On Feeling Byzantine

S. R. Chapman may not be a philosopher (yet, you know how things are) and yet she is such a careful hearer. She got hold of the mis-called "H. P. Grice Papers" at Bancroft. They are really "H. P. Grice Collection", for they include, er, tapes.

One is a tape, undated, of Grice's contribution on "Oxford philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s", American Philosophical Association, undated but given by Chapman as 1970s -- BANC MSS 90/135c. Grice said,

"I for one don't care a hoot what the dictionary says"

--- thus he replied to Austin. "And that's where you make your big mistake", Austin would reply.

"Matter of fact," Grice says, "I once decided to put Austin's method of "going through the dictionary" to the test, by using it to investigate the vocabulary of emotions".

"I started", he recollects, "at the beginning of the Oxford Concise, in search of words that could complement the verb"

I felt X.

"But I gave up towards the end of the B. For I discovered, with regret, that the verb, 'to feel' tolerates ALMOST everything -- including "Byzantine"".

Cheers,

JL

I was thus amused at

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/robyn/relevance/relevance_archives_new/0534.html

on learning that P. Wilson, a graduate student at Berkeley had found one of Grice's seminars "Byzantine".