Grice Goes (Seriously) Kantian

Kramer comments on "How not to do Urmson with things", in my Gricean rewrite:

"The question is simply whether the conversation
is primarily about the confidence in or authority
for a statement or about the subject itself."

--- But that was Kant's problem (vide my "I Kant", this blog).

Kant refused (and Grice gave the Kant Lectures at Stanford, Spring term 1977) so he possibly Kant either) to believe that the distinction here is valid.

"It was valid for the Grecians. Things are as they are. There is a Subjekt. And there is an Objekt. They were naive realists. Hume awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers"

"the conversation
is primarily about
the confidence in or authority
for a statement or about
the subject itself."

But what is a poor pirot to know? Grice often speaks of pirots. It's his pun on 'parots' which Locke found 'rational, very intelligent' beasts. To converse, they way pirots do, is to exchange our beliefs and desires about the world -- our confidence or lack thereof -- about _things_. Only at a later, much later -- so later that I never yet reached it -- are we starting, pirots are, to grow an interest in the subject itself.

And it never pays, for by the time, trust the pirot to 'change the subject' as they say.

Etc.