Grice Is As Grice Does

---- By J. L. S.

------------ ONE DAY I was at an old library and caught a copy of Passmore, "A hundred years of philosophy". Obviously, I went directly to name index. "Grice, H. P." featured alright. "This ingenious fellow has written a few ingenious things." He writes (or words).

..... ONE MAY SAY That the most important thing, to some, that Grice contributed to philosophy was his "Causal Theory of Perception". Why?

Well, because he makes a wonderful presentation, in a section, that, undestandably enough, he omitted when he reprinted the thing in his posthumous Way of Words (since it was too repetitive, he says, vis a vis the William James Lectures), of

"implication"


--- So, since this was mainstream British at the time where British philosophers were only quoting other British philosophers, Grice made the rounds. This was 1961. So the next couple of years we see a sprinkling of references to Grice 1961 PAS (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, the distinguished acronym goes) in works by mainstreat, cutting-edge philosophers (I hate that phrase, but there you are): Hare, Hare, Hare, Hare, and Hare.

----

What about his "Meaning"? Well, yes, this was seminal, but the history behind it is so dark, that one wonders. Grice never meant to publish this very early piece 1948, and was submitted by his student (some student!) Strawson.

----

When, thanks to the offices of Rogers Albritton, Grice got invited to give the William James bi-annual lectures (one year Psychology, the other Philosophy; he gave, of course, the philosophy series) he expanded on both topics:

-- implication. For which he used now his "neologism" "implicature" which he had
used in MS that we have (The Grice Collection, rather), dated 1964.

-- meaning.



So these were the two topics for Grice. He was always a "methodologist". His interest was NOT in this or that area of philosophy, but philosophy method as such. HE KNEW he was good at that and exploited that. Nobody wanted to hear Grice speak about a PARTICULAR. They rejoiced in his grasp of "method".

He would lecture on various topics in the coming years: intention, for the British Academy (1971), philosophical psychology (as president of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, 1975), reasoning (Kant Lectures, Stanford, 1977), value (Paul Carus lectures, 1982) and then he died.

RIP.