualified as RATIONAL constraints or constraints of RATIONAL DISCOURSE fit in? In the desiderata.

To these two grand reciprocal principles: the principle of conversational benevolence and the principle of conversational self-love, Grice then adjoins a desideratum or two. Interestingly, the two desiderata he mentions are similarly reciprocal in nature. There’s the obvious desideratum of CONVERSATIONAL clarity – the thing sounds pompous enough that Grice can spare the tutee of the ‘sic’ which he adds in his formulation: ‘be perspicuous [sic].’ He was well aware that Lewis was shouting loud that CLARITY is never enough! So the other desideratum is the Desideratum of Conversational Candour. The biscuits ARE in the cupboard, what more do you want? This desideratum enjoins that the move will be genuine, informative, and true. ‘True’ is of course restricted by Grice – or any other rational being – to conversational moves which are judicative in nature, never volitive. It is in odd form to utter at Oxford that ‘Close that window!’ is true!

Armed then with two desiderata and two principles, Grice thinks he has given his scholar some background for the expectations of co-operativeness operative in conversation.

Grice was never too happy with ‘co-operation’ as a term; for one he disliked the umlaut. And also, he had these impulses, no doubt triggered by the nightmare of Austin, that Grice was deviating from ‘ordinary language’. What’s wrong with ‘help’? Does ‘helpfulness’ equate ‘cooperative’? In Italian it does: aiuta. There seems to be something reciprocal about ‘cooperation’ that is not so obvious in ‘help’ but for years, Grice kept referring to this as the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness, rather than the more Latinate ‘Cooperation.’

In Method in philosophical psychology, that came after, Grice explores an issue that has specific conversational overtones. And thus, rather than discussing it as the framework of the framework it seems more appropriate to include it within the framework itself.

Grice is exploring the ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ offshoots of his pirotological programme and arrives at what, again echoing Kant, he calls the IMMANUEL – which some have referred, as applied to conversation, as the CONVERSATIONAL IMMANUEL. Grice is not concerned at this point with the NATURE of the postulates in this manual for conduct. Only on its formal aspects. These rules for moral conduct – under which would fall conversational behaviour in this Kantian light, to be un-universalised by Hegel, each guideline is not just a maxim qua counsel of prudence. Grice has yet to examine the categorical imperative (which he does in the last Kant lecture and in the second Carus lecture) so this is seminal. He is considering such counsel of prudence such as a pirot may institute for himself as VALID only on the basis of (Grice’s term) its universability (and refers in passing to ‘well-known current discussions on the issue – by which he is having in mind all the attacks Hare is receiving from Rawls and the zillions of other critics. What does it mean that a guideline of conduct in the IMMANUEL and a fortiori, in the CONVERSATIONAL IMMANUEL is universalizable?

Grice does not stop at this point. He provides THREE CRITERIA for such universalizable. He is considering the most general terms in a psycho-logical theory that will explain the conduct of pirots, and talking pirots in particular. The first feature of UNIVERSABILITY is forma.

Each guideline of conduct needs to be formulated in terms of conceptual simplicity. His conversational maxims pass muster here – since as Matthew criticised Moses’s elaborate decalogue, what can be simplest than the Golden Rule.

The second feature is functional. The maxims need to be interrelated.

The third feature is APPLICABILITY, and this is the kernel one. Grice was giving a seminar on ‘Social justice’ at the point, moved by all the fuss they were making over Rawls’s passing reference to Grice on ‘fairness’ and co-personal identities. The maxims apply EQUALLY to every pirot. This is the equivalent of such ideal model he was proposing earlier in his seminars examining the expectations of cooperativeness conversationalists make on the basis that what “I do is what an honest chap does”. The guidelines are fair only if they apply fairly to both conversationalists in the dyad. No place for a master-slave dialectic here! If Plathgel is to succeed Ariskant he will proceed by a different route, and justify the cunning of conversational reason as it applies particularly to one specific Oxonian situation, say, where such FAIRNESS is not an option – consider an arbitrary Board of examineers decision to a tutee --.

In our formalistic terms of System PHP, the thing is clear to formalise

IF JUDGE_BVOLIT_Ap VOLIT_Bp

Consider the Austin’s biscuit conditional again. ‘p’ is know A’s volition that B supplies the missing information in ‘The biscuits are in x.’ B utters: “in the cupboard,” thus complying with A’s wish. B is being cooperative, helpful. He is abiding by the Principle of Conversational Helpfulness?

Does the mechanism get explained by the previous format of two desiderata and the principle of conversational benevolence plus the conversational self-love? It does. It would be the appeal to the PRINCIPLE of conversational BENEVOLENCE that does the trick. Self-love is minimal in this exchange. It only takes B’s the minimal energy of supplying the information. The desideratum of conversational candour, and the desideratum of conversational clarity are also respected by default. B is not making it ‘very difficult’ for A to catch what he means. Consider:
A: What are we having for desert.

B: I veto I – C – E – C – R – E – A – M.

One parent says to the other in the presence of an infant who is unable to process the spelling. The principle of conversational BENEVOLENCE does the trick. And the flouting of the desideratum of conversational CLARITY triggers the extra implicature that that is that.

For some reason Grice thought of ‘echoing Kant,’ and while Kant never spoke of ‘manner,’ in the seminars Grice refers to the category of MODUS rather. He had encouraged Strawson (who was a PPE and not a LitHum like himself) to study Kant’s categories in detail. Kant’s quartette in fact hides a twelve-fold list. Qualitas and Quantitas and Relatio and Modus were categories even for Cicero, who coined indeed Qualitas and the more ugly-sounding Quantitas. But behind the quartette Kant goes on to show how the monster rears his ugly head. There’s negation, privation, infinite, hypothesis, and the rest. For each of the four FORMS of categories there are THREE categories. The result is indeed the Table of Twelve Categories. Grice knew that he was making an informal use of Kant, so he couldn’t care less.

If the echoing of Kant is not to be taken seriously, perhaps Grice would take the idea of a CONVERSATIONAL CATEGORY slightly more so. It is often said that twentieth-century philosophy saw a revolution: the linguistic turn, as Rorty called it. Or, in H. P. Grice’s case, a CONVERSATIONAL turn. The phrase ‘conversational category’ indeed occurs in ‘Logic and Conversation,’ but readers were not meant to take it seriously. The idea however IS serious. Grice elaborates on this the year before he died in ‘Retrospective Epilogue.’ As if repeating in pragmatic terms what Kantians lecture in mere moral term, Grice is wondering – given the panoply of procedures used in conversation: the open-ended, almost, set of rules for the open-ended, almost, nature of the conversational game, why are we, and need we, organize them?

Grice is a monist in one big respect. There is just ONE categorical imperative in ethics (“Do not multiply categorical imperatives beyond necessity”) and there is only ONE CONVERATIONAL IMPERATIVE (as he also calls it) in conversational pragmatics: this is the principle of conversational benevolence (not ill-will). Grice allows for models which regard conversational as a variety of behaviour “indeed rational” – but he allows within those models to cover only the rational aspects simpliciter – as Kasher does in ‘Conversational maxims and rationality’ – or as pertaining to a more specific sub-model that sees conversation as a variety of CO-OPERATIVE rational discourse – hence benevolence – since what is benevolence but lack of ill-will and furtherance of the shared conversational goal?

But within one single CONVERSATIONAL CATEGORY it seems obvious that some ordering is in order. He did not find the task easily. He looks back at his self when in 1967 he goes on to postulate truth at the level of ‘avoid ambiguity’. He does hint in ‘Logic and Conversation’ itself that some ‘maxims’ or categories seem more crucial than others: again, notably truth – a bite of truth is not a bite of a cheeseburger. What what more there is? In “Logic and Conversation” when he refers explicitly to the FOUR conversational categories – in Kantotle’s tradition: QUALITAS, QUANTITAS, RELATIO, MODUS – he knew what he was talking about. There is a specific intriguing phrase, “And one may need others.” Attached to the last of the maxims falling under the category of MODUS. Seeing that the maxims are nine, you add one and you get the CONVERSATIONAL DECALOGUE, as some have called it. Note that the arithmetic is not an easy one. Grice distinguishes between a maxim, a supermaxim and a submaxim. It is the submaxim that is the maxim simpliciter: things like ‘Avoid obscurity.’ Supermaxims are larger things like ‘Try to make your conversational move one that is true’ which embraces TWO conversational maxims proper: do not say what you believe to be true, and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Similarly, under the CONVERSATIONAL category of QUANTITAS follow two maxims – which Kasher has identified as one addressing the maxi, and the other the mini.

In any case, the idea of CONVERSATIONAL category is important, and Grice’s tetrachomy is as good as any other. Indeed, some have attempted to find a rationale to the idea that there are FOUR and that there ONLY can be FOUR conversational categories. But when you read such rationales you find that they are built in an ad-hoc theory of communication especially designed to make the four conversational the four cornerstones of our conversational behaviour.

Consider Grice’s play with things like ‘Be polite’ – or ‘maxims’ that guide our conversational behaviour which are ‘moral’ or ‘aesthetic’. The adjective ‘moral’ at this point offended Stalnaker, who will later go on the whole Kantian way. Is Grice implicating that the maxims such as those he dubs ‘conversational maxims’ are NOT moral? Surely they are not. They may RECEIVE a transcendental justification that removes the interest and motivation behind it, and brings in the duty. But such transcendental justification needs to be provided for – and his pointing to the common goal of mutually influencing and psi-transfer will still be deemed as merely ‘utilitarian’ rather than Kantian, in terms of moral theory.

A further controversy regarding the idea of a CONVERSATIONAL category is that it simplifies the task for Grice’s theory of conversation. After all, the discussion had been in metaphysics – as Strawson was well aware – about the ONTOLOGICAL status of the category – as in Aristotle or Kant – and the mere LINGUISTIC (or as I prefer morpho-syntactic) side to it, as per most practitioners of ordinary-language philosophy of the type H. P. Grice is associated with.

By talking of a CONVERSATIONAL category Grice is binging yet another dimension. There are ontological categories – qualitas, quantitas, relatio, modus – as it applies to res – ens realissma --. There are morpho-syntactical categories of the type that were being investigated by pomposusly called categorial grammarians, but in the Middle Ages merely known as MODISTAE.

And now Grice is bringing the idea of a CONVERSATIONAL CATEGORY. The directives for conversational behaviour, that stipulate if a move in the conversational game counts as appropriate fall under considerations which may well be deemed ‘categorial.’ Grice may well be thinking of his old desideratum of conversational clarity which has become a mere conversational supra-maxim, be perspicuous [sic] under which FOUR conversational maxims proper follow, or five, if we add the one that turns his bunch into the analogue of what Moses got from God at Mount Sinai.

The etymology of ‘category’ – prae-dicamentum since Cicero onwards – need not concern Grice. The notion was adopted by Aristotle from ordinary language (ordinary Greek), from a directive to be proclaimed at the agora, to a claim (‘dicamentum’) put forward (‘prae’). Grice’s more general point is that conversation is enough of a distinguished acvitiy to be endowed with its sets of categories. And recall again that the best expansion of the acronym P. G. R. I. C. E. is that philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, c is for CATEGORIES, and ends.

What was bothering though, was the way his legacy would look in the longitudinal unity of philosophy. Strawson had had the CHEEK to quote “Mr. H. P. Grice, from whom I have never ceased to learn since he was my tutor” about these ‘rules’ – of course they are not ‘rules’ – of rational discourse: strength, informativeness – how does Grice now manage to fix the mess and present an ORDERED scheme?

If Strawson had just NOT followed Oxford etiquette by referring to Grice informally in a footnote – with regard to things like:

A: Where are the biscuits?B: Some are in the cupboard.

Strawson is arguing that for Grice to utter ‘some’ when ‘all’ does is a flout of strength. It is the type of inference that Grice will go on to expand in that infamous interlude in ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’

To add injury to abuse, when Strawson felt he had the right to refer to his former tutor H. P. Grice in that infamous footnote in Introduction to Logical Theory, he never cared to be specific. This was point out to him ‘in a different context.’ I. e. at least he is respecting the difference in status. Grice always referred to logic and its practitioners as blue-collar. But Strawson does not specify WHICH context Grice was having originally in mind. It is a bit of a puzzle, since Strawson would hardly attend any seminar by Grice unless it’s the he was giving jointly with him.

Grice suggests that the context was the philosophy of perception. In that paper written the year before he died, Grice confesses that he saw the import of conversation as a rational activity best fit for survival – “not just a game!” – was in connection with matters of the philosophy of perception.

To this we have to thank Anscombe. Anscombe (whom Grice hated) had brought Vitters to Oxford, and Grice refers to the ‘Wittgensteinians’ collectively (since Witters was gone) with reference to an ordinary-language philosophy manouvre:

A: The pillar-box?

B: Seems bright red to me.

Why would B care to guard his conversational move: The pillar box seems a good bright red to me – why the ‘seems’ – why the ‘looks to me as if…’? These are typically guarded English – both Cantabrian and Oxonian – witness Miller’s parody of the Moore-Russell interactions in ‘Remembrance’ in Beyond the Fringe – unknown to blatant Vitters.

The Wittgensteians were challenging the ordinary-language philosophy account of sense data in terms of such roundabout locutions on the face that they sound utterly conversationally inappropriate.

So Grice’s defence had a direct route, which become a slogan:

“Misleading, but true.”

(Winch, of all people, loved the phrase, and would refer it to as ‘Grice’s point,’ i. e. as Grice’s importance in pointing out to us philospohers in the English community – Winch had moved to London by then and was doing redbrick – of the importance of the point.)

Grice is explicit enough in ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ And his explicitness comes in with a bonus. He realizes that

A: Red pillar box?

B: So it seems.

would hardly be the epitome of the crucial philosophical disputes philosophers are supposed to be payed to resolve. So he adds a list of six other areas where THE EXACT SAME MANOEUVRE will apply. Some are dated, since they concern Grice’s temporary obsession with Malcolm and what this New-World philosopher was saying as self-appointed master of what Moore meant (when he said ‘knew’) – “Is Moore misuing ‘know’?” Some are deep ontological: What is actual is not possible? Stuff and nonsense! Only blameworthy actions are caused? – a reprieve to what the anglo-jewish couple of H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honore were suggesting in Causation in the law – and so on. Each requires its own conversational scenario and Grice provides it!

To add to this six PHILOSOPHICAL CONUNDRUMS to be added to the ‘seeming red’ on the part of the pillar box, Grice includes FOUR NON-PHILOSOPHICAL examples in that infamous interlude. And it is only in connection with THESE four non-philosophical addenda that Grice cares to explore on how STRENGTH and INFORMATIVENESS should lead the way to the principle of conversational benevolence and, later, to the principle of conversational helpfulness (where ‘helpfulness’ covers the equilibrium between conversational benevolence and conversational self-love, simplyifing Grice’s account: do not multiply principles of conversational conduct beyond conversational necessity.

It’s the last of the four conversational NON-PHILOSOPHICAL examples that concern us here to see the connection from the STRENGTH or informativeness – merely ONE of the FOUR conversational categories, in the Kantian jocular paradigm Grice adopts for the labelling of his sort of conversational game – his critique of conversational reason, cunning of conversational reason and all.

The three first NON-PHILOSOPHICAL examples that predate the one at issue, and which Grice wants to compare, rather than contrast with the red-seeming pillar box are all stock examples, and may require a brief conversational expansion here.

EXAMPLE 1

GRICE (at collections). Him?

Co-Examiner. Yes, what’s your assessment?

GRICE: He has beautiful handwriting.

Grice is clear that ‘He has beautiful handwriting’ has to be the ONLY MOVE made – no guardedness, pre-sequel or warning.

EXAMPLE II

A: And she lost her honest name!

B: But she was poor

A: And she was honest.

Grice is providing a variation of a song his father had learned during the Great War (“’Tis the same the whole world over). In this case, ‘but’ carries a CONVENTIONAL implicature, not a conversational one.

EXAMPLE III.

Grice: I did not!

Strawson: But they say you did stop beating your wife!

Strawson was arguing that, in some uses of ‘imply,’ we may just as well say that, by uttering ‘The king of France ain’t bald,’ the uttering IMPLIES that France is, at the time of utterance, not a monarchy. Grice labels this ‘presupposition,’ and was doing thus with Strawson in their joint seminar on ‘Meaning, Categories, and Logical Form.’ At a later stage he would hold that it’s a mere conversational implicature that solves the problem of having to appeal to Strawson’s monstrous truth-value gaps.

EXMPLE IV that matters to us in this context:A:

A knows that B lives in a very small apartment with only two rooms and no adjoining hallways – these rooms being a bedroom and a kitchen. A comes out of the apartment.

A: I cannot seem to be finding your wife.

B: She is in the bedroom or in the kitchen.

A: Can’t be. I just looked – twice!

B: Perhaps you are having a reverse hallucination?

It is with respect to B’s answer “My wife is in the kitchen or the bedroom” (Grice is loose enough to allow for syntactical variation here that could only irritate Chomsky). Grice wants to argue something that is so commonsense and commonplace that nobody would disagree with him. His typical manoeuvre (except your are a scholar looking for another scholarship and you NEED to argue ad mortem!). B’s implicature is that he doesn’t know! This is not the polemic about ‘or’ being inclusive or exclusive – which O. P. Wood had declared a matter of conversational implicature in his review of a logical textbook then popular at Oxford in the pages of Mind. This is a different epistemic implicature, to echo Gazdar and others. It involves our VOLIT and JUDGE then. In logical forms, the implicature behind B’s response amounts to

~JUDGE_B(My wife is in the kitchen) & ~JUDGE_B(My wifei s in the bedroom)

Rationale. It is when it comes to the RATIONALE that we should be concerned. Whatever B IMPLIED, if appropriately recognsied by his co-conversatioanlist, that is retrieved by the ASSUMPTION the co-conversationalist is making that B is abiding by a constraint of rational discourse. Grice is vague about the formulation. Never mind the imperative mode, which is otherwise rude at Oxford. A reasonable conversationalist is EXPECTED – or not expected not to – abide by the fact that his strongest conversational move under the circumstances is to be issued. Grice goes on to apply this to the bright-red shining red-pillar and notes a discrepancy. While, by the introduction of ‘v’ it is the case that

p --- p v q

It is NOT the case that the corresponding generalization applies to the bright-red shinging pillar box. In Grice’s words “Neither ‘The red pillar seems red to me” nor “The red pillar IS red” – entail each other!” So there is no way we can explain away this ‘assumption’ or expectation (rather) of maximal informativeness – falling under a more general assumption provided by the principle of conversational benevolence or the principle of conversational helpfulness – in mere terms of entailment. Grice does not go back to the issue. At the point he is satisfied by the fact that his addressee – in this case the audience that met at Cambridge for the symposium on The Causal Theory of Perception – will get a glimpse of what Grice is after. An amusing glimpse, to boot, to counterbalance this rather dry discussion of the even DRYER account of the Causal Theory that Grice drew directly from one of the most boring philosohers Oxford ever knew: Welsh Mr. Price!

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! For every conversational move there is a corresponding UPTAKE, before the conversationalist is allowed to expect a conversational counterpart move. Grice knew that this uptake (which was postulated by Austin as necessary in conversational games involving betting – unless the invitation is ‘taken’ nobody can be said to have bet --. Grice saw that the m-intention of the conversationalist already contains the rudiments of what the possible reply will be. In fact, if you count the maxims you get nine. And in Presupposition and conversational implicature, he feels like adding one. He had lectured on Moses’s ten commandments, so he thought the addition of one little maxim to his conversational Immanuel made a lot of sense and turned it into a CONVERSATIONAL DECALOGUE. And this little maxim is all about the EXPECTED REPLY. ‘The king of France is not bald.’ CONFUSING if you are putting that forward on the basis of France not being a monarchy at the time of utterance. The uptake is incorporated into the M-intention.

Moves are only EXHIBITIVE, not protreptic – or rather, the philosopher ends his analysis at the EXHIBITIVE level because the PROTREPSIS cannot be algorithmically decided – or mechanistically calculated in a way that we are dealing with mechanistically replaceable finality. So, all that the conversationalist can hope is that his conversationalist partner will understand him! Unless you are, as Nowell-Smith would say, Donne, and derive pleasure out of the fact that you are thinking you are totally unintileggible in your well-formed sentences, when you are not!

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!

LIBERUM is one concept in the alphatbetical index of concepts that follow this systematic treatment of Grice’s theory of conversation, which is critical and not just exegetical. Grice’s means-end analuysis is not Machiavellian. There is ALWAYS the possibility to refuse to attain your goal, or END, as Grice prefesr. Happiness is all about ends. But ends need not be followed. There is always in the pirot’s perspective the tantalizing question: “Why go on surviving?”. While a means-end rationality enures that the next move in the conversational game will be appropriate and according to the principle of conversational helpfulness, it need not be. The whole point of this realm of communication is that it is not Chomskyan. It is not at the sentence-level, which Grice took algorithmic (“An ill-formed sentence is not a sentence”). But an inappropriate conversational move is always a possibility. For one, a conversationalist is free to opt out. Grice’s slogan: “My lips are sealed.” But more generally, this echoes in the indeterminacy of any bit of information exchanged with a view to the institution of a decision. Each conversatiaonalist knows that the his companion in FREE in this sense, a full Hegelian sense – as when we see Hegel developing rather than refuting Kant’s regulative ideas on freedom. In this respect, the conversational game is not like critket, which Grice pacticed amaterusishly – i. e. gentlemanlike – to the point of obsession. The cricketer may leave the field, and that is that. But he cannot longer be said to be playing cricked. “My lips are sealed” still does count as a conversational move, however inappropriate. Or “When did you last see your Father?” “Last night, in dreams.” Grice saw a regressus here, most notably discussed in “Actions and Events.” Thus this mean that the means-end pattern is EMBEDDED within higher goals and higher ends and higher means? It does!

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! There is another aspect to consider within the Oxonian context, and the index of concepts. Consider LIBERUM, or Grice on freedom. He always crtiicised Davidson for seeing men as automata. Searle was more realistic and he refused to extend his speech act theory to conver conversation, since conversation is the freest human agents get, and any constraint into the mechanics would be just anti-Griceian. In the TOWN/GOWN debate, this freedom is a manifestation of what I call the cunning of conversational reason. Conversational reason may deflect from its universability, but as in Pears’s scenarios of motivated IRRATIONALITY. When it comes to TOWN, Grice may place the money for his tobacco on his tobbaconists’s counter, and get no tobacco. The tobacconist just refuses to engage in conversation with Grice. Say, he heard something someone said that Grice did or say! IN GOWN, it is more complicated, and may lead you to expel, which is what Ockham, the lector interruptus, got. Or T,. C. Potts, who just couldn’t get on with Grice as a tutor and was lucky enough to ask for a change of tutor and remained at Oxford until his graduation. The tutee, even though in the dynamics of conversational power is below the tutor, can still exercise his ‘freedom of the will,’ to use Pears’s pretentious pompous phrase. To take Grice’s example. A: You are hereby ordered to bring me a paper on our next meeting next Tuesday at 10.’ Grice was called Godot at St. John’s, so Strawson knew that 10 could well be 11.

And Strawson could REFUSE to bring a paper or pring a copy of the Oxford Gazettte instead. ‘I did not mean a newspaper. I meant a piece of written work.’ Questions are supposed to be answered, and so on. Grice had the unfortunate luck of getting tutored by Hardie, and cherished, however, Hardie’s conversational move at the end of a long tutorial where Grice had exposed the immortality of Aristotle’s soul. ‘That proves, then, the immortality of the soul.’ Hardie’s only comment was: “Before you leave to come back next week with an epilogue to that, I have to ask: “What do you mean by ‘of’? And feel free to use that as your opening gambit in next week’s paper!’

It is utterly UNFAIR that H. P. Grice is associated with a co-operative view of conversation. It is true that he distinguishes two thesis behind his ‘avowed aim’ of seeing conversation as rational activity. The general thesis is the general one: conversation as rational, hence our playing with the puns of a faculty of CONVERSATIONAL REASON, complete with her cunning --. The specific thesis is conversation as RATIONAL CO-OPERATION (He does this the year before he died in the 1987 Retrospective Epilogue, and rather than dropped here and there in a causal way, he discusses it explicitly in the niche – Strand Six – which he creates JUST FOR THAT PURPOSE.

But it is unfair, as I say, because one of his examples was ‘War is war.’ And where can be more conflict than in diplomatic conversations where each conversationalist is stating that HIS war is the JUST one. Romans knew about this, and if they kept talking of ‘strategies’ – what a general does – they would know what they were doing. Art of war became a discipline by the time of Machiavelli – or Macchiavelli, as Grice more correctly spelt his surname. In a discussion of war strategies by Frontino in a collection that would be familiar to Grice as it fit a gentlmean’s pocket – the Loeb Classical Library edited by Heinemann – a discussion is carried over the fact  that a strategos – or Roman general – may MISLEAD his own troops into sure death. ‘Strategos’ has a deceiving ring to it: it applies to war, and it involves conflict – when it’s A’s war versus B’s war – or undercover as in the case of a ‘straegy’ a general may use against the welfare of his own troops.

Typically, the type of CONFLICT in CONVERSATION with which Grice is concerned is other. I shall refer to two conversational illustrations from different publications. In the earlier ‘Vacuous names’ Grice explores this infamous Marmaduke Bloggs, who has climbed Mt. Everest on hands and knees, an amateur alpinist, as it happens, he being a Merseyside stock broker by profession. When The Merseyside Geographical Society organises a cocktail in his honour the conversation takes place.

A. I love the way you so tidily get all things so prettily set for the cocktail. I am saddened, though, by the fact that someone won’t be attending.

B. Who?

A. Marmaduke Blogsg.

B. But it is in his honour!

A. That’s as it may be – but he doesn’t exist. He was invented by the journalists.

B. Well, someone won’t be attending the cocktail party then.

A. Have you heard what I’ve just said: he doesn’t exist.

B. I heard you quite distinctly. Are you under the impression that I am still committed to his existence by may Oxonian way of putting things in words?

The polemic concerned that raised by Strawson with his idea of the ‘implication’ behind ‘The king of France ain’t bald’ as involving a TRUTH-value gap, seeing that ‘The king of France ain’t bald’ fails to be either true or false for Strawson, not Grice.

This was a vintage polemic, and, since both men (the tutor and the former tutee) were engaged in it publicly in their joint seminar on ‘Meaning, categories, and logical form’ the thing was deep. There are interactions by Grice in that joint seminar where he is still unsure as to how to deal with this concoction by Strawson of the truth-value gap, and if there is ONE BIG TRIUMPH of Griceianism over Strawsonianism when it comes to conversational pragmatics is Grice’s delivery of the alleged ‘presupposition’ as a mere cancellable conversational implicature.

The conflict between A and B in the preparations of the cocktail party for Marmaduke Bloggs takes explicit expression in the conflictive conversational moves by A and B – and Grice, as he will with the next example – leaves the CONFLICT unresolved.

Grice was a meaning-liberal (Bennett speaks of meaning-nominalism, but there is meaning-liberalism, to attenuate Flew’s meaning-anarchism that he attaches to Humpty-Dumpty). Grice is not willing to disqualify a conversationalist who uses ‘not’ differently (“It is not the case that someone will be coming to the party.”). He is just providing a MORE REASONABLE way to approach the topic. Strawson’s truth-value gap theory just depends on the appeal to this metaphysical concoction, which one can avoid by sticking with conversational reasoning. Strawson’s truth-value gap would be one such CUNNING of conversational reason at Oxford.

In fairness to Grice, it would be up to the conversationalist A who is using ‘not’ differently from conversationalist B to provide, within what Grice calls ‘a system’ – our system GHP a way to ‘introduce and eliminate’ negation or any other ‘logical device’ in ways that makes his conversational move a true one that abides with the desideratum of conversational candour and the desideratum of conversational clarity.

“Marmaduke Bloggs won’t be attending the party” on the basis of the non-existence of Marmaduke Bloggs would thus be a true thing to say – if misleading. The desideratum of conversational candour clashes with the desideratum of conversational clarity. But any qualification to honour the desideratum of conversational clarity may not be in the offing when it comes to Oxonian conversations, -- at least within the Gown, if not the Town. The cunning of conversational reason is to suppose that conversational reason applies irrestrictvely to both!

The second illustration comes from the lecture to the British Academy a few years later. Here again we have Grice’s concern for the LACK of REMEDIAL ACTION in conversation leading not to CO-OPERATION (as the slogan of most popularisers of Grice go) but to CONVERSATIONAL CONFLICT. And again, the topic is typically Griceian. It doesn’t really concern the conflict over alternate views to approach nuclear deterrence, say, but about how you use ‘intend’.

A I am so happy you are intending to attend that concert on Thursday. Miss Foster-Jenkins provides one of the most memorable renditions of “Home, Sweet Home,” that I have ever suffered.

B. Well, as the case may be, I may not be attending the concert after all.

A. What do you mean.

B. The Metropolitan Police, which covers Oxford you know, will be interrogatin me on Wednesday afternoon, so I may well in jail by the time of the concert on Thursday.

A. Excuse me! Then why were you talking about ‘intention’ in the first place?

Grice’s point is again one about a philosophical concoction and its analysis – only if an analysis (reductive, if not reductionist) in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is provided (for “not” in the Marmaduke Bloggs, or for “intend” in the concert scenario – can the philosopher rely on a distinction between what is ENTAILED and what is IMPLICATED. A is stuck with an analysis of ‘intend’ which involves a clause involving a belief on the part of the intender that the intended action will be fulfilled by a degree of probability > 0.5. The conditions regarding the utterer’s knowledge that he will be interrotagated by the police, leading to a possible arrest that will keep him behind bars during Jenkin-Foster’s performance of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ at St. James’s Hall makes all the difference.

As in the case with “Marmaduke Bloggs” Grice leaves the CONVERSATIONAL CONFLICT unresolved.

Are the conversationalists still co-operating. In “Post-War Oxford Philosophy” he had approached the issue directly. Grice is liberal enough to be willing to engage in a piece of conceptual analysis with an occasional co-conversationalist philosopher, even if the conceptual analysis that is being developed is not ONE that Grice’s own ‘conceptual scheme’ will allow!

In any case, if we allow the CONVERATIONAL IMMANUEL as a guideline for conversational practices, which, however imperative in form, results from statistical generalisations over what reasonable conversationalists in practice do, we can simply add the ‘caeteris paribus’: conversations will be co-operative, unless they won’t!

THE CUNNING OF CONVERSATIONAL REASON is a good one. We cannot let Grice conclude his Oxonian contribution with a picture of conversation as displaying CONVERSATIONAL REASON when evey Oxonian historian of philosophy knows that there’s no reason without a cunning of it.

One area that Grice explored in connection with the CUNNING OF CONVERSATIONAL reason has of course an Oxonian application. But its basis is broader. It concerns what Grice calls ‘akrasia.’ There is no easy way to translate the concept, but Grice does his best. In a framework where only the ACCEPTABLE conversational moves are made – “Make your conversational move such as is ACCEPTABLE and APPROPRIATE at the stage in which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the conversation in which you are engaged. In symbols

A ACCEPTABLE CONVERSATIONAL MOVE 1

B ACCEPTABLE CONVERSATIONAL MOVE 2

The whole logic depends on this. With the ‘akratic’ conversationalist, you have to be careful. Grice’s conversational examples in the area are rare. And had it not been for Davidson to be REJECTING the idea of ‘akrasia’ wholesale, he wouldn’t have bothered. Grice had given joint seminars in the philosophy of action with both THOMSON and PEARS, and knew the topic well. Suppose the conversation takes place between GRICE and THOMSON.

GRICE. Bother for another Navy’s cut?

THOMSON. You know, I should cut on those Navy cuts.

GRICE. Just one.

Smoking was THE habit for the don. In Grice’s case, the habit had been engulfed by one casual remark by his mother when visiting her son in his quarters at Oxford.

MOTHER. That cigarette makes you sophisticated. – look sophisticated, if you must.

GRICE. Thank you mother.

As Thomson’s health deteriorated, smoking and drinking – issues of akrasia pertain. The way Grice sees things are Kantian, or if you will Rossian-Urmsonian. Urmson was revisiting Prichard’s collection of essays previously edited by Ross on Duty and interest. The topic concerns OBLIGATION, be it moral or political, and how it cashes on DESIRE.

In the case of the AKRATIC, no such cashing ever takes place.

For Grice, the akratic behaviour is then totally conceivably conceptually – as it was not for Davidson, who hailed from Puritanland! – it just involves a hierarchy of VOLs.

A: Fancy for a cigarerette?

B. No thanks.

A. Come on!

B. Alright! Just the last one!

B’s reasoning can be frmalised in terms of

VOLBVOLBstop-smoking

The akratic deals with his volitions at this higher level. The pure motive may cash in desire, as will the impure motive. The framework is Kantian. In the ideal non-akratic scheme, there is no “not” operator occurring at any level of the endless chain (in principle)

VOLAVOLAVOLA…VOLAp

This is what makes a move manifesting such a volition ‘acceptable.’ It is acceptable and accepted by both conversationalists if deemed as a result of a volition that the conversationalist has deemed acceptable.

When it comes to the Oxonian concept, we can play with Grice’s illustrations in ‘Logic and Conversation’ – all his examples are non-akratic. But for each illustration, an akratic version is possible. The akratic versions are especially frustrating if, as Grice claims the thing is, the COMMON GOAL of conversation is psi-transfer: mutually being influenced by one’s co-conversationalist towards the institution of a decision.

But what if there is a change of mind? Grice deals with the topic, in the ‘uncertainty’ that akrasia – qua lack of strength of will – at one paradox in his analysis of action:

GRICE: Please untie me. My head aches, and I want to scratch it.

GUARD. Alright.

GRICE. Thank you! (Remains unmoved)

GUARD. I don’t see why you don’t go and scratch your head now.

GRICE. I just changed my mind.

Frustrating for the Guard, but not impossible, or inconsistent. In the akratic case, if a prolonged conversation is being held by A and B for the ‘institution of a decision,’ the common ground shared goal will suggest that the ACTION resulting from such a joint decision which has been established WILL be carried over. When it doesn’t, blame it on akrasia.

And Grice observed that in TOWN, if not GOWN, Oxford akrasia can be collective, too! He admired Hare’s efforts to the contrary, when spending all that energy which Hare could have devoted to conversational pragmatics when engaging instead in the Secreatary of Transport at Oxford, seeing that he found automobile driving at Oxford – just ‘crazy, if not akratic’!

 

PART TWO: THE CONVERSATIONS

If there is one conversation that features large in our application of the FRAMWORK is the engagedment between Grice and his tuttee, Strawson, on presupposition. Strawson had left doubts about his self-importance than Grice did, and his ‘On referring’ had become (to be regarded as) a classic in analytic philosophy of the type Grice and Austin were engaging. Strawson had contributed in press to the debate with early pieces on ‘Truth’ for Analysis, and using ‘performatory’ before Austin did. In the official version of ‘On referring’ the topic is conversational at the meta-theoretical level: (Dummett’s adaptation).

A You still haven’t displayed to me whether Queen Elizabeth wore a wig.

B. And I won’t. There’s no way I can – the past is a foreign country.

Dummett always considered Strawson’s response to Russell’s On denoting rechereche and well worth the angry response by Russell (“Mr. Strawson on referring” on the same pages where Strawson had added insult to injury). In a scenario where Queen Elizabeth I does not exist, to wonder if she wears a wig seems otiose. If we add, “Queen Elizabeth I did not wear a wig” we do add insult to injury. There is an ‘implication,’ Strawson thought. The utterer is IMPLYING that there is a present Queen of England. He later rephrased such talk of ‘impying’ into a talk of ‘presupossing.’ Kneale and his wife were lecturing Oxford on the growth of logic and Strawson found that ‘suppositio’ was a word that, Collingwood notwirthstanding, could do a second round, and leave implication to Philonius.

When Grice submitted on the year before his death the material to Harvard University Press, he managed to include the MAIN sequel to ‘Logic and Conversation.’ In principle Harvard University – the president and Fellows, that is – are committed only to the text of the WILLIAM JAMES MEMORIAL LECTURES, bi-annual as they were at the time of Grice’s deliverance – and held bi-departmanntally – the previous year it had been a psychologist lecturing on retina.  

When the material went to press, under Part II, Semantics and Metaphysics, Grice managed to include an excursus on the Logic and Conversation, with which he had been working all his life since he met Strawson. At Urbana and other places, talk of ‘presupposition’ and ‘conversational implicature’ was becoming common, and so Grice entitled the talk for publicaction as ‘Presupposition AND conversational implicature’ meaning ‘Presupposition AS conversational implicature.’ The examples he provides all allow for conversational illustrations. At one point, before calling the game off, the conversational game off, as it were, Grice expresses dissatisfaction with his former self, and his sticking with well-worn examples like baldness of the king of France and whether we should stop beating our wives. But the illustrations he offers to replace them are ultra-linguistic botanising, beyond his own patience.

DEREK GRICE. Father died.

GRICE. When did that happen?

DEREK. Just yesterday night. Mother sent me a telegramme. I regret Father’s death.

GRICE. I don’t.

DEREK. I don’t get your point.

Grice’s point was that ‘I regret Father’s death’ may well entail that Father indeed did die. It is not the case that I regret Father’s case does not. This is not a presupposition which depends on the a truth value gap (‘The event of Father’s death did take place’). Grice is pointing to the fact that it is not clear to him whether the embedding of clauses involving factives inherit their alleged presuppositional counterparts, especially when there is no such a thing as a presupposition. Continuation.

DERECK. I was confused yesterday. You said it was not clear to you that you regretted Father’s death.

GRICE. After some introspection, I believe you are right. I should have guarded my judgement, and I guard it now: I DON’T THINK I REGRET FATHER’S DEATH.

Grice thought that a person never dies – that’s why!

A different specifically Griciean keyword – such as ‘squirrel’ – that will reveal a piece of philosophising as Griceian in spirit, is deutero-Esperanto (since who else would use it if not Grice?). It seems convenint to elaborate on the issue in this second, less central part II (‘The conversations’) rather than Part I dedicated to the Framework itself, since it does not involve an ESSENTIAL part of the framework but one that Grice encountered when fighting with adversaries that were claiming such a role in the programme. It appeared at various stages in his career. The earlier is not deuteron-Esperanto itself, but more in the vein of the semiotic Grice that he always was (semiotike – old mediaeval name for ‘the science of signs’) a ‘new High-Way Code that Grice invents while lying in the tub. Grice was aware – since his days with Hardie, who drove (Grice was boarded at Corpus and did not have to) – how UNBEARINGLY complex the High-Way Code is, so the implicature is the obvious one of requiring a Hare-type simplification (a bit like Ogden’s Basic English, with which Grice was familiar enough – he treasured Ogden’s MM, as he abbreviated the title of “The meaning of meaning, being a study in the science of symbolism.” Why does Grice introduce himself as inventing a new high-way code. This was delivered at Oxford, when indeed under the tutelage of Quine, Lewis was adopting co-ordination problems and offering ‘convention’ as a solution. Grice would have none of that. It is not surprising that the next stage where something like this new High-Way Code makes it to the Griceian scene is at another public event. Grice had been invited by a well-known grammarian, N. V. Smith, who published the proceedings, to lecture the crowd at Brighton, were Smith had tenure – and surprised Smith was when Grice began unpacking what he called the mystery package. ‘Convention,’ Grice repeated, has NOTHING to do with ‘meaning’ and this is where the semiotician that Grice was brings in not the proto-, which would be boring enough, but a REFERENCE to his ‘Deutero-Esperanto’ – a ‘language’ and not just a bunch of procedures in one’s idiosyncratic repertoire, as his prior High-Way code was, -- hardly the form of life Vitters thought a language, each language was – but a SYSTEM of communication devices that makes Grice the master.

He had been quarrelling with his informalist tutee, Strawson, for too long. While Urmson had learned the lesson and would be more than willing to allow for the equivalence of “and” in “He took off his boots and lay in bed” and “He lay in bed and took off his boots,” Strawson was appealing to different USES (if not meanings, if not senses) of something as basic as the semantic Boolean ADDITION, just for effect. When discussing PIROTESE, Grice will have occasion to show off his classical education background: there’s proto-Pirotese (the pirot that groans), and deutero-pirotese (the pirot that forms an INTENTION to groan in the presence of another pirot), TERTIO-pirotese (the pirot whose intention has become reflexive, i. e. reproduced into a second-order intention to assure that the ground-level intention is recognised), TETRA-pirotese (for the pirot who adds an anti-sneak clause prohibiting any further element of deceit in groaning), PENTO-PIROTESE (when the pirot actually engages his co-pirot attention) and HECTO-pirotese (when the dyad of his groan is completed by some maniestational acknowledgement on the part of his co-pirot: “I’m so sorry to hear!”).

When fighting against Strawson’s INFORMALIST, Grice was constantly invoking Strawson’s nemesis – the formalist. But Grice did not know at his stage where Strawson was going. He had been asked by Mabbott (Strawson’s initial tutor at St. John’s) to join in the tutoring of this scholar who had changed from a planned degree in English to one in politics, economics, and philosophy – eventually he passed with a second – and Mabbott thought that he could not cope with dealing with Strawson’s learning abilities to pass the Logic Paper as it was called. Grice went to assist. Years later, Strawson would still credit “Mr. H. P. Grice, from whom I have never ceased to learn about logic since he was my tutor in this area.” What area? Strawson was indeed using symbolism, both belonging to term logic or subject-and-predicate logic, and predicate logic proper complete with the panopy of what Grice refers to as ‘formal devices’ – and which he lists – six of them – in ‘Logic and conversation’: the first: ‘~’; the second: ‘/\’; the third: ‘\/’; the fourth: ‘>’; the fifth: ‘(Ɐx)’, the sixth: ‘(ⱻx)’; the seventh: ‘(ιx).’ – and it wasn’t like if Strawson was using all of them.

However this allows Grice to provide his tirade against what he was starting to hear from his seminars in some institutions – the coming of the Einhait of Wissenschaft – the unified science proclaimed by the diaspora of the Vienna Circle after the Hun took over. (The Peano school survived because Italy was part of the Axis, but Benedetto Croce made his best to declare that what they were doing was ‘nonsense’ not ‘philosophy’ – vide his Breviario di estettica, la logica come scienza del concetto puro, l’estetica come scienza dell’espressione pura). So this was a pan-world movement that Grice had to fight against. Against informalists like Strawson – and a few others, like Warnock (whose ‘Metaphysics in logic’ may be regarded more informalist than otherwise, especially with his counterattacks to Quine on (Ex) – ‘There are tigers’ – what does it even mean, Warnock was wondering!).

Grice saw the formalists as blue-collar at their best, and it is not surprising that, today, logic is taught at Oxford next to Grice’s quarters, on St. Giles, but not as part of what once was the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. Logic has its own Institute – Informal logic is no longer considered logic!

Grice kept changing labels. His informalists (seeing that Ryle was abusing this term, vide his ‘Formal logic and informal logic’) became the neo-traditionalists, an oxymoron that only Grice could dedicate. The whole point of being a con is that  neo-con sounds parodic. Ditto for neo-traditionalist. Is Grice suggesting that Strawson will be inspired and turn into a palæo-traditionalist in return? –

So the year before he died, Grice included just before his Strand Six on Conversation (the topic of the present notes) an appendum that relates, where ‘his position’ among the disputants, the neo-traditionalists and the modernists stand.

‘Modernism’ makes slightly more sense, but some have suggested that in this guise, Grice would end up being a ‘post-modern’ – since he does see, in his own words, the debate between the two warrying camps as one that ‘rests on a common mistake’ – no other than DISMISSING the cruciality of the conditions, rational ones, that attend conversation as such, regardeless of subject-matter.

And Grice right is, too. The modernists are thus called as heirs to Peano, and Whitehead and Russell. Grice (who once authored a draft ‘Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular’ to be superseded by his ‘Presupposition and conversational implicature’ with variants – theory theory requires that each sketch is sustained –never saw Russell as a philosopher – and then Russell did not either. Russell practiced at Cambridge what at Oxford we call ‘mathematics.’ And mathematics is what Peano was doing. Mathematics is what Frege is doing. This is what make them blue-collar, and no attempt to crystallise anything like ‘the English language,’ or ‘the Italian language’ will come from their quarters. What will come out is Esperanto, or Deutero-Esperanto.

Hilbert is perhaps the clearest formalist or modernist that Grice can cite. While Grice engages in a bit of formal calculus – witness his introduction of ~ with numerical subscripts ~1p2 versus ~2p1 and the introduction rule and elimination rule formulated always with ordering of numerical subscripts understood as bearing maximal scope in the reading of the formula --. Still, Grice calls his thing a ‘natural deduction’ alla Gentzen – nor a piece of gibberish, as Hilbert saw the real formalist should.

Grice’s Deutero-Esperanto is not Esperanto. Esperanto is what Hilbert calls Cantor’s paradise by contrast. Consider

A: Kie la kato sidis?

B: Vi celas la hirtan?

A: Jes.

B: Sur la tapiŝeto.

A: Lo dekano estos furiozo!

It is not this type of Esperanto Grice has in mind with his own version – hence DEUTERO-esperanto. In the spirit of his prior new Highway Code what he has in mind is a conversational, rational for sure, between rational conversationalists, who can depend on what Mill – yes more Grice to the Mill, as he would say – on their stipulative definitions, and proceed to converse. In such a ‘formalist’ paradise, any ‘execrescence’ brought by ‘ordinary language’ is forbidden by lex, sed dura.

His Pirotese served his purpose. In his seminar on ‘Pirotese’ a pirot is said to potch and cotch an obble which is fing or fang or in fid with another obble. The operators are intrdocued via content internalization. The pirot – an eagle this time, not a squarrel – perceives a hare on the ground and lurks from a branch. What the eagle has internalized is ‘disjunction’ – her behaviour does not manifest either p or q, but the transient state ‘p or q’ – Grice, like Loar after him, regard that type of psychological pirotological content internalization essential if the eagle is going to survive!

The philosopher’s – any philosopher, not just Grice – games with calculus is long dated. Grice had his master to blame, as he witnessed on each Saturday morning, for a while term, Austin’s tenacity in bringing in a new version of SYMBOLO – the sad part, as Grice recalls, is that Austin never cared to provide the TOOLS of the game. These were adjudicated to Mrs. Warnock, who had to cut them in tidy pieces of cardboard for the members of the play group to entertain themselves for the rutinary three hours at St. John’s.

If we discuss the topic in Part II, Conversations, it is because it is not essential to the framework. It is only as a matter of history that Grice happened to come to assist Strawson in his Logic Paper. It is only a matter of history that in Prolegomena, he recalls the incident and Grice quotes verbatim from Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory on ‘if’. Th excursus in the “Logic and Conversation’ with a reference to the metaphysical excrescence that the formalist will judge his informalist rival engages with is non other than causation, which the formalist, like Grice in some respects, is more than willing to RE-troduce rather than introduce in the account of the ‘horse-shoe’. After all, the horseshoe is an INVERTED “C” as devised by Peano – if a non-inverted C may mean CONSEQUENCE, by inverting you invert whatever you originally meant by that. You are engaged in Deutero-Esperanto CUM FLEXIONE!

It is easy enough – but don’t exepct systematics – in elaborating on all the conversational contexts that H. P. Grice SYSTEMATICALLY used only for the solution of philosophical problems along his vast oeuvre. The career of a philosopher’s life is never given for granted at Oxford. They don’t really expect much from you and the less noticeable you prove to be the more successful you will be with yourself and your ‘colleagues.’ We see this in Grice. He never ventured a first move. All his oeuvre results from collaborations, and invitations, and if the things got published it was out of a matter of course. His ‘Negation and privation’ (1938) never saw the light of day, and the typescript uses his Harborne address. “Personal identity” he felt like submitting to “Mind” as proof that his Hammondsworth Senior Scholarship at Merton had proved good. “Meaning” was presented to The Oxford Philosophical Society (a society for undergraduates) and published nine years later as submitted by Strawson. A year before, Strawson had submitted Grice’s and Strawson’s ‘In defence of a dogma’ to the same journal. Two conversations feature large there:
GRICE: I don’t see how your neighbour’s three-year old can be an adult.

QUINE. Neither can I, which proves my apostasy!

EXAMPLE II

GRICE: I can very well see why your neightbour-s three-year old understood Russell’s theory of types. It IS a piece of cake.

STRAWSON. But perhaps it was not properly formulated to him!

The Causal Theoy of Perception was Grice’s only collaboration to The Aristotelian Society. “Metaphysics,” with Starwson and Pears, came at Pears’s invitation to broadcast the Third Programme lecture at the BBC and got published by Pears by Macmillan. And so on. ‘Vacuous names’ was just his submission at the request of Davidson and Hintikka for a festschrift for Quine. In this contribution Grice gets at his most conversational with conversations on Marmaduke Bloggs and the cocktail party. ‘Intention and uncertainty’ as his obligatory lecture as having been elected a fellow of the British Academy. And so on. Each conversational illustration requires an expansion.

 

PART THREE: THE FRAMEWORK BEHIND THE FRAMEWORK.

When reviewing the conversations that we have dealt with in Part TWO: The Conversations, a syntactical point made by Grice needs to be taken into account. He is seeing himself as a philosopher REPORTING on a conversation. This approach is theory-theoretical.

In his early ‘Meaning,’ his goal is to provide a third-person perspective (he’ll return to the first-person perspective of his earlier ‘Negation and Privation’ and ‘Personal identity’ soon after in this 1949 Intention and dispositions). A third-person perspective of what? Of what a conversationalist (in this broad use, almost Biblical) of ‘conversationalist.’ The analysandum is oddly in the past tense but it does not need to.

By uttering x, U has meant that p iff…

The focus here is on the “has meant that…” If we stick to the present tense that yields:
By uttering x, U means that…

which is more or less equivalent to what hundreds if not thousands of philosophers had examined before in terms of ‘significatio’ – with the profferatio of the utens and the auditor. It is important because in P. G. R. I. C. E. has to challenge the idea that “p” is being used as ‘dummy’:

By uttering x, U means that p iff VOLITAJUDGEBJUDGEAp

In predicate calculus format:

By uttering x – ‘Where did the cat sit?’ U means that (Ex)CxMx iff

VOLITAJUDGEBVOLITA(Ex)CxMx

By uttering “On the mat” B means that the cat sat on the mat iff

VOLITBJUDGEAJUDGEB(Ex)CxMx.

In all cases the ‘proposition’ referred to in the analysandum gets a repeated occurrence in the ‘analysans.’ There is circularity here.

A similar subtle qualification occurred to Grice later in his career. He is coining not the implicature, but the DISIMPLICATURE now. He will eventually consider that ‘disimplicature’ should be used minimally in philosophical conversation. He gives a three examples of it.

The first example of DISIMPLICTURE concerns Grice’s dissatisfaction with Davidson’s thinking that he could go on and apply Grice’s analysis of ‘itnention’ in the newly published ‘Intetnion and uncertainty.’

In a lecture by Davidson peppered with this obscure European publication in the Proceedings of the British Academy, Davidson quotes Grice on intending, and proposes conversational illustrations alla Grice.

A He did not!

B. He did. He climbed, Marmaduke Bloggs did, climbed Mt. Everest on hands and knees.

Did he intend to? Grice is discussing cases when the goal is so difficult that ‘intend’ does not quite do, and you need to qualify: ‘if he can,” or ‘if I can.’ Such qualifier, the whole topic of Pears in ‘Ifs and Cans’ where he also reles on Grice’s conversational implicature, is best illustrated by Grice.

A That’s all very fine. And what about your old age.

B. I intend to raise ducks.

Grice feels that he does not need to qualify ‘if I can’ since the outcome is long coming anyway.

In any case, Grice disapproves of Davidson’s application of the concept of ‘implicature’ to the analysis of ‘itnention’ in that Davidson is treating an ‘entailment’ as an implicature – it is a DISIMPLICATURE which is at play, if anything.

In terms of the philosopoher’s analysans and analysandum:

A DISIMPLICATES that Marmaduke Bloggs BELIEVES that he can climb Mount Evereest on hands and knees.

iff

the usual constraints on conversational co-operation do not obtain.

The second example concerns ‘Macbeth saw Banquo,’ ‘Hamlet saw the ghost of his father’ and ‘The tie is not blue, it is green.’ The issue was raised in ‘Further notes on logic and conversation. How do they compare. In the context of that lecture, Grice is concerned with M. O. R. Modified Occam Razor. How many senses does ‘see’ have? Is an expansion necessary or is it a violation of conversational form.

A I tell you, the tie is blue.

B Green to me.

Since ‘a change of colour’ is out of the question, the conversationalists are using ‘is’ when ‘seems’ would be strictly more appropriate, but otiose under the circumstances. It is then that Grice turns to the parasitic use of ‘see’ in hallucinations. It would be otiose to add that ‘and he was hallucinating since Hamlet’s father was nowhere to be seen.’ (Cf. “When did you last see your father? “Yesterday night, in dreams).

In Grice’s new nomenclature, the co-conversationalist is DISIMPLICATING.

Conversationalist C DISIMPLICATES that q, if his conversational move would otherwise trigger the implicature that q, upon the conversationalist having explicitly communicated that q, but where no rational constraints on conversation are operative.

The clearest is Grice’s third example of a disimplicature – a plain metaphor. SCENARIOS

GRICE (looking at the cream on his coffee). You’re the cream in my coffee.

MRS. GRICE: It’ll get cold.

In a literal scenario, ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ is uttered by a conversationalist to his intended addressee (‘the cream in my coffee’), and he’s not expecting a reply. These are the cases that Grice explored under the rubric, ‘Grice without an audience’ (Hyslop) in ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’. Grice’s REALISING that his addressee is no such, does not disqualify him from having meant that the cream in his coffee is his cream in his coffee.

SCENARIO II is the metaphorical. Grice does not provide a conversational illustration, but since he is mocking the American Tin Palley satisfaction for cliché, he is thinking.

A You’re the cream in my coffee!

B You’re the salt in my stew!

The lyricist spoils it all by turning these sublimine metaphors into cliché by turning the interpretant in the fourth line: ‘My only necessity is you.’

Grice had dealt correctly with metaphor as the absolute FLOUT of the desideratum of conversational candour in ‘Logic and Conversation.’ When rephrasing the apparatus with the addition of ‘DISIMPLICATURE’ it becomes Grice’s claim:

A DISIMPLICATES that the addressee is the utterer’s cream in his coffee when all regulations about coherence and categorial affinity are suspended.

However, it is not up to his “Method in philosophical psychology” where Grice feels it’s about time to answer the charges about the circular loop regarding his claims of the connection between the ‘semantic’ and the ‘psychic’ And that is why we are treating this under the Framework of the Framework – his theoy theory. It does not concern Grice’s theory of conversation as such, but its background.

In fact, Grice goes on then to replace his earlier – in ‘Negation and privation’ – “mental act” to psychic, and then psychological. It is the bridge between the ‘semantic’ and the ‘psychological.’

Grice should not use ‘semantic’ so freely – he does (Part II of his Studies in the Way of Words is titled ‘Semantics and Metpahysics’) and the Retrospective Epilogue contains a reference to a distinction, however, between the pragmatic inference and not the semantic inference, but the ‘logical’ inference.

Well imbued with readings of Aristotle’s DE INTERPRETATION, Grice is well aware of Aristotle’s ‘semantikos’ – a formation out of ‘semeion.’ Grice had infamously claimed in ‘Meaning’ in a remark meant to provoke the Lockeans, that words are not signs – where the Greek would be semeion, semeia (in the plural), signum, signa. In notes for the attending seminar to this talk on ‘Meaning,’ where he is distancing from Peirce and Ogden, and Wilby, Grice does grant that a thing need NOT be a ‘sign’ to be able to ‘signify.’ Indeed, an utterer SIGNIFES, and an utterer ain’t a sign.

By switching from the psychic to the psycho-logical Grice is having a broader perspective or paradigm switch in mind. He s going to take seriously Aristotle’s idea of a soul as consisting of a developmental series – ‘soul’ or ‘life,’ Grice is indifferent about this – for the Greeks indeed, the psyche was the principle of life (bios, zoon) and it’s ‘life’ that Grice is into as he engages in a programme of pirotological ethology (or zoology or biology, starting from PLANTS, not animals).

The switch suggests, as Grice notes, that a psychic concept becomes a CONCEPT within a psycho-logical theory, with emphasis on the “-logical.” It is this ‘functionalist,’ Aristotelian account of the psycho-logical as a bridge between the PERCEPTUAL input of a creature and its manifested behavioural output that turns whatever we ascribe in between as a concept or TERM that becomes psychological by fiat.

He is aware that by doing so he is distancing himself from an earlier intuitive, or intuition-based approach that was at the root of the ordinary-language philosophy movement (for what is ordinary language if not what intuitive speakers regard as such?). So he has a few caveats about the type of LAW in which such psycho-logical theory is supposed to consist: each law will be caeteris paribus and folksy in nature.

Grice gave indeed a seminar which he entitled, simply, “Needs.” As any student in psychology will realise – if he happens to take Grice seriously, as he should – “needs” feature large. Surely, Grice is a philosopher, and would be reading philosophical literature only. The days of his realiance on Wundt were long gone, and if he needed to refer to this old school of psychology which was so influential at Oxford once – versus the trash as which he described most of his contemporary stuff – it would be to point his tutee out that ‘back in the day, you know, the question as to whether there can be thought without language was quite a high topic!”.

If his seminar on “Needs” was basic it did not involve basic needs as such – he thought that Stampe’s explorations, in any case, were more basic than his own (Stampe had been Grice’s tutee at Oxford).

Grice’s communicatology explorations range both the phylogenesis AND the phylogenesis and he is bold enough, as the Oxonian philosopher he was, to aptly proclaim it. His stage of communication devices by one pirot to another in a ‘conversation’ involving a groan, and the simulation thereof, is meant to be a ‘myth’ of both the phylogenesis AND the ontogenesis of communication – aptly representing how the non-iconical builds on the iconical – for what is a pooh-poo ouch ouch bow wow interjection of pain in a communication device if not a replica of what, in the pirot, any unwelcome external stimulus will CAUSE the alarming response.

His ‘Method in philosophical psychology,’ as he declares, he was proudly assured that it had been delivered as separate lectures elsewhere, including an occasion as the John Dewey Memorial lecture, so he knew. He does not describe squirrels in the “Method,” but squarrels.

Indeed, it may come as a surprise for the philosopher – not Stampe – of course. But Grice manage to finds his perfect example. He is considering an attribution of a psychological (qua internal) state into a ‘creature’ – recall ‘God’ is used as ‘exegetical’ device – of a pirot – a squarel gobbling nuts – which nicely gets symbolized as “N.”

Grice is aware that he is being artificial in the reconstruction, but he is only concerned with the specific machinery a philosophical psychologist – as he was being, in the long tradition from Aristotle and the empiricists – and not more than that. If you started to be concerned with MORE specific machineries, you ceased to be a PHILOSOPHICAL psychology, and would be regarded by your philosophical community as a ‘psychologist’ simpliciter – a bit of a blue-collar profession: a service profession – and NOT a philosopher, as he never wished to stop being.

Grice would be familiar with the fact that squirrels – if not his squarrels – are notably UN-cooperative. This would hardly bother him. His ‘Method in philosophical psychology’ is meant to provide the framework for his framework. For each specimen of the species there would be qualifications to be made. And his squarrel was notably NOT the common European squarrel. Each scenario switches for each specimen and species – there may be cross-species type of rational (on the Homo sapiens sapiens part) ‘conversations’ – but not among squarrels, if they are supposed to represent a prototype of a squirrel.

At Oxford, as it happens – if not in Grice’s days -- the common squirrel that you would encounter is the Eastern grey squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, an invasive species from North America that has largely replaced the native Eurasian red squirrel, Sciurus vulgaris, in most of Oxford, if not England, or the UK. Regarding Grice’s query on "coo-rdinated" nut gathering via communication, these points are Griceian in character:

Evidence for Coordination

There is no scientific (psycho-logical or etho-logical, as Grice would have it) evidence that a specimen of Scirius vulgaris co-ordinates, in a "brood,” or group, to gather – never mind eat -- nuts through communicative devices.

Instead, the Scirius vulgaris is primarily a solitary (or Cartesian as Grice would have it) forager, that as a matter of fact, *compete*, rather than co-operate, for resources. 

Individual Strategies Over Coordination are then the norm, not the Griceian expectation for his specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Scatter Hoarding. Unlike social insects (bees or ants), the Scirius vulgaris uses a "scatter hoarding" strategy where the speciem buries often *thousands* of nuts independently.

Spatial Memory: The Scirius vulgaris, unlike Homo sapiens, relies on sophisticated spatial memory and "spatial chunking,” organizing nuts by type, to find their own caches rather than sharing a communal stash.

On top, there is evidence for what Grice calls the ‘sneak’, or Deceptive Behaviour. Far from coordinating or abiding by what Grice dubs alternatively the principle of conversational benevolence or, the principle of conversational helpfulness, a specimen of Scirius vulgaris will often be competitive and deceptive. Spceimens of Scirius vulgaris have been observed – not by Grice, but by Derek, his brother -- making what Derek Grice called a "fake" cach — i. e., pretending to bury a nut only while being watched — to trick another squirrel or squirrels – which are its conspecifics -- who might try to steal their food. 

When it comes then to what Grice would characterize as the ‘potential’ ‘role’ – in survival -- of ‘communication’ or ‘conversation’ at this level, it needs to be pointed that, while the Scirius vulgaris – the model behind Grice’s squarrel – does NOT co-ordinate gathering, it does use communication for *other* social purposes. These include:

Alarm Calls: The Sciius vulgaris expectably uses vocalisations – sometimes annoyingly to the Oxford philosophy tutor – such as a bark, a piece of co-ordinated chatter, a whistle, and tail-flicking to warn another speciemen or specimens of a predator – say, an Oxford philosophy don or couple of them perpateting on The Meadow – but NOT to signal food location.

Tail Signaling: This is a tail movements– a ‘gesture’ in Grice’s parlance – and thus an ‘utterance’ or ‘complete or whole utterance type -- can communicate or signal or ‘mean’ – in Grice’s preferred Anglo-Saxonism – frustration, or aggression, to keep other speciemsn or members of other species – such as Homo sapiens sapiens as Grice was -- away from a specific foraging area.

Social Learning: There is also evidence, some collected by Derek Grice, that specimens – especially virtuous  specimens of Scirius vulgaris can *learn* -- and not just learning how, but learning that – (to use Grice’s use of Ryle’s distinction) by observing another specimen or other specimens -- e.g., seeing which pots contain food, but this is "eaves-dropping,” and not what Grice would have as active co-ordination of the type promoted for Homo sapiens sapiens by his principle of conversational benevolence or his principle of conversational helpfulness. 

Derek Grice observed that if you happened to have noticed specimens of Scirius vulgaris near each other in The Meadow, as Oxonians call it, it is likely due to high food density, such as an idle tutor or two stupidly feeding them – when he or they should be elsewhere – ‘learning’ even if not poor --, rather than a co-operative effort effort of the type that Grice subscribes to Homo sapiens sapiens – “in our better moments, of course.”

Grice is returning to deeper psychological problems that he had encountered causally in his earlier ‘Further notes on logic and conversation.’ When distancing himself from Nowell-Smith, Austin, or Urmson on the treatment of the ‘implication’ behind the pragmatic contraditction posed by Moore’s paradox Grice is clear. He des not want to say that by uttering ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ the utterer has IMPLIED that he believes that the cat is on the mat. That’s NOT, he remarks, a natural use of ‘imply.’ Rather the utterer has EXPRESSED that the cat sat on the mat. Or technically, the utterer has EXPRESSED his belief that the cat sat on the mat. ‘Express’ had been the kernel behind idealist Brentano-type accounts of communication known in Europe via Croce and at Oxford via Collingwood. Grice will return to ‘express’ in “Method in philosophical psychology” exactly in terms of one of those laws of the psycho-logical theory, caeteris paribus, and folksy in nature. It is, as B. F. Loar has suggested, a functionalist empiricist account of what Grice in his Kantian flights regards as a moral rational constraint, seen here as a mere contingent generalization over functional states. The example in particular Grice redacts as follows

A JUDGE A JUDGE the cat is on the mat.

He wants to say that

A JUDGE-2 the cat is on the mat.

Is there a NON-LINGUISTIC difference between a pirot manifesting his JUDGEMENT that the cat is on the mat from a pirot manifesting his judgement that he judges that the cat is on the mat? Grice realizes that to allow for distinction without behavioural manifestation will not be easily welcomed by Wittgensteiians. However, he choses that path, if only because that seems to Grice to be the only way to reach the ‘reconstruction’ of the idea of EXPRESSING.

The law in question would be:

By uttering ‘The cat sat on the mat’ A EXPRESSES that the cat is on the mat iff A judges-2 that the cat is on the mat.

In the earlier format of “Logic and Conversation” this gives justification to the ‘dull, empiricist’ answer to the fundamental question of why we follow the maxims – in this case, do not say what you believe to be false.

Caeteris paribus, pirots are constructed in such a way that they can express their beliefs and volitions. The other pirots can RELY on that. This reliance is what is behind the second conversational maxim under QUALITAS – do not say that for which you lack evidence for. He had explored this in his earlier ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ addressing his audience at the British Academy with the President of the British Academy – A. J. P. Kenny, in evidence.

GRICE: The president has a corkscrew in his pocket.

MEMBER of the audience: What reason do you have to utter thus?

GRICE. Oh, no reason whatsoever.

The conversational is possible, and Grice has made a conversational move. But it is not an APPROPRAITE conversational move. It is not a conversational move that passes muster in either terms of this ‘contigent’ empirical generalization between functional states OR in the Kantian quasi-contractualist or plain rationalist lines of his earlier ‘Logic and Conversation.’

While Grice is technical about pirots, and pirotology in his “Method in philosophical psychology” that was because he was torturing his tutees at an early stage with Carnap’s ealy pirots that karulise elatically. In this earlier seminars, Grice goes on to coin PIROTESE – a variant of his secretive communication device – his new Highway Code devised while laying in the tub – or his later ‘Deutero-Esperanto.’ In Pirotese, the point is to provide a SIMPLIFICATION of our ways of talk. Borrowing (but not returning) from Austin: “Simple Ways”: Grice refers to PIROTESE as a simpler way of talking.

Recall that the type of conversational dyad that Grice is having in mind is such that springs when A finds himself in a survival risk:

A: Where did the dean’s cat sit?

B: On the mat.

By applying ‘potching’ and ‘cotching’, Grice will have more primitive counterparts of his VOL AND JUD. VOL and JUD are both forms of ‘cotching’ or conceiving – as in The Conception of Reason, not the Concept of it. But this cotching presupposes an earlier POTCHing, which is merely a perceptual rae-presentation, iconic in part, caused by the events in question. It is because B perceived (or potches) that the cat sat on the mat, that he can CONCEIVE (coth), indeed, JUDGE, that the cat is on the mat, and thus he is in a position to abide by the desideratum of conversational candour and supply the information A is after in his query – the formula with a single unknown item: A has already potched the cat, and the mat, and the concept of sit – A is just not clear if the cat did sit on the mat on the occasion he is inquiring about.

In “Method in philosophical psychology”, while Grice expands on the MOLECULAR potchings and cotching or that potching and cotching which involves yet a unary opearator such as ‘not’ – he does not go any deeper. In his earlier ‘Pirotese’: “How pirots karulilse elatically, some simple ways” he does. If potch and cotch seem primitive enough, object does not. It’s an obble all that pirots require – not surprsisingly, Grice stopped using a personal computer when he realised that not only was it not allowing ‘sticky wicket’, but spell checking his pirot into a parot.

An obble is yet not all that there is. Grice uses ‘o’ to symbolize it, and uses subscripts. As with ‘the cat’ – the dean’s cat, that is, which is a dog – and ‘the mat’, and the dyadic predicate on ‘sitting on’ – explored in ‘Actions and Events’ – we have o1 and o2.

Grice further introduces the fing and the fang. These stand for properties – and are symbolized as F1 and F2. So, it is one PICTURE of rae-presentatio that will be given as o1 F1 o2 – the cat sat on the mat --. If the dean’s cat is shaggy enough, that’s a FING. If he is disposed to sit for too long of a period on a mat, that’s a FANG.

Grice introduces a further element in PIROTESE, id, which stands for a Relation – dyadic at least. The cat is shaggy and sat on the mat – we have obble o1, the shaggy cat, and obble o2, the mat, and the dyadic relation of ‘sitting on’ – the id.

The obble is indeed a post-Warnockian innovation. Grice realizes that his joint seminars with Warnock on the philosophy of perception – notably centred around ‘visa’ – were insufficient in that they did not delve deeper into the THING-aspect. The blame is on Russell who speaks of a meta-language and an object-language, a language of objects o obbles. But for Kant, what we’ll never know is not so much the obble, but the ting-a-ling (the thing in itself – Ding an Sich – that stands allegedly BEHIND A’s and B’s potching and cotching of o1, o2, their fings, fangs, and Fids. In logical forms,

A: Where did the cat sit?

B. On the mat.

VOLBJUDAJUDB(the cat sat on the mat).

OBBLE-FORMULATION:

VOLBJUDAJUDB(Fango1Fango2Fid)

THING-FORMULATION – for ‘the thorn rune’ to represent the ting-a-ling:

VOLBJUDAJUDB(FandDING1FingDING2Fid). Or using ϸ

VOLBJUDAJUDB(FANGϸ₁FINGϸ₂FID)

where ϸ is pirotese not for ‘obble’ but for ‘dingaling.’ – and not to be confused with Grice’s θ – lower case of Θ – which Grice uses in “Method in philosophical psychology’ to represent the Hellenic ‘th’ of theory, not the Anglo-Saxon ‘th’ of ‘thing.’

In sum, what Grice is offering is a conversational framework that makes base with reality. His concern is that of the standard philosopher who wants to provide a foundation for his critical variety of realism. Perception will provide a RAE-PRESENTATION of the shaggy cat sitting on the mat. But this RAE-PRESENTATION is doing a job. – Grice is sure at this point that, for all his functionalist adventures, to ‘rae-present’ is like to play cricket, or football.

When he was the captain of the football team at Corpus for one year, he knew that THE CORPUS FOOTBALL TEAM is doing for CORPUS what CORPUS cannot do for itself, to wit: engage in a game of football.

In a similar fashion there is no way the shaggy cat that sat on the mat can just ‘appear’ on the scene. The most they can is GET RAE-PRESENTED --. Grice allows that the most primitive form of rae-presentation – having learned Pierce almost by heart – is EICONIC, or iconic, i. .e. natural, and causal (His ‘spots’ that ‘meant’ measles). But there is a SECONDARY, more sophisticated type of RAE-PRESENTATIO which takes place when this iconic mode of correlation gets replaced by a non-iconic one. There is nothing in ‘the’ ‘cat’ ‘sat’ ‘on’ ‘the’ ‘mat’ that displays an ICONIC mode of correlation with the fact that they, in combination, manage to ‘rae-pressent.’

In asking his question, A is NOT interested in how B perceived the shaggy cat sitting on the mat. A is, as a matter of survival, ONLY interested in the real cat, really shaggy as she is, really sitting on the real mat. Not obbles, but ding-a-lings.

Grice’s conception of rationality still has a way to go, and he elaborates on that in Aspects of Reason and Reasoning. When reminiscing on them in ‘Prejudices and predilections’ he is aware that there was a causal link missing: the reasoner’s belief in the consequence of his reasoning has to be CAUSED by his INTENTION that there be a legitimate passage that lead to that consequence from his belief in the premiss. He spends most of the lectures on reasoning as he ascends the ladder from credibility and desirability to universable forms of such patterns, with an ultimate goal of the provision of ‘If you want to be happy, abide by the categorical imperative.’ As a bonus, he provides a definition of ‘eudaimonia’ in terms of such constraints – which allows him to accept that it is, to echo Locke, the PERSON, or very intelligent rational MAN that can be happy – more of the country gentleman, than the monomaniac stamp collector!

One of the virtues of Grice’s theory of conversation is that, unlike that proposed by his critics, it is elementary and self-evidently true. If he was a-systematic in the presentation of it, it was this obviousness to it that justified his doing so. No philosopher worth his name is expected – at Oxford or elsewhere – to be lectured on how conversation should proceed.

But there is a deeper reason for this. Grice is aware, as he becomes aware of his own development as a philosopher, that there is an underlying unity, with REASON featuring large. Indeed, if one can think of a good expansion for P. G. R. I. C. E. that would be the PHILOSOPHICAL (not scientific) GROUNDS (i. .e. foundations) of RATIONALITY, or the faculty of REASON – conversational or other – behind it – in more basic elements, which may well be ultimately pre-rational, since reason is not self-justificatory: INTENTIONS, that is the meat and bones of his m-intentions which inform his provision of the significance of the conversational moves made by rational players --, the CATEGORIES, be they conversational – QUALITAS, QUANTITAS, RELATIO, MODVS, you name them – and ENDS – which are the things that make you happy, and not just the thing you have to achieve at the end of EACH of the conversation you happen to find yourself a part of.

This systematics is typical of the philosophising of some philosophers – think Leibniz, think Aquinas – but not all: think Derrida! The systematics allows for a theory-theory and not just a theory of conversation. The philosopher sees himself a theory-theorist, i. e. as the designated human in society to provide a theory for a theory. Grice is thus not only providing a theory (never an analysis) of conversation – significance and communication – but a THEORY for it, grounded on rationality, and he spent the full Immanuel Kant lectures AND the John Locke lectures lecturing about what he entitled the ‘aspects of reason and REASON-ing.’

The elements constitutive of the theory of conversation – understood as a branch of psychologia rationalis, are those provided by this bigger picture. Grice regretted that with the specialisation that was more and more required in academia – including Oxford – it was a sad consequence that philosophers may not even be REQUIRED to provide a general background of what he was doing. And Grice was especially offended by one of his colleagues, that would confess that he ‘could engage in any branch of philosophy,’ ‘except ethics’!

One topic which belongs not to Grice’s philosophy of language simpliciter (what I here call the framework) but to what I here call the FRAMEWORK of the framework (Grice’s theory-theory) is causation. Was was ambivalent towards causation for his whole life. When he citicised Stevenson – in the Yale 1944 novelty that Grice rushed to buy – on Ethics and Language, he goes on to criticise publicly in The Oxford Philosophical Society as being ‘too causal to be true.’ But when in the Kant Lectures he fails to give an account of the link between a REASONER’S acceptance of the consequence out of the reasoner’s acceptance of the PREMISE, in his ‘Prejudices and predilections,’ he notes that he now sees that he left a gap in those lectures at Stanford and Oxford on reason: the causal link. A proper piece of reasoning can only be deemed to take place if the reasoner’s ACCEPTANCE of the consequence is CAUSED by his acceptance of the premisse. He had ventured an analogous explanation for his earlier ‘Intention and uncertainty.’ After dismissing his optimistic palaeo-Stoutian account of intending for a neo-Prichardian one, Grice hastens to add the causal link:

GRICE: Please untie me! My head is aching – I need to scratch it!

GUARD. Alright, alright. Don’t make such a fuss about it (He realeases Grice’s arms – Grice remains still). I thought you were going to scratch your head.

GRICE. I’ve changed my mind.

Grice’s point being that the agent’s INTENTION to do action A is a combination of a WILING that he will do action A AND a BELIEF (with a probability greater than 0.5) that his WILLING will CAUSE action A. Later in his career, -- in ‘Actions and Events,’ distanced himself from this causalist position, very much in line with his more Heglatonian (rather than confessed Kantotelian) account of conversation. If conversation is a free enterprised conjoined freely by feely-acting agents, we should stop asking for causal justifications. And there is an easy way to do that, by dispensing the Prichardian conditions on willing of causal efficacy.

GRICE. My son gave a good friend of his a job at his car body parts shop.

STRAWSON. That was so kind of him. It is a small shop, though. Did Timothy really need to give his friend a job?

GRICE. Oh, he never got the job. My son just GAVE he job to hm.

Grice’s point being that when it comes to conversation and life at large, it is not the INTENTION but the good intention that paves the way to hell. Giving the job means the INTENTION to give the job. There is no way in hell that the purity of the agent’s intention is to be nullified by the fact that the recipient never GETS to get the job!

The underlying theme behind the framework of the framework, that is, the theory theory that back his theory of conversation as part of psycholgia rationalis, is survival. Each species – not specimen – of pirot has its own survival conditions. The conditions for Homo sapiens sapiens are not those for Troglodytes aedon or Fringilla domesticus, to use Austin’s example (“I KNOW that’s a goldfinch, I don’t just BELIEVE it!”). Evolutionarily, it may well be the case that vision was monocular. But when it comes to Homo sapiens sapiens, the philosopher need not rely on the scientific results of the empirical anthropological science. He just knows that a Homo sapiens ssapiens has TWO eyes and two eyes only by means of which he sees (“I see with my eyes, Geoffrey Sampson tested his students at Lancaster, only to prove that only half of them thought it was analytic). Thereofore, Grice’s explorations on the senses of the Martians become relevant. In more phenomenological terms, Grice is concerned with EXPERIENCE, as categorially determined for Homo sapiens sapiens, in the survival conditions and evolutionary stage at which Homo sapiens sapiens finds himself. The conditions of conversation FOLLOW from this bigger paradigm. Philosophers, after all, are into the big picture, and NOTHING but the big picture, trust me, will satisfy them – even if they are of the Oxonian minutiae type seemingly involved with the prognostics of linguistic botany, as H. P. Grice was often characterised as being!

 

PART FOUR: CONCLUSION

We have reached a level where we should be more or less clear about the PHILOSOPHICAL IMPORT of H. P. Grice’s theory of conversation, and the seminal role it played in Oxford philosophy in the twentieth century. We have presented, in Part I: THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK; in part II the various conversational illustrations along the parade of publicationsn and unpublications with which Grice delighted his audience, and have inspected the major philosophical consequences of his type of rationalism invoked in his substantial theory underlying conversation. So it is time for some conclusions.

Grice has not been fortunate in this exegeses. He says he was, but just out of politeness. Oxford philosophy (and more importantly, NON-Oxford philosophy, and NON-OXFORD NON-philosophy) being what it is, that was bound to happen.

As Grice says, he suffered his whole life the ANTAGONISTIC mode of philosophising: the epagogue. Whenever Grice felt challenged he forgot his native Birmingham-area accent and appealed to classical Greek. “I was never into epagogue; I am all for DIA-gogue!” But Oxford philosophy is NOT made of diagogue. It is a REQUIREMENT for passing the simplest examination in philosophy – forget other disciplines: you cannot argue history or brain science – that you should take a CRITICAL stance: critique. And critique is what Grice got.

In all fairness the conversations in which Grice found himself philosophically engaging were not just his contemporaries. He indeed had praised to treat those who are dead and great as dead and living. So, it is worth considering his interactions which Grice undertook ‘in theory’. Under this group we should consider not his engagement with Athenian Dialectic (the old-gone trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) but more contemporary figures, too.

An important figure to consider is John Locke, associated with Oxford to the point that the John Locke Prize was possibly the most valuable prize that Oxford could offer. Grice sets the record straight in his proem to his John Locke Lectures. He confesses he had applied for the Prize on TWO occasions – failed on both. The references to Locke by Grice fall in two groups. The more tangential one in one respect is Grice’s obsession with that passage in Essay concerning Humane Understanding where ‘humane’ as Locke was, Locke explores ‘person,’ ‘man,’ ‘parrot.’ Grice takes this up in ‘Personal identity’ and never let it go. Up to his memoir in ‘Prejudcies and predilections’ Grice is still considering what he know sees as a TRANSSUBSTANTIATION, where the human (or man) has to turn himself into a metaphysician and become a person. The less tangential (is it?) concern is what has been called the TELEMENTATIONISM. In the European tradition of philosophy, any interest in communication – via signs which were arbitrary – was the place where the philosopher could expand on how useful – the utility – of it all. Homo would not be the rational animal if Homo were uncapable of ‘letting his companions’ know about his ‘ideas,’ which stand for thing. This telementational model pervades Grice’s programme, and his contribution to the debate was his rather elaborate functionalism that allows the philosopher to describe such an ‘idea’ in terms which do not rely on ‘the semantic.’ For such a manoeuvre, he needs to disqualify Locke on some respects: words will not be signs (as Locke claims) and it’s best to stick to conversational moves which may display different forms – not necessarily ‘linguistic’ or verbal –: a gesture (like Grice’s frown) will do. It’s the utterance that matters, of the UTTERER, which becomes Grice’s equivalent of the de-Saussure SIGNIFICANS. Locke was being popular at Oxford due mainly to the work of a practitioner of this type of ordinary language philosophy: Ronald Hall, who upon leaving Oxford, dedicated the rest of his life to the edition of The Locke Newsletter, so Grice knew where the Oxford tradition shone best.

Consider Wilson. Grice takes a look at Wilson’s contribution as late as 1987, the year before Grice’s death. He brings Cook Wilson as a relativist in the sense that truth would be too much of a standard for him, and ‘taken for granted’ seems to do just fine. Grice will refer to Cook Wilson’s Statement and inference when considering the conversational role of various ‘connectors,’ notably ‘if’ as in

COOK WILSON. But who did kill Cock Robin.

FAIRBOROUGH. It wasn’t the Wren.

Grice considers those conversational exchanges as conditional in form. Cook Wilson is led to engage in a piece of conditional reasoning – elimination. If it wasn’t the Wren it was most likely the Sparrow. A third occasion refers to Grice’s memoir, where Grice cherished the encounter with a rear admiral at Strawson’s college of Magdalen and the talk that ensued after diner in the common room.

GRICE. Cook Wilson. I still find his STATEMENT and INFERENCE engagement.

REAR ADMIRAL. I cannot say I would appreciate Cook Wilson the way YOU do, I was just his tutee. But we just loved him.

GRICE. What was about him that you found particularly of reverential devotion?

REAR ADMIRAL. The thing he SAID things. He would out of the blue, provide all the confort I needed by a simple tautological remark like ‘What we know we know.’

It would be more difficult to find a conversational illustration where ‘What we know we know’ finds a place in conversation. When formulating his principle, ‘Make your contribution such as is required by the purpose of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.’ Grice found that patent tautologies like ‘Women are women’ or ‘War is war’ may play a judicious role qua conversational moves. Ditto for ‘What we know we know.’

COOK WILSON’S DAUGHTER. I didn’t know that.

COOK WILSON. You do know.

DAUGHTER. True. I know. We know.

COOK WILSON. What we know we know.

DAUGHTER. That, too. Thank you, Father.

From the closests of his colleagues. From the closest of his affiliations. One should be a good conversational example. Grice’s polemic with Austin. Admittedly, provocative intent and all, Grice is postulating the problem wrongly: linguistic botanising does NOT mean ‘going through the dictionary and believing all that the dictionary says!’ But the conversation on record went:

GRICE: Byzantine. I’m feeling byzantine.

AUSTIN. I can’t see what you mean.

GRICE. Well, if you would, you’d have better eyes than most. What I meant, I followed your advice, and did go through the dictionary. Recall your point that the way to get to the kernel of what ‘feeling Adj.’ means is to go through the Oxford Little Dictionary. Well, I had to stop at ‘BY-‘ all combinations made perfect logical sense to me.

AUSTIN. Perhaps you should have tried the Concise!

GRICE: Austin. My point: I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says

(APPALLED SILENCE and Pause IN THE HALL OF FAME OF THE PLAYGROUP)

AUSTIN: And that’s where you make your big mistake, if you ask me.

The problem is that nobody was!

Grice’s polemics with Austin are long-going, and they are some of them on record by Grice himself. My favourite being Grice’s treatment of Austin in the ‘Prolegmena’ to ‘Logic and Conversation’. Grice credits Austin with providing a general formula to Ryle’s even more pedantic approach to ‘willingness’. ‘A did A M-ly’. But Austin cares to distinguish between the implicature and what is NOT the implicature, and that is that.

Grice’s interactions with the senior group led by Ryle did not fare any better. In the obituary of Ryle written by Owen for The Aristotelian Society, Grice could read Ryle’s impressions about this. Ryle was familiar with Grice in the wrong way. Austin gone, Ryle thought he would recover the lustre that Austin had taken from him as the Grand Master of Ordinary-Language Philosophy. In retrospect, and only on Ryle’s death, Owen tells the truth: Ryle despised Austin and his sequel, and by that he meant Grice, who had the cheek to continue those infamous meetings of the Saturday-moning play group. By the time, transportation to London had made easier, and few would stay at Oxford for the week-end anyway (“Week-end? What IS a week-end?” Grice is clear that Austin never cared for the play group more than he should and that the Saturday-morning meetings were held ‘during term time’. By the time Austin was gone, there was no such thing as ‘term time,’ and life beings at Oxford Circus!

Austin was the leader of the play group but not his only component. Indeed, no history of H. P. Grice’s philosophy of language and communication could be to some complete unless it discussed the consequences, as per conclusions, with regard to the interactions by Grice with other members than Austin from this group. It is interesting that, when it comes to Grice’s own CONTRIBUTIONS to the minutes of Austin’s play group the record is scares. We have at least one interaction.

AUSTIN: Byzantine?

GRICE. Yes, that’s how I’m feeling. And I did the work, I went through the dictionary. To be honest, I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says.

AUSTIN. And that’s where you make your big mistake.

Austin’s response didn’t exactly hurt Grice, and in fact Grice prided of the fact that he had the courage to challenge Austin on that. Of course Austin’s point is NOT, when it comes to botany, to go ‘through the dictionary and believe everything it says,’ which is Grice’s paraphrase. The dictionary doesn’t DEFINE, for one. And ordinary language rather grows from the native competence of its speakers, not from the pages of the Little Oxford Dictionary.

A second interaction of Grice-Austin in the play group – or Grice’s interaction in the playgroup simpliciter – has made into the pages in print. In some versions, the credit to Grice is not given. Grice repairs the mistake. When recalling the incident, it is best to provide a conversational illustration of what such para-philosophical conversation on a Saturday morning – ‘when plain philosophers meet to philsophise,’ as Gellner had it – might have gone:

AUSTIN. That’s not really philosophically important.

GRICE. I fail to see how you draw such a sharp line between what is philosophically important and what is not.

AUSTIN. I challenge then, Grice, to bring for next Saturday morning an example of a philosophical UNimportant remark.

The fact that the discussion took four weeks is the whole point of the punch line. The next week Grice brings the requested example.

GRICE. It has been observed that the modifier ‘very’ applies to any adjective you choose. However, the grammatically analogous modifier ‘highly’ seldom does so. ‘Highly stupid’ does not ring a bell in me as a piece of ordinary language.

AUSTIN. Your point?

GRICE. I would claim that the distinction in our use of ‘highly’ versus ‘very’ fits your identification of a realm of conversational examples that while INTERESTING, display NO PHILOSOPHICAL interest. Or to use your preferred sobriquet. It is UNimportant.

AUSTIN. Important UNimportant important. I was never good at judging what is IMPORTANT simpliciter, never mind PHILOSOPHICALLY important.

Grice recalls the anecdote with wisdom and humour. Given that the occasion had been treated as the epitome of the Play Group – and by extension, the whole Oxford programme in ordinary language philosophy – frivolity, Grice felt like justifying both Austin and Grice in retrospect. When taking out of context, one would think that Austin and Grice were discussing about proper and improper uses of ‘highly’ versus proper and improper uses of ‘very.’ But, as Grice makes it clear, the situation was other, and rather compared to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The mediaeval question was aimed at a clarification in the analysis of materia extensa. Similarly, Grice goes on, the very/highly debate was merely put forward as an EXEMPLIFICATION towards the identification of an alleged distinction between a question or problem which, while important per se, would not qualify as having any PHILOSOPHICAL importance whatsoever. Grice confesses that the debates on issues on the Saturday morning was replaced by another one without any clear sign that they have reached some level of success in answering the original question!

In chronological terms, the figure of A. D. WOOZLEY is figure in this respect. He had participated in Austin’s old play group (that lasted only two years) and joined Austin in 1946 in the ‘new’ play group. Grice was familiar with Woozley pre-war as Woozley was editing pieces by Reid that would become helpful to Grice in his ‘Personal identity.’ Interestingly, after the war, in the very 1946, Grice – who was Woozley’s senior – organized with him a joint seminar on ‘Common sense and scepticism.’ It was a long seminar, and Grice’s role was that of attacking the sceptic. In retrospect, Grice saw those interactions with affection, and he thought that the objection he posed to the sceptic in the very terms of the theory of conversation (communication in reasonable terms) should prove ‘fatal.’ While in the later version of ‘Meaning,’ Grice does not consider the quantificational or predicate-calculus or propositional-calculus logical form of the message that is being communicated, the analysans being always of the form

VOLAJUDBJUDAp

in ‘Common Sense and scepticism’ Grice considers

VOLAJUDBJUDA(p & ~p).

There is an Eleatic side to this. What if the sceptic is intending his addressee to engage in a CONTRADICTION? This is what Grice leads the sceptic to be precisely doing.

The figure of G. A. PAUL is important to consider in connection with Grice. When Grice cared to list the members of the play group – in the only passage where he does – the list is surely not complete. He is just pointing to the fact that each member displayed ‘such an independence of mind’ that any idea that they were just DISCIPLES of Austin, or his apostles, would be silly. And it is here that PAUL gets a mention. When in “Retrospective Epilogue” Grice explores the motivations and underlying unity of his various philosophical efforts – this was the year before his death –he seems to suggest that it was Paul’s ‘Is there a problem about sense data?” in Mind that was in the air thick enough for Grice and Austin and the more junior Warnock to realise that the philosophy of perception was a topic worth pursuing for its general value, and not just as a discipline within epistemology, as it is often done in the Continent, which is always less empiricist. Paul’s career was brief. An amateur sailor, he died after a frigid incursion in the North Sea.

Consider Strawson. It would be difficult to find a peer to Grice’s talent other than Strawson. As a tutee, and later colleague, he provided foil to Grice’s concoctions, and the interesting things are two: that a tutee would be so engaged with his tutor – by law, an Oxford tutee loses all interest in his tutor, as Grice did with his own, Hardie – once the examinations are over. The other is that the tutor (Grice) showed an interest in what his former tutee had to say (most tutors don’t) and perhaps unethically, came to critique him! The divergences became deeper with the years. From the early credit by Strawson to Grice in Introduction to Logical Theory, a full programme in Strawsonian truth-value gap semantics-sans-implicature became an option to some. The Gricieans had to keep defending a world-view without truth-value gaps.

But Strawson was five years Grice’s junior. There were other philosophers in between. One is even older than Austin: Hart.

Hart has been studied critically – notably in a festcrhift with a contribution by G. P. Baker (Gordon Parks Baker, if you musn’t) on ‘defeasibility’ and meaning. The biographer of H. L. A. Hart has examined the role Grice played in Hart’s development: he intimated him! This is curious since in Hart’s letter to Morton White, Hart wants (uninvitedly) warn White that Grice ‘is a character’ that needs prompting, ‘as we give it to him at Oxford – so please do when he visits.’ Hart manages to quote from Grice in an obscure review to Holloway’s Language and Intelligence that appeared in the pages of The Philosophical Quarterly some five years earlier than when Strawson finally decided that it was time to publish Grice’s piece.

Hampshire is another interesting character, and his association with Hart seems natural. They have a joint essay together, on intention and certainty, which was the trigger for Grice’s own ‘intention and UN-certainty’. But Hampshire knew Hart from well before then, having socialsed, as Grice did not, with Austin and Berlin and four other – the group of six – at the Tuesday meetings at All Souls. Hampshire’s Thought and Action, a masterpiece with some boring sides to it – shows some similarity with Grice in the general framework of the consideration of intention, and behaviour, with emphasis on the point about trust, and co-ooperation. While Hampshire and Grice interacted occasionally after the war – they would dine at each other colleges at least once a month – their secific credits are sparse.

Nowell-Smtih is an intersteing character. Just one year younger than Grice, he possibly felt all the embarrassment in the fact that while HE did coin the idea of a ‘contextual implication’ and went on to catalogue the ‘rules’ of trust, and relevance – he is only recalled by Grice by his clumsy interations with Austin, which Grice provides in detail.

FIRST INTERACTION.

Nowell-Smith. Bribe! The idea!

Austin. Well, that’s what happened, if we are to trust Gardiner. The Greek tutee was just bribing Gardiner for a free pass to avoid the Friday tutorial so he could head straight to London on the Friday train.

Nowell-Smith. And what did Gardiner say.

Austin. Well, that’s the point. What would YOU say?

Nowell-Smith. That I don’t take bribes on principle.

Austin. Would you? I think ‘No thanks’ may even more than that Greek bastard deserves!

SECOND INTERACTION.

Nowell-Smith: Nobody speaks to confuse his audience – unless you are a poet, you know.

Austin. What do you mean.

Nowell-Smith. I specifically mean Donne. What can be more Unintelligible than ‘From the imagined four-coners of the earth, angels your trumpets blow.’

Austin. What about it?

Nowell-Smith: I find ‘imagined four-corners of the eatth’ unparseable.

Austin. Your problem. Surely Donne could count on a smarter audience. By importantion you get the imagined out of the clause, and get: angels, blow your trumpets from what LESS INTELLIGENT people than me would refer to as the four corners of the earth.

Grice’s problem with Nowell-Smtih was  deeper than that. If Grice does use ‘rule’ for ‘maxim,’ when referring to the ‘rules of the conversational game’ he knew deep down that they are not RULES as cricket rules are rules, or auction-bridge rules are rule (he mastered the game) or chess rules are rules (he also mastered this game) or football rules are rules (Grice captained the football team at Corpus for a year). While Grice has a full panoply of concepts to see how his rules of the conversational game are only METAPHORICAL THUS called, he was never sure Nowell-Smith did. In any case, Nowell-Smith never stopped being the empiricist he was, and would have hardly swallowed the Kantian weight that Grice needed to impose to the rules for them STOPPING from being arbitrary, constitutive, procedures of a given coordination activity and become part (if not parcel) of the human faculty that makes a person a human: reason itself, and conversational reason its offspring!

A similar situation with Urmson. These were the days when Oxford was at its (or her?) most parochial, so don’t expect to find any of this in pint. Urmson ended up writing the obituary for Grice in THE INDEPENDENT (which nobody at Oxford reads), but the interaction dates from a few years earlier. My favourite is Grice’s citation of Urmson in ‘Utterer’s meaning and revisited.’ When we analysed previously the anatomy of the M-INTENTION we got

VOLIT_AJUDGE_BACCEPT_Ap

where ACCEPT is Grice’s dummy for ‘either volit or judge.’ I. e. the anatomy of a single M-intention behind the simplest conversational move involves a VOLITION on the part of the game-player that his co-player will JUDGE that the conversationalist ACCEPTS that p. (‘Close the door!’ It is already closed!). It is discussion with Urmson – in the example of a bribery – that moves Grice further away from the causalist approach he had ventured in ‘Meaning.’ In ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ Grice thus cites Urmson explicitly as the only source for his necessity to expand the clauses required in the NECESSITY of the conditions for an M-intention being what it is. Grice’s analysis was formulated up to that point in a manner which was loose enough to allow for the motivation behind the utterer behind a matter of a CAUSAL influencing his co-conversationalist in terms of an expected ‘response’ – or ‘effect,’ indeed. The cause-effect link despised by Hume. Urmson made it clear to Grice that there is a REASON involved here. Kemmerling expresses this by means of a curved arrow, which is not the truth-functional ‘if’ – p -> q. In Urmson’s original case of a bribery, we can go back to GARDINER and ONASSIS exchange.

GARDINER: See you on Friday then, Onasssis.

ONASSIS. I won’t be able to make it. I intend to take the morning train to London then.

GARDINER. Are you suggesting you’ll miss our tutorial.

ONASSIS produces a bundle of bills.

By bribing Gardiner, Onassis is EXPECTING that his showing the colour of money, Gardiner will allow Onassis skip the tutorial. But what kind of behaviour do we have on Gardiner’s part? Is Gardiner’s acceptance of the bribe CAUSED by his perception of the money? No. What we require for Onassis feel free to skip the tutorial is that Onassis recognizes that he has instilled in Gardiner a REASON, and not merely a CAUSE to accept the money. Grice reformulates Urmson’s original example in terms of a torturer applying thumbscrews on his victim.

TORTURER. Where is he?

VICTIM. Won’t say.

TORTURER applies thumbscrews

VICTIM. In the attic!

Here, the victim’s conversational move, ‘In the attic’ is prompted by the thumbscrews but not as mere CAUSE. The victim has still to process his pain in such a way that the pain will provide his REASON, and not merely his CAUSE for answering the question!

Urmson received good treatment by his former colleagues and tutees in a festschrift which unfortunately made little of his interaction with Grice. The locus classicus for a full account of the history and the concluding prospects of Grice’s theory of conversation will have to take into account what became a famous locus classicus in he literarture of Oxford ordinary-language philosophy. In Urmson’s Parenthetical Verbs, and in his essay on Probability which appeared in a collection edited by one of Grice’s earliest – if not the earliest – tuttee: A. G. N. Flew, Urmson discusses a few points that have Griceian relevance. Urmson refers to a ‘scale.’ This is before Grice is commenting the usual mistake made by that philosopher who goes as per this conversation:

MALCOLM. You know that, Moore?

MOORE. No, I just believe it.

The reciprocal:

MALCOLM: You believe that, Moore?

MOORE: No, I know it.

Grice and Urmson agree that Moore is being illogical here: if he knows it, he believes it. Urmson explains this in terms of the scale (Urmson’s term): ‘know’ above ‘belief.’ The utterance of a parenthetical, such as ‘I believe,’ versus ‘I know’ is guided by the choice guided by expectations in conversation. Urmson mentions expectations involving trust and informativeness. In further publications, notably in his essay on ‘Intensionality’ for the Aristotelian Society Urmson considers:

A: The backyard is empty. No animals there

B: Wrong: there is a bacterium.

Second version:

A: The backyard is empty. No animals there.

B: Wong. Aunt Matilda is there.

Urmson, like Grice, would claim that there is an implicature that ‘animal’ conversationally implicates – ‘not an ant’ and ‘not an aunt.’ “Animal” by default is, in Urmson’s parlance, ‘middle-size animal.’ None of this level of detail is usually encountered in standard presentations of Grice’s philosophy – the reason being that the Oxonian context is taken out of the account!

HARE is an interesting figure to analyse in connection with Grice’s pragmatics in that Hare could be elusive. He had lectured with both Austin and Grice on a seminar on Ethica Nicomachea, and Hare would indeed succeed Kneale who had succeeded Austin as White’s professor of moral philosophy. The interactions with Grice started early enough, and Grice would rely on Hare’s 1949 ‘Imperative sentences’ essay in Mind to elucidate with his tutees issues of meaning. Grice knew that Hare was into something.

In contrast with Grice, in retrospect, we may say that Hare became too obsessed with just ONE type of NEUSTIC. He took his professional duties seriously, and once he was appointed the White’s professor of moral philosophy, he possibly thought, as Grice suggests, that he no longer needed to provide an answer qua philosopher as such. It is not surprising that when criticizing the colonial philosopher J. L. Mackie, who had recently died, Grice in the first Paul Carus lectures, brings Mackie to task, by quoting extensively from The Invention of right and wrong. But of all the paraphernalia in Mackie’s essay, it is the verbatim comments by Hare against the universality of values that struck Grice most as ripe for criticism.

Grice would object to Hare that ‘sub-atomic particles’ of logic need not be multiplied beyond necessity. Grice does distinguish between the RADIX and the PROPOSITIONAL CONTEXT (that cat sat on the mat) to which an indicator of MODE is attached. But he rather SIMPLIFIES the modes – to two: the VOLIT and the JUDGE – and both are seen as manifestations of one single supra-operator: the ACCEPT. Throughout his career, Grice kept this generalizing attitude, which he saw was being restricted by Hare by focusing on just one type of sub-atomic analysis, the “!” operator.

When the O. E. D. were looking for early citations of ‘conversational’ implicature and implicature simpliciter, I provided the quote from the early 1967 essay by Hare on Indicatives, where the conversation could go:

HARE. I shall post the letter.

MRS. HARE. Please.

HARE. Or burn it.

Hare is applying Grice’s consideration re: “My wife is in the kitchen; therefore, my wife is in the kitchen or in the garden.” Hare is seeing that one alleged asymmetry between an !-forced conversational move and a .-forced conversational move may be explained away by recourse to the conversational logic provided by Grice that knows no boundaries between the alethic and the practical.

Indeed, Hare is being reluctant here, and cannot really quote from ‘Logic and conversation’, but from Grice’s earlier ‘The Causal Theory of Perception.’ In the version of ‘Logic and conversation’ that came to light in 1975, Grice is critical about the look of  his ‘conversational immanuel’ as too alethically-oriented. He would remark that he has stated the maxims as if the purpose of conversation were the maximally efficient exchange of information – for ‘indicative cases,’ as he has it in his 1948 ‘Meaning’ – but accommodation can easily be made to allow for the mutual influencing – psi-transfer – behind the simplest motivation by a conversationalist in the ‘instititution of a decision’ via deliberation. In such colloquial terms, he seems to be addressing Hare’s obsession with the practical reason which Kant only thought elucidating well after he had critiqued alethic reason in full!

WARNOCK was quite Grice’s senior, but they got on together very well, and one is surprised that Warnock, but not Grice, was able to engage in issues in the philosophy of perception with BOTH Austin AND Grice – whereas the direct interface AUSTIN-GRICE on this topic is missing (Excpet for Grice’s reference to his hate for that ‘sexist bit of vocabulary, the trouser-word’ coined by you know who! The first Carus lecture). Warnock and Grice would spend joint seminars on the philosophy of perception, and the concoction of VISUM is academic in detail. Those seminars were, as they are not NOW, Oxford having become more narcissistic and self-centred – were collaborative efforts in the Oxford manner. The conversationalist B was meant to refute all that conversationalist A had said the previous week. So we can imagine.

GRICE. Warnock had introduced the visum last week, and I will extroduce it today.

WARNOCK remains silent – (Participation at joint seminars is reserved for the final section of the conversation.

GRICE: (after forty minutes against visa). Any questions?

WARNOCK: Yes, I think there is more to be said about the visum that you allow, but see you next week, Mr. Grice.

Warnock’s own essay, The object of morality, has sections on trust and cooperation that are almost too Griceain to be true, but the two men interacted. And what’s more, Warnock knew what interacting with Grice was. In his “Saturday mornigns”, Warnock expands on various interesting aspects of Grice’s interactions. For one, Warnock testifies that of all the places that Austin preferred for the play group meetings, St. John’s room provided by Grice was Austin’s faovurite, ‘since it made Austin looked like the important business c. e. o. that he was not’. Warnock reports Grice’s ‘How CLEVER language is!’ and hastens to add about the naivete of it all. This, Warnock gets on record, was NOT a public venue – it was not uttererd even on a Saturday morning. And adds that the Saturday mornings, even, were of course not PUBLIC venues, in a way that a joint seminar would be a public venue. Warnock’s implicature being that Grice and others were led to feel free to disagree with Austin (“I don’t give a hoot what the dicionary says!”, Grice would shout at Austin) in ways that was just not etiquette in the ‘flintier’ experiences which were the PUBLIC occasions that had Austin as lecturer – and Warnock knew that Grice had participated in TWO of them with Austin: one on Categories and De Interpreatione, and another one along with a third, R. M. Hare, on Ethica Nicomachea. Warnock never showed, as Grice did, a theoretical interest in a philosophy of language as such. However, due to this status in the Oxford hierarchy, he would testify to current developments in the philosophy of language – vide his treatment on Schiffer on ‘meaning of imperatives’ in “Language and Morality” or this advising B. F. Loar, a Rhodes fellow from the New World – on Loar’s dissertation on ‘Sentence meaning.’

As we proceed, as Grice would have it, in ‘strict order of seniority,’ we reach D. F. Pears. Some tutees recall him as a ‘short man,’ but there was more to Pears than that. His aristocratic background – of “Pears’s Encyclopadeia” fame – and affilitation: the cathedral that makes Oxford a city – helped. His interactions with Grice were many and varied. My favoruite has to be “Metaphysics,” which has Grice as co-authoring (again, as in ‘In defence of a dogma,’ the primary author) with Strawson and Pears for a BBC Third Programme Meeting. The lecture is dry in tone, expect for the bits Grice dedicates to Wisdom, whose conversations were worth reporting:

WISDOM: And so I conclude that all metaphysics is nonsense.

MOORE: Garbage, you mean?

WISDOM. No, Moore, nonsense. Interesting nonsense, in fact!

Pears could get more technical elsewhere. When the O. E. D. were looking for early citations of ‘conversational implicature,’ I provided Pears’s reference to Grice in (of all places) The Canadian Journal of Philsoophy. Why Pears would submit an essay to THAT journal escapes me, but it’s all about Grice on ‘if’ +> iff

GRICE: There are some biscuits in the cupboard if you are hungry.

PEARS. I am. But I’ll only touch them IF AND ONLY IF I am hungry.

GRICE. As you wish.

Pears would go on. In a most promising contribution to a festschrift for Davidson, Pears repeats Grice’s point that WILING is hardly INTENDING. Intending, as Grice knew – vide his ‘Intention and Uncertainty’ final paragraph – is inextricably linked with BELIEF. Not just any belief, but the belief that the outcome of your intention is feasible in a probability greater than 0.5. Grice knew this. They had, after all, collaborated at Oxford in a subtle topic, “The philosophy of action,” on which subject Grice had also given seminars with J. F. Thomson, but for some reason, Grice got on together better with Pears.

THOMSON was a characteristically Oxonian figure, with whom Grice contributed for as long as he could. It was not long before Thomson left Oxford for good. His joint seminars with Grice on ‘The philosophy of action’ are however in the records of this particular chapter in the history of Oxford philosophy – the school of ordinary-language philosophy --. An examination of Thomson’s essay on ‘if’ and the horseshoe show  further Griceian affinities.

SNOWDON is an important figure in the later scene of Oxford philosophy – at a time where you were NOT allowed to use the phrase ‘ordinary-language philosophy’ which had come to be a term of abuse. But Snowdon, with Grice directly, and via Strawson, kept Grice’s causal account of perception in the forum. It needs to be remembered that Grice’s approach to causation here is ornamental. As a philosopher, having read Hume, Grice knew that it is best to leave cause and causation OUT OF IT, and when it comes to the trick of PERCEPTION, Grice had no problem in leaving the specific link between the pillar box BEING red and it seeming red to Grice a matter for the occulist! CAUSE had caused him enough problems to Grice, in one earlier conversation he reports in Studies in the Way of Words.

TEACHER. Explain the cause of the Death of Charles I.

STUDENT: Decapitation.

Grice’s point being that (i) the teacher did not mean that, but was looking for the wider context. The second, that Hume is right, and that if ‘… caused …’ is synonymous with ‘… willed …’ then we will have to accept that Decapitation willed the Death of Charles I. When lecturing on ‘knowing’ in the third William James lecture, the cause was again the source of some conflict.

TEACHER: When was the Battle of Waterloo.

STUDENT. The defeat, you mean?

TEACHER. Right.

STUDENT. 1815

In the version published in “The Philosophical Review” but not the reprint in Way of Words, Grice cared to provide alternate dates for this “1815 (1814).” Grice’s point being that if we are going to deem the schoolboy KNOWING that the battle of Waterloo was lost by Napoleon in 1815, this is because there is a direct link, alla Dretske and Stampe, between that event, and the schoolboy’s brain. Snowdon knew all this.

There are what we may call ‘minor figures’ – a phrase Grice adored as he applied to, in this order: Wollaston, Bosanquet, and Wittgenstein – in the Oxford scene. One group corresponds to those English-born philosophers who got the proper Oxford five-year education (as Grice did for his Lit. Hum.) and then leave for the world at large.

C. A. B. PEACOCKE succeeded Strawson as the Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy and that makes him already a Griceian. As it happens, he attended Grice’s seminars in philosophical psychology and became a specialist in Grice’s favourite passe area of research: can there be thought withtout language, or vice versa. My favourite Peacocke alla Grice is his contribution to an influential colloquium organized at Oxford by G. J. Evans and the South-African philosopher McDowell. Peacocke takes up a topic seldom discussed seriously by Grice except on two occasions. The earlier one, in the locus classicus of ‘Meaning’ itself – Grice grants that his audience may wonder what an utterer’s intention may have to do with what a WORD means – ‘Perhaps we are making a reference to ‘people in general’?’ He leaves it at that. By 1967, when Grice resumed the topic, he had the new coinage of ‘idiolect’ to his disposal, but he never passed it. He never provides a definition of the ‘signiificance’ of a ‘conversational move’ as given by a member of a population P. Perhaps the closest he gets is when he says at, at Oxford, i. .e. in the population of Oxonians, ‘We should meet for lunch sometime’ MEANS ‘Get lost’! Peaocke seems unsatisfied with this and provides at the Oxford colloquium necessary and sufficient conditions for an analysans that explicitly mentions not just an utterer but a POPULATION of utterers. Unfortunately, his essay is seldom quoted.

Peacocke’s Griceian tribulations with populations was in the air. The Oxford educated – English born (Welsh ancestry) M. K. Davies, attempts much the same in his essay combining an utter-based account of communication with one that also takes into account the population in which that utterer feels like being the member of.

SAINSBURY is an aristocrat, Oxford-educated, and refers to Grice’s identificatory/non-identificatory distinction that Grice introduces in ‘Vacuous Names.’ The essay was murdered when it was cut in two in some reprints, leaving the first part underocovered.

OVER was Oxford educated, an unlike Sainsbury, who moved south, Over moved North and settled in Northumberland. But he recalled Grice and discusses Grice’s exploration on the identificatory/non-identificatory distinction in ‘Vacuous names.’

T. C. POTTS was tutored by Grice and became an expert in the philosophy of language. He settled in Yorskhire, but always kept bright reminiscences of his days with Grice.

Michael Clark, Oxford-educated, but with a career afterwards elsewhere, discussed Grice’s M-intentions in the pages of “Analysis” and beyond, regarding the alleged Griceian soluion to Moore’s paradox.

It is more difficult to categorise those philosophers who display a deep Griceian influence, who are English-born, but whose Oxford credentials are minimal. My favourite has to be HOLDCROFT who spent most of his penetrating critique of Austin in the Clarendon volume which Holdcroft titled after the seminar by Austin on Words and deeds, and subitlted ‘a critique of Austin’s theory of speech acts.’ His critique amounts to a return to Griceianism, in the emphasis on the intentions by the utterer to make the conversational move he is making. Holcroft had occasion to engage with Grice more specfifically in a number of publications on implicature and conversation, and unlike Leech, who is no philosopher, but a grammarian educated in the redbrick – it is the very philosophical Holdcroft who cared to submit a piece to the non-philosophical journal Journal of Rhetoric and listing the Grice’s ‘conversational insinuation’ – as in damn by faint praise – ‘He has beautiful handwriting’ as a brilliant case of those ‘forms of indirect communication’, as Holdcroft calls them.

Scruton, who hailed from Cambridge, and very English as he is, managed to apply Grice’s theory to a topic that Grice evaded for some time: sexual desire. Scruton points to the fact that if using a dildo, the utterer is not really engaging in conversation, in that one cannot expect the dildo to display M-intentions! His other example concerns Parsiphae who coupled a bull to spawn Asterios, when zoophilia in itself precludes any Gricean sort of conversation.

Oxonian philosophers are usually, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the best to criticize his Oxonian colleagues. A few points about Grice’s tenure may be relevant here.

His post as tutorial fellow in philosophy at St. John’s and his university lecturership in philosophy for Oxford as a whole came without any requirement for publication or ‘fame.’ Indeed, Grice makes fun of this when in his ‘Prejudices and predilections’ emphasized that such a cavalier attitude invited violent reactions from the tutees, as Grice refers to a philosophy don who predated ‘who managed in his whole lifetime NEVER to publish ONE word’! When Strawson and Wiggins wrote the obituary for The British Academy they do make a reference to the ‘cold shores’ of Oxford. Their implicature being that Grice’s defensiveness was the response to his often competitive milieu. In fact, he kept the marginal annotations to ‘Intentions and dispositions’ which include some criticisms: “I just don’t like the way Grice goes to work,” one commenter remarked. Affiliation to Austin’s play group has been a matter of debate, in that the spirit de corps hid some prejudices and predilections by the ‘Master’ himself. Grice annotated under the ‘yes’ all the good fellows that count: Hare, Hampshire, Nowell-Smith, Pears, Urmson, Warnock. Under the ‘no’ appears Dummett. Dummett was in fact never invited to the play group, but then we don’t think Dummett cared! When Grice succeeded Austin as the convenor to the Play Group, Oxford had changed a bit, and neither tutees nor scholars at large were willing to spend the valued Saturday mornings in ramblings that would not necessarily lead to anything professionally productive.

The Sub-Faculty of Philosophy that saw Grice is now gone, and few would-be philosophers care to enoll in the Lit.Hum. programme. The fact that there is a new monster called the Humanities Division doesn’t help. In Grice’s says as a fresh ‘Scholarship’ boy from the Midlands stuck at Corpus, he had no choice, and no hope to even HEAR about philosophy well after he had passed Mods! In his day, the Wykeham professor of logic was supposed to teach you how to argue. Now Oxford offers a Full School of Symbolic Logic on St. Giles that is quite unrelated to whatever rambling the Wykeham professor may feel to engage in!

After Grice’s passing, a portrait of H. P. Grice was aptly placed in the Philosopher’s Gallery in the Ryle Room at Merton, as a memorial to a don who encapsulated what is best in the legacy of Oxford ordinarylanguage philosophy.

Yet, Grice is still in the air, and if these notes have inspired he who matriculates at Oxford for the study of Griceianism, let us praise the Lord!