Disimplicature

The Cunning of Conversational Reason: Disimplicatures as
Disentaglements.

So now we have this nice new book with Palgrave on Grice.

“How pleasant to [really get] to know Mister Grice!”

(who's written such volumes of stuff -- to echo Lear and his self-addressed limerick).

– loads of readers will exclaim, echoing Loar – I mean, Lear.

The work by author S. Chapman – especially at the Bancroft [Library, UC/Berkeley] is a veritable labour of love and provides an endless source of entanglements (and some disentanglements) of Grice’s cunning with conversational reason.

In her acknowledgments, she expresses the gratitude to the ‘executors’. It’s quite eschatological that Grice wrote such specific directives to each and everyone of these.

The preface raises a verbal point. Is ‘linguist’ an appropriate, informative enough, epithet to apply to Grice, besides any marketing strategies the publishing house of Palgrave may have in mind. He was, after all, as the London obituary read, "a professional philosopher (and amateur cricketer)". I was particularly moved by some of the anecdotes. Rereading that “Paul [had] not [slept] at all on Saturday
night” (162) before composing the third Carus memorial lecture. Also, his struggle (if that’s the word) with the cigarette (167) (Oddly, I used the 'politically incorrect' smoking example in my discussion of Grice in Speranza, 1991, "Rauchen verbotten").

Odd that someone who, as Chapman has, discusses the Grice/Chomsky polemic on language-as-expression vs. language-as-communication should wonder much about of some of Grice’s marginalia in his unpublications ("the bigheads and the hardheards," and "the nutheads and the noheadds", and "the beheads"). “It is not clear”, Chapman comments, whether Grice intended these jottings for any purpose other than his
own amusement”. Perhaps the biographer is suggesting that the biographee may be eschatologically intending them for his biographer’s amusement – transitively, the biographer’s reader’s amusement.

Chapman unfolds Grice’s 'vital' life in philosophical terms, and his philosophy in vital terms, which has a nice air of Gricean paradox about it. So don’t look in the book for any concise ‘encyclopedic’ entry of a notion at hand.

The title for Chapter 1, ‘The Skilful Heretic’, Chapman borrows from the (let's grant) happy phrasing by Grice’s successor as Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at St. John’s, Room 8b, way up that steep stairway): the late American philosopher G. P.
Baker. In P. G. R. I. C. E. (the festschrift for Grice that sorrily missed the “H” – see Grandy/Warner below), Baker had referred to Grice’s ‘skillful advocacy of heresies’. And Chapman, familiar as she is with multi-stage epithets, finds a good justification in transferring the ‘skilful’ directly to the heretic from one or two of his advocacies. Interestingly, Baker goes on to say (but Chapman does not quote) that it was Grice's skill which turned your common-or-garden heresy into an orthodoxy. Schiffer, in his contribution to that festschrift, straight from his (then still unpublished) Remnants of Meaning and that Grice was reading at the time and finding it slightly obscure,, maintains the religious terminology. “I trust Paul will forbear my apostasy”. (As it happens, I treasure my copy of the festschrift where Schiffer wrote, “To JL, that he may save the Gricean programme!” when we discussed on this and other matters in a memorable night at the International Hotel of Campinas -- for the SOPHIA colloquium).

Chapter 2 Chapman titles “Philosophical Influences”. The usual suspects –or ‘greats’ as Grice called them – or him? – are there, summarised as “Aristkant”. Grice would later prefer “Kantotle” for this multiple personality, as in “In the tradition of Kantotle” – Bennett’s review for the TLS of the festschrift that Chapman 'fails' to quote). Personally, I love to see Grice as a Lockean. After all, they both lived in the West Country (indeed Bristol), and Grice’s Way of Words is a rather good pun on Locke’s Essay on Humane [sic, as the 1690 edition now in the Bodleian] Understanding, and his distintion between the way of ideas and the way of words. It’s indeed difficult to trace this purely English, healthily empiricist, tradition since Oxford was so Latin-dominated. But much of what Hobbes wrote on “Computatio”, or Digby, or Ockham – not in his native Surrey dialect, alas – provides a rather satisfactory ‘Anglic’ plateau for any Gricean worth of her name (Grecian indeed).
When was Grice first exposed to the word, ‘philosophy’, though? We expect the word he was exposed to was, in the correct script, "φιλοσοφιά" and we hope that, Clifton education beside, it was seriously from the mouth of W. F. (“Frank”) R. Hardie, Grice’s tutor in (especially) the Ethica Nichomachea and (later) golf (13). The programme was “Greats”, Oxford for “maiores”. Oddly, Grice will proudly play on his ‘Greats’ thing much later on, when we find him “Conversing with the Greats”, where he waggishly lists Bernard Bosanquet not as a great (like Aristkant) but a ‘minor’. Chapman notes: “until just before the Second World War, no living philosopher was represented on the Oxford philosophy syllabus”, which reminds me
of Grice's extempore exclamation that, of all people, Heidegger was what he thought "the greatest [in talent] living philosopher (WOW, 6). There is a rationale behind the Oxford curricular restriction, and it's a general one. Why read Doris Lessing when one can read Pliny? Grice found a good way out to this otherwise restriction: “we should treat those who are great *and dead, as if they were great and living”. On a personal note, after Grice’s demise, and before Strawson's) it was customary (for me) to refer to Grice’s ‘articulate second’ in Oxford, Strawson, as “the greatest English living philosopher”. While new to golf, Grice excelled in cricket (throughout the summer season (what else to do on the Meadows?) and football (in the winter), besides taking care of The Pelican -- the undergraduate magazine at his alma mater, Corpus. Then, in the happy pre-phoney war days, there was Gilbert Ryle, and of Grice’s generation, Ayer -- and the Thursday evening meetings at All Souls that Grice did not qualify for -- being 'provincial', according to Chapman, "having been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks", as she rather derogatorily puts it -- What's wrong with Clifton and Corpus -- a lot, apparently.
Chapman provides an interesting summary of Grice’s first publication, ‘Personal Identity’ (Mind) -- now repr. in Perry's paperback. She finds a few foreshadows of his later developments, which are only to be expected if we are dealing with a consistent philosophical continuum. One that she 'fails' to quote is Grice’s apt commentary dismissing a critique as to that how complex the 'analysis' of an
apparently simple notion (like "The ball hit his face") can be. Tricky as the Oxonian use of ‘great’ (to mean the Classics) is Grice’s characterization of Ayer as the then enfant terrible. Chapman fails to quote that Ayer was still terrible (if pas un enfant) when he acknowledged Grice’s work on ‘implicature’ as a symposiast for the Aristotelian Society for ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ (this time with L. J. Cohen). Talk of longitudinal unity of philosophy and the relevance of time-honoured topics indeed.

Chapter 3, “Post-War Oxford”, covers what Grice refers to as “the hayday of ordinary linguistic philosophy” -- the Saturday mornings of the “Play Group”. This was a characterisation Grice loved though apparently never used in Austin’s presence. “Not the sort of man with whom to share such a joke", Chapman writes. At least so Grice liked to think _others_ would think! What the group did (and how) is one of the
most fascinating chapters in the history of English (Anglic) philosophy. Otiose happenings multiply, like they once triying (and failing?) to ‘learn Eskimo’ (42). The motivation, in this case, a refutation of Witters’s example of a language as ‘form of life’ and the many lexical possibilities that this Polar-region language has for ‘snow’ (cf. Tarski, “snow is white"). There are details of Strawson’s going up to Oxford in 1939 and becoming Grice’s tutee at St. John's. One interesting reminiscence to add here is by the Scot philosopher who co-tutored Strawson. “[Strawson] was the ablest pupil I had and this view was shared by my brilliant colleague, H. P. Grice” (Oxford Memories, Thornton's, 1986:108) – a passage that would make Grice exclaim (“Good old Mabb”) with approbation on this rare outburst of Oxonian sentimentality. Not much is told of Austin's rival (literally across the Cherwell) group, led by Ryle. O. P. Wood was one of them, and proof that the rivalry as not unsurpassable is that Grice discussed questions of meaning with Wood and quotes him in "Some remarks about the senses" (WOW). Another
cross-reference in the Austin and Ryle Groups was indeed the polemic between Grice and Roxbee-Cox on the factivity of 'see' (Cox retired from University of Lancaster but was active in Ryle's group at Oxford). Teaching joint seminars was for Grice a ‘flintier experience’ especially with Austin (Warnock confides). Chapman expands
on the difference of personalities between Lancashire-born Gritty Northener Austin and the more-pleasant very-Heart of England, Harborne affluent suburb-born Grice. There's always room for 'reconciliation', though, as in the PhD dissertation available from UMI, “A Reconciliation of Austin and Grice”.

Chapter 4 (“Meaning”) centres the eponymous essay of 1948 submitted (by Strawson of all people) to The Philosophical Review. The influences therein of Stevenson's newly published book with Yale University Press, and through him, to Pierce, on whom Grice had given seminars at Oxford (I owe S. Sharpless for helping me to understand
this link in such a natural way). Chapman rather cursorily notes that “Grice does not seem to have anything to say about Peirce’s icons” -- other than acknowledging their existence by mentioning them -- which is quite some saying as far asphilosophers go. Also, his four tenets towards a theory of representation (admittedly, that Grice composed some 50 years later) are all about ‘iconic’ versus ‘non-iconic’ -- which sound tres Peirceian. Perhaps Chapman does not emphasise strongly enough the historical importance “Meaning” provided for the
vicariously local and closed Oxford scene. Hart was quoting it already in 1952 (Philosophical Quarterly) and it's basically Oxford authors that Grice deals with in his reposte in the William James lectures. One is the counterexample to Grice's analysis of meaning of 'bribing', provided by Urmson, and the chain of 'Strawsonian' regress types. I would go on to say that it's this essay that is cited more profusely in the philosophy literature than “Logic and Conversation”, which is more of a favourite in linguists' circles. Note that “meaning” will remain a central concept of philosophy, with implicature as just a ‘shade’ of that many-faceted notion. Note also the standard “linguistic” approach to implicature is to take an account of meaning as 'sense' or 'logical form' for granted and is at a later staged
enriched with implicatures or impoverished with disimplicatures. And as Grice himself put it, "No treatment of Saying and Implying can afford to omit a study of the notion of Meaning whch plainly underlies both these ideas" (180).

Chapter 5 (“Logic and Conversation”) is confined to the William James Lectures, given at the William James Hall (_not_ the Emerson Hall) up the Charles, and where Grice proposed his ‘programme’. A description of the Harvard atmosphere is lacking, where Rogers Albritton, D. K. Lewis (then writing his PhD on "The conventions of language"), Lakoff, Quine and indeed Chomsky, would have provided a wonderful list of dramatis personae. Grice dedicates the lectures to develop the idea of ‘implicature’ (and disimplicature) and how the idea of the maxims springing out of the quartette of Kantotelian (or Aristkantian) categories.

Chapter 6 (“American formalism”), fails to quote Putnam (up at Emerson) who, “of all people” said “I was too formal”, Grice reminisces in "Reply to Richards". Chapman quotes some good use by Grice of his superscript device. “Grice proposes two types of operators, OpA and OpB. The operators grouped together as OpB can be divided into two types: OpB1 and OpB2. A-type operators, on the other hand, represent some degree or measure of acceptability or justification. They can take scope over either of the B-type operators, yielding OpA1 + p for an expression of “it is probable that
p” and OpA1 + OpB2+ ! + p” for an expression of “it is desirable that p”. Generalising over attitudes he proposes ‘X psi-1 p” for believes and “X psi-2 p” for wants. Psi-3 is concerned with an attitude of deciding whether to believe p or not, while psi-4 with 'want to decide whether to will p or not”. Grice suggests an operator OpIS corresponding to any particular propositional attitude psi-3, where
‘I’ is a dummy taking the place of either 1,2,3,or 4, and where ‘S’ is a dummy taking the place of either A or B. “ (p.132). No reference is made to Myro who tried so hardly to systematise all this in what he called a 'highly powerful/hopefully plausible" version of System “G-HP (for "Grice, H. P."), with the use of the radix symbol (129) (“√p) to complicate things a la Grice. I found it rude to read from Quine the rather indiscreet detail that, already back in Oxford, where Quine had
Grice as his host, Grice “was missing some teeth”. At least he does not go to rigidly designate the pleorenetic quantifier.

Chapter 7 (“Philosophical Psychology”) deal with the passage “From the banal to the bizarre”, or the principles ‘pirotology’, which, to echo Bennett, that Chapman fails to cite, should be “learned by heart by all philosophers of mind” (TLS). Here Grice introduces the delightful pirots, and “pirotology’ as Grice’s favourite branch of imaginary zoology (he was interested in why and how pirots should engage in the
most biological of activities like "breathing (why?)" or "excreting".

Chapter 8 (“Metaphysics and Value”) cover Grice's higher, more eschatological (and not 'skatological', as Chapman types it) later developments. Or not so later, if one remembers that indeed a publication missing in the list of publications compiled by Grandy/Warner is Grice's "Metaphysics", a rather conservative (or 'dissidently conservative') talk on 'what there is' that Grice gave as a BBC Third Programme (published by Macmillan 1957, ed. Pears, "The Nature of Metaphysics"). Due emphasis is given to "prosona" (p. 163), Grice's favourite term for 'rational being', and ‘optimal’ which Grice thought would help him out of what he called the 'minor' problem of expression meaning ("'snow' optimally means snow iff...")

Chapter 9 (“Gricean pragmatics”) provides an overview of (literally) post-Gricean developments.

I love executors. I wonder if they have a right to cite Grice’s longest 'unpublished' (yet scribbled) sentence ever (p. 170). Oddly, while discussing “Grice’s heritage” in chapter 9, Chapman focuses on the influence of ‘Logic and Conversation’ exactly *without* philosophy, rather than within it, and thus 'forgets' a few philosophers. Part of my aim in distributing, from The Swimming Pool Library, the Gricean (Conversational) Newsletter was to provide a fuller register of those *philosophers* who have quoted him, and The Grice Club qualifies as members philosophers like Dennis Stampe, Terence Patton, Peter Facione, and hundred others. I welcome such interdisciplinary indeed cross-cultural even connections, but would rather have liked some purely philosophical discussions updated (Chapman fails to cite Cohen's riposte to Walker, "Can the conversationalist hypothesis be defended?", dealing with the critical issue of 'embedded implicatures', or Kasher's second try at a strategical foundation of Grice in "Gricean inference revisited"). Ditto for historical background. She quotes Fogelin’s review of WOW, but not his earlier “Evidence and Meaning”. She refers to Bennett, but not his Review of PGRICE for the TLS, and fails to cite minor details
-- but important to me -- like name of editors in different editions of Austin, How to do Things with Words (Urmson/Sbisa/Nidditch), Philosophical papers(Warnock/Urmson) and Sense and sensibiliia (Warnock). Holdcroft's main publication is listed but not his most specifically Gricean treatment ('Conversational relevance', and his paper for the University of Leeds review). Martinich is cited, but not his specific Gricean defense in _Dialectica_.

Chapman is interested in terminological innovations, and discusses 'scalar' implicature. Indeed, I note Urmson already uses ‘scale’ (p. 209) for precisely the thing Grice had in mind "know, believe" (and failed to be quoted by Chapman).

Chapman, a Lancastrian by birth is understandably Anglic-centric, and keeps referring to the "Anglo-American" lucky ones to belong to the Anglo-American tradition. “British and American” is her description for the proper use of the term "Gricean", which "has been applied to a number of [people], both American and British” p. 207). Asa Kasher comes to mind, author of “Gricean inference revisited” which Chapman comments on. “Grice suggested that he drew out, and perhaps saw, the
significance of rationality to this theory of conversation more clearly in later commentary on the work than in its original formulation of it” (p. 141). So it was not just Anglo-British-American. We may add to the non-Anglic list people like Giovanna Cosenza (who edited "Grice's Heritage" for the Semiotic Studies ed. by
Umberto Eco), Marina Sbisa, French anthopologist Dan Sperber, who with Francois Recanati founded "le (Paris-based) GRICE" (Group pour la recherche de la inference et la comprehension elementaire). Then there's Andreas Kemmerling, whose 'curbed Rock and roll prose notwithstanding as that Anglic commentary by Platts in Mind reads) I cited Meggle in my very own “German Grice” (referenced in Habermas, "Pragmatics of Communication" (MIT). Strawson refers to the “cold shores” of Oxford? (p. 157) as opposed to the warmer shores of Marina Sbisa's San Marino country, we expect. Or Marcelo Dascal's. Or the River Plate, for that matter. But recall the water off the Bay of San Francisco (where Grice eventually settled) is pretty cold, too!

Chapman's North-of-England parochialism is _not_ particularly welcome when, Grice, as Chapman acknowledges, displayed in later life a “wish for some of the strands of his life’s work to reach a wider audience”. Must say I love the title of one of his works in progress with which he attempted to do so: “From Genesis to Revelation (and back): a new discourse on metaphysics”. Evangelical and rightly populist.

Discussing things like “Stealing is wrong” – I prefer Flanders/Swann, “Eating people is wrong”, Chapman discusses (p. 158) expressionism of the type put forward by S. W. Blackburn and others and once pretty influential in Oxford. This Chapman does in connection with the so-called “Geach point” of attitude introduction. In other cases, Chapman just provides a rewrite of the 'standard' philosophical questions and
what's worse, the 'standard' way to solve them!

But she delights in some 'non-standard' paradoxes too, as when she quotes Grice quoting from Mount Sinai's "10 comms" (155) brought by Moses. Indeed, I have elsewhere referred to the Kantian quartette -- the Immanuel -- involving a very decalogue -- if we count the 9 maxims in 'Logic and Conversation' and add 'the extra maxim' in 'Presupposition and Conversational Implicature', and which agree with
what Chapman refers to as Grice's 'ecumenical tendencies'

It's high time, I would think, the Royal Philosophical Society place a blue placque in Grice’s birthplace at Harborne. We know he saw philosophy as enjoyable group activity, like music-playing (as when he engaged in a trio, Grice playing the piano, his father Herbert the cello, and his brother Derek the violin). We learn Grice also played solo Ravel at Clifton. More of his musical tastes are reported in the delightful obituary by George Richardson for St. John's College Records. His all-time favourite seems to have been indeed Gustav Mahler, if we leave aside the good old songs of the cheerful music-hall days whose titles he would drop in his many examples of conversational illustrations (“She was poor but she was honest” in
'Causal Theory of Perception'; “Every nice girl loves a sailor”, “Home Sweet Home” in 'Logic and Conversation', etc.)

Chapman makes what I find is too much of a big issue about the ‘linguistic sensitivity’ – of the type with which Grice – and Austin – were endowed. “A lifestyle that depended on privilege maintained by the status quo”, Chapman goes political (p. 139). This involved in particular a study of the Classics, by which it is meant Graeco-Latin Loeb-type kind of readings – as was the custom in any varsity alma mater worth her name. Thus, the classicist in me was slightly amused when Chapman drops the aspiration (176) and refers to Grice’s new use of εςχάτολογιά (yet another of his religious-themed vocabulary for a man of whom Chapman assures 'had left all faith') as being eskatological. But that's understandable for a generation (like Grice's students at Berkeley) who, Grice confided to his wife, would rather read Aristotle in his former tutee, J. L. Ackrill rather than the Helladic original (144).

“Certainly by the time Grice had reached adulthood he had abandoned any religious faith he may have initially have held” (11). Call me a traditionalist, but while a pastor or a wife can legitimately report that, I don't think it's what I expect of a biographer. As philosopher J. M. Geary, head of the Seattle School of Scholasticism knows so well, faith is just around the corner, and the way Mrs. Grice recalls how Grice successfully (albeit 'too late') quit smoking has a religious -- faithful even -- side to it.

Grice's έσκάτολογιά (176) would however would have pleased Grice who had elsewhere attempted a genitorial justification of the excretion -- following digestion -- of his beloved pirots (p.162).

There is a rather good discussion of D. F. Pears and Grice vis a vis the epistemic implication of intention. Chapman has this tendency to use full first name (as in "David Pears" (99)-- rather than the 'older style' D. F. Pears of his "Nature of Metaphysics" including Grice). And indeed "H. P." became by personal decision “Paul Grice”, dropped the “H[erbert]” that possibly held too much of a father-figure burden to him. It should be noted, though that when in 1952, P. F. (“Fredrick” or “Frederick”?) Strawson acknowledges his tutor it’s never “Paul” – but “H. P.” -- as he would not be the Peter who gets robbed to pay Paul _in that context_. On the other hand, I don’t think anybody ever called Hart Herbert. He always went by “H. L. A. Hart”, and he was known as "Adolphus" to his friends. To Chapman's discussion of Chomsky's treatment of Grice, may I add Chomsky's sticking with initials -- good intention, but wrong result. "H. P. Grice" is listed in the index to "Aspects of the theory of Syntax" as "A. P. Grice".

Of ‘implicature’, Chapman notes indeed that it was ‘coined’ by Grice as far as an English word of such prestigious Latinate pedigree can be 'coined'. Apparently it was (Loeb Library tells us) coined by Sidonius, way back, and one may delight in the entry for ‘implicatura’ in the Oxford Short and Lewis – a volume with which Grice, as a First in Greats must have been rather too familiar with! While Sidonius goes
still uncredited in the OED3 definition of 'implicature' (I'm glad to say I supplied to Pears quote, and indeed 'alerted' the gap (ADS-L)), and Grice is still described as a 'linguist' rather than the Oxford philosopher he always was.

Then, Grice possibly thought that Carnap had coined 'pirot', and I was saddened to see that the word had been used by Englishmen for some hundred years (to refer to some kind of shell-fish -- see OED).

There's a very good discussion of the philosophy of perception, especially in connection with Grice's alleged 'neologism' of 'visum'. Warnock is referred to as Warden of Hertford, and one wonders if adding he was (as well) Vice-President of the University would be too overinformative to count? Odd Chapman – whose interests include literary theory -- should pay little attention to F. N. Sibley whose work on‘sensitive’ (and "aisthetikos") (179) pervade any Gricean approach to esthetic intentionalism worth the name.

There is also a good discussion of “conversational impenetrability”, which Chapman discusses vis a vis Davidson. But the theory was indeed first put forward by D. F. Pears, of Christ Church, and before him, and at the same college, Locke and Lewis Carroll (I discuss this in an issue of "Jabberwocky"). No wonder Grice sounds so Carrollian on more than one occasion. Consider Grice's analysis of “It is an illusion” “accompanied by the unanswered question ‘what is _it_?’” (55). Almost
an echo of the Mouse’s Tale and his problems with anaphoric pronouns. Pears reports the implicature view as being ‘too weak’ to be true even for Grice (134).

In the post-Gricean segment (although Grice was alive and kicking when Mary Louise published her book) there is a good treatment of Pratt (189), but fails to credit Deirdre Burton for her excellent analysis of Harold Pinter (and Dennis Potter) as "Gricean dramatists".

Chapman, who calls Grice "linguist" does indeed access to the Times obituary and manages to quote the newspaper at its rudets. Indeed, one wonders what right The Times has of calling Grice’s openings 'inelegant’. Such wording from the Telegraph would not surprise me, but the Times (o tempora). It is particularly irritating when
'elegant' is such a loaded trouser-word, and the obituarist would not
even sign the obit.

While Chapman provides a good quote of Davies, she fails to give the complete pessimist title of the thing: “The failure of Gricean theory”! Similarly, while she notes the acrostic (PGRICE) in Grice's festschrift, she fails to quote the full title answering for the '-ICE' ("intentions, categories, ends"). Also Avramides's book is cited sans delightful subtitle featuring "Gricean". She quotes from the APA
1989 symposium but fails to quote it as what it was: “Symposium on the Thought of Paul Grice”.

Some other omissions look more like typos. Thus, “metal” (p. 151) should read “mental” (unless it’s really a metal state, cfr. Grice's examples of frictionless pulleys (192) and being caught in the grip of a vice. “Wiggins” is s-dropped on p. 184). (Indeed Wiggins has an interesting early Gricean paper on what a Gricean dictionary would look like). “repr.” should be “repr. revised” (236). Further typos may include “humane” for “human” (238) and no accent on Sbisa. (239).
Work on implicature and liturgy is ascribed to Warnes (241), rather than the real, delightful Coventry scholar Martin Warner, BPhil Oxon, at the university in the heart of England where Grice was born, and with whom I've had the pleasure to discussed issues of ‘purism’ in the use of lithurgical implicature. While Chapman cites Ogden’s old (Cambridge) translation of the Tractatus, it is my feeling that Grice (who disliked second editions) would take exception and use the new edition by Grice’s collaborator, D. F. Pears with Brian McGuinness. Searle (1986) indeed dates back to (1973) when it was presented with Grice in the Performadillo. Russell’s On denoting, has also been reprinted! Mention of Loar in “Grice’s Heritage” could be made more historical sense by a reference to his book with C. U. P., a rewrite
of his D. Phil on “Sentence meaning”, with G. J. Warnock as thesis advisor.

While strong in her Hornian cites, Chapman fails to cite one of my favourite Horns, “Greek Grice” (a pun on Greek Rice, he tells me, and a good exegesis of the influence of Grice on Aristotle).

In some cases, Chapman's marvel at Grice's linguistic innovations would require further textual references. After all it was von Wright who coined “alethic” (147) that Grice fell so in love with. It would have done also to explore Grice's own influences, sometime subtle ones -- like his reference to the never fashionable W. C. Kneale, and even more obscure ones, like Stout, and Pritchard. In some cases Grice did not innovate linguistically enough. Chapman cites Grice use of “volitive” (147), but he failed to recognise “boulemaic” (as brilliantly coined by Allwood et al), which features largely in that area of cooperative conversation that Chapman says rather little about: (148) ‘influencing and being influenced by others' (WOW).

If Chapman is vague in the bibliographical references to Austin, one would expect more carefulness in detailing Grice's own (rare) publications. One being “The causal theory of perception”. It would not hurt to explain this sprang from an extempore symposium with A. White held in Cambridge, and reprinted for the Oxford vicarage by
Warnock in his Oxford Readings. Or that Grice's Pacific Philosophical Quarterly paper on Aristotle (183) was posthumously edited by B. F. Loar.

In a 'tit for tat' kind of manoeuvre, Chapman feels the need to complain about the few linguists that Grice (alleged linguist) himself cites. It would at least have been good to take the opportunity to correct Grice’s very own typo when he did refer to what he felt was the epitome of linguistic wisdom: the Danish Otto Jespersen who comes out as “Jasperson” (85). It is cognate, but neither British nor American!

Grice thought that implicatures guide reason, and disimpicatures guide indeed irrationality. His bet was for rationality, his bet was for the good old tradition of Aristotle that he treasured so much at St. John's. It is perhaps appropriate to end this catalogue raisonnee with the Alexander Pope epigram, "Here St John mingles with my friendly bowl,/ the feast of reason and the flow of soul" (My gratitude to the memory of my mentor, H. P. Grice, and his wife, Mrs. Kathleen Watson Grice, and children: Karen and Timothy).

J. L. Speranza, Esq.
The Grice Club, etc.


REFERENCES

Austin, J. L. Philosophical Papers, ed. Warnock/Urmson. Clarendon
Press.

---. Sense and sensibilia. Ed Warnock.

---. How to do things with words. Ed. by Urmson and Marina Sbisa.

Ayer, A. J. The causal theory of perception. PAS.

Cohen, L. J. “Can the conversationalist hypothesis be defended?
Philosophical Studies, repr.

Grice, H. P. Studies in the Way of Words.

---. The conception of value. Clarendon Press.

---. Aspects of reason. Clarendon Press.

Hampshire, S. N. Personal correspondence with J. L. S. The Grice
Club.

Hart, H. L. A. Critical notice of Holloway. Philosophical Quarterly,
1952.

Holdcroft, David. The structure of conversation. Leeds
---. Correspondence with J. L. S., the Grice Club.

Kasher, Asa. Gricean inference revisited. Philosophica.

Kenny, A. J. P. ‘Practical inference’. Analysis.
---. Correspondence with J. L. S., The Grice Club.

Mabbott, J. D. Oxford memories. Oxford: Thornton’s, 1986

Martinich – in Dialectica. Reviewed by Speranza.

Neale, S. Obituary of H. P. Grice. University of California/Berkeley –
Records.

Nowell-Smith, P. F. ‘Contextual implication and ethical theory’.
Proceedings Aristotelian Society.
---. Personal correspondence with J. L. S. The Grice Club.

Richardson, George. Obituary of H. P. Grice. St John’s College
Records.

Sharpless, Seth. Personal communication with J. L. S.

Speranza, J. L. ‘On the way of conversation: some prospects and
retrospects of Gricean conversational pragmatics, featuring an
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J. L. Speranza, Esq.