Perfectionism

It has been usual to try to psycho-analyse Grice. The man published so little. People don't like that. So, they are always or usually finding Freudian reasons for that. The worst comes from G. Richardson in his obit. for Grice in "The St. John's College Records". Words to the perlocutionary effect: "He was too much of a perfectionist to publish". Obit in The Times, and recollections by Strawson: "Grice would not publish. He was so implacable (sp?) with others, that he feared they, i.e. the others, would be implacable with him."

Stuff and Sense! Of course it wasn't like _that_. He did publish, if by publish we mean, make his ideas 'public'.

There is a colloquial feeling to Grice's prose. One reads him, and one _hears_ him. What surprises me is that this colloquialism was so _planned_. It was hand-written.

I am pleased I was never asked to 'type' his unpublished hand-written notes. I cannot type. I mean, not that I cannot type as Grice writes that he cannot type (and thus that a typewriter is of no use for him -- he had others type things for him. Reply to Richards). I mean, I cannot type, in that when I type, I re-write. And thus, trust that had I _typed_ his handwritten thingies, they would have become quite different thingies altogether.

Grice kept a wonderful untidy desk. It challenges comprehension how he filed things. But his wife would often volunteer to clean, getting the instant refusal by Grice. Things were perfectly orderly for him. I know the hoarder-type!

But more seriously, Grice was with his-self. His philosophy is a dialogue of H. P. Grice with H. P. Grice. So, perfectionism is a matter of philosophical evolution. For surely one expects that if philosophy is the salt to life -- and not just its bread and butter --, it should, like the good wines (puajj -- this is the mixedest bag of mixed metaphors I have ever come across), improve with time. Unless it turns, as Jesus Christ says, into "vinegar"!

JLS