Grice and Strawson as The Philosophical Logicians

--- by JLS
----- for the GC

-- AS I COMFILY REVISE STUFF AT MY SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY, I come across the intro to Strawson to his "Philosophical Logic". Of all papers by Grice, he (Strawson) HAD to reprint "Meaning" -- totally offtopic, but hey -- he had respect for his tutor's views, and what Grice ONLY IN 1989 (one year after his death) had as "Logic and Conversation" was NOT YET PUBLISHED.

In the intro, Strawson manages to make an excellent commentary. Since this is my PhD thesis I know. I did study all of the Grice philosophers of the Grice generation (Strawson does NOT count because he was almost ten years Grice's junior). But Urmson, Austin, Nowell-Smith, Warnock do count). Strawson only counts as Grice's "pupil".

Yet, Strawson is on the other hand important because he was the ONLY one Grice cared to quote -- he would NEVER quote from Warnock's brilliant "Metaphysics in Logic". Grice saw Warnock as a philosopher of PERCEPTION only and never took his views on philosophical logic seriously enough. Nor Thompson's and his "Defense of Material Implication", or Urmson in "Philosophical Analysis".

No. For Grice, it was "Strawson" only. And this because Grice found Strawson 'colourful'. I.e. the mere idea of a truth-value gap amused Grice. Strawson gave Grice the opportunity to go to the defense of his ultra-conservative views on classical logic.

Strawson and Grice knew what they were talking about: Quine. -- Quine had visited the men (well before the infamous defense of a dogma by Grice/Strawson in reply to Quine's more infamous yet, "Dogma of Empiricism"). To think that Grice and Strawson were empiricists was just too much for Grice and Strawson to swallow.

Anyway, I have a copy of Strawson's Intro -- to Philosophical Logic (volume, self-edited for OUP) and Grice is cursorily but brilliantly cited, on p. 9.

The section where Strawson cites Grice is "Truth-Functions".

Rather than Grice, Strawson quotes directly from Quine. In Methods of Logic, Quine had written:

Such connection between antecedent
and cosnequent

of material implication via horseshoe

p --> q

underlies the useful application
of the conditional without needing to
participate in its meaning. Such connection
unerlies the useful application of the conditional
even though the meaning of the conditional
be understood precisely as
'- (p.-q)'

Strawson adds:

"The case has been most powerfully argued
by Grice in a paper unfortunately
unpublished."

---- Indeed, Grice possibly delivered those lectures just to get Strawson off his head. He quotes explicitly from Strawson on 'if' in "Intro to Logical Theory" (vintage 1952) in "Prolegomena" and dedicates the central lecture, No. 4, to 'if'.

The thing had impressed Strawson so much that he wrote, in 1968, 'If and -->'. Which some 18 years later was finally repr. in the PGRICE festschrift. In a gaffe, Strawson managed to REPRINT the thing in his "Identity and Essence" -- thus killing the idea of a festschrift which contributors should SWEAR they are NOT going to publish elsewhere. (Strawson did swear and fulfilled his promise when he said that he would NEVER reprint the thing he co-wrote with Grice, "In defence of a dogma" -- but one never knows with executors).

Etc.

----

In "If and -->" Strawson is more clear as to what the gist is (cfr. Grandy in "Legacy of Grice" for the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1990, ed. K. Hall). It is a MOOT point.

For Grice, the implicature is CONVERSATIONAL. For Strawson it is CONVENTIONAL. Big deal, right?