Grice Remembered -- by R. Hall

Delightful anecdote. I'll try to memorise that: "On no principle". May come
out handy now & then.

The chair of the non-Locke Society writes:
(I'm currently reading LR Horn's contribution to the Mccawley festhcrift,
"An un-paper for the un-syntactician")

>There isn't a Locke Society; people have sometimes suggested I start
>one, but that is too much to do in addition to the only journal on
>Locke, which I started in 1970, and still edit (more on this journal
>some time).
>Mary Warnock's memoir in a recent year (I don't have the title
>or date to hand) contains interesting information about Geoffrey W.
>As you remark, he became a `Sir' in his own right, and not because he
>was married to her and she became a Dame in about 1984. In any case,
>one year later she was created (as they say) a Baroness, so on your
>non-sexist principles he should have become a Lord! (Only a courtesy
>title that would be, like the `Lady' of Lord's ladies.)

I'm slightly confused. I expect you mean, "the "lady" of _lords'_ ladies.
Or are they all bigamist too. Gentry!

>- I hope I
>have got all this right.

Whoa -- about the bigamy bit you mean. Actually unspecified _poly_gamy...

In view of your interest in these matters, I should admit that
>I used to go to his lectures on Kant, in Magdalen.

He _was_ a veritable Kantian, was he. I have a friend who hates Strawson's
explanation of Kant, and insults _me_ for that, too. Mpf. I should ask him
what he thinks of _Warnock_'s Kant. Among the unpubliations of H. P. Grice,
we have "Kant's Morals", and he gave the Kant Lectures at Stanford too.
It's very sad that he gave the _same_ lectures as the Locke Lectures in
Oxford...

My friend wrote:

"Strawson himself, the greatest
living English philosopher,"

He calls him like that _ceteris paribus_ because that's how I once said I
viewed Strawson -- Grice dead.

"identifies geometry with the chalk marks
on the blackboard and even talks about more accurate methods of
measuring geometrical figures as a motor of progress in our
knowledge of geometry (in The Bounds of Sense)."

I can't seem to find my friend's most horrible criticism of anglo-oxonian
critiques of Kant, but I may... For some reason, I think Warnock was
probably more careful about the responsibilities that "being a Kantian
scholar" carried...

Have _you_ learned something about Kant from Warnock. "surely I did, I
founded the Locke journal, did not I?".

>And the Grice &
>Warnock seminars on Perception were also in Magdalen, a few years
>later (and Austin would go to them).

This is what Grice says about that most boring of books that no man
(including Warnock) should have EVER edited: Sense and Sensibility (by J.
Austen) sic sic: "I have never been very happy about Austin's Sense and
Sensibilia, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem
to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality, but more because
its tone is frequently rather unpleasant"

!
(in R. Grandy, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, ed. Oxford, p.62 --
lots of nice Oxonian refs there).

I think Grice means his (Austin's) constantly polemising with the Penguin
philosopher (Ayer's _Problems of Knowledge_, Penguin -- and sometime
"Oxford's enfant terrible"). I do like some of the examples in Austin's
book, though, such as Austin's augmenting degrees of pedanticity as in

1. That's a tiger
2. I believe that's a tiger.
3. I believe it seems to me as though that's a tiger.

I also like his distinctions re "that spot out there is a star" or something.
===
>When Grice came out with a list
>of verbs of perception (though on some occasions he said he hadn't
>written a paper at all),

Which is just as wel. He had his organs of perception allright, did not he!

>I remember Austin inquiring heavily, `On what
>principle were these verbs selected?' and getting the reply from
>Grice, `On no principle'(!)

and you chuckling at Austin's expense, right. Tsk tsk.


====
Incidentally, I was looking for anglo-saxon, as it were, verbs for
"suggesting". Grice mentions "implicate" to do general duty for "mean,
imply, suggest" (Studies in the way of words, p.24 -- I've been told by
Horn that upon my commenting to him that OED does not recognise Implicate
nor indeed Implicature, OED3 _may_ -- they're currently working on the
"scoop" of the definition. Grice Be Praised, some may say. But I'm not so
sure. Knowing how prescriptivist youse are, trust you to go and think that
what OED3 says about implicature is right, and stopping thinking about
these essential matters...). I would add, to Grice's list of latinate
terms, "hint" -- I discovered that "implicatura" was first used by SIDONIUS
in The Letters, Clarendon Press. He was Bishop of Rome, circa 480. He uses
the word in Letter 9 of Book 9. And Short/Lewis translate that as
"entanglement").

Anway, re verbs for hinting -- these things are seldom discussed by
philosophers. I should check a thesaurus I know. I recall Holdcroft's
excellent essay on that, "Some Indirect forms of communication", Journal of
Rhetoric. (He's great and teaches in Leeds).