Grice As A Brand

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

--- WE WERE DISCUSSING with Kramer and Kennedy various things, including Grice -- then Butler was brought up and how bad she writes (for Dennis Dutton -- 'if you can say you are good, I guess we can say she writes bad'). In search for more evidence I went online and found out the infamous "Althusserian" passage that Dutton laughed at -- "candidates for nomination for the Bad Writing Contest should NOT be meant as parodies -- there's a lot of unintentional parodying going on here so there" (or words)). After a few years -- apparently Butler was the first winner, but Jameson and Bhabha also made it -- Jameson twice -- Dutton was forced to stop it ("it's not fun anymore"). (But it was).

An online essay by an author with a Scandinavian surname discusses "proper names" as brands. There's Grice, Gricean, and Griceian, and paleo-Gricean (my usage), neo-Gricean, post-Gricean.

But that for later. Rather I want to discuss brand names used by Grice himself. He uses, first:

"neo-Prichardian".

He says his account of intention (in "Intention and Uncertainty", Clarendon Press, separatum of the British Academy Annual Philosophical Lecture for 1971) is "neo-Prichardian". This is a joke because none of the audience had a clue as to who Prichard was -- except those who did (have a clue). I was not in the audience but I do have a clue (now).

Prichard is perhaps the most important philosopher in the world, after Grice -- for someone. He was, I think, a Londoner, but with a name like that, trust he was called "Welsh" (I treasure that little book on "The Georgian Literary Scene" that has E. Morgan Forster as "Welsh" alright!). Prichard's views are so obscure and scattered in forgotten books -- although he was an Oxford professor -- that it was a blessing that Urmson decided to reprint most of his important pieces -- that Grice refers to -- in 1968 for an Oxford paperback. Prichard talks about 'willing-that' (e.g. I will that Beckham scores a goal) rather than 'will to' (I will to go to London, I will go to London). Grice loves the freedom that the 'that'-clause introduces ("Surely you should be able to will that Fido is a bitch", etc.). He also (Grice does) loves from Prichard the element of 'belief' instilled onto 'willing'. He mentions Prichard twice only: on the first page of his separatum and in the last but one -- before finally providing the analysis of 'intending' he had been promising his audience to offer.

---- Then Grice drops the usual suspects: Aristotle and Kant he finds so boring that he has to merge them into a multiple personality: Ariskant. From Aristotle, all the stuff about virtue ethics and teleology. From Kant, all the deontological anti-Aristotelian stuff. Trust a Gricean to turn ortho doxies onto hetero ones.

--- Grice uses his own name as brand only once. In combo with his colleague Myro, he refers (Grice does) to the Grice-Myro theory of identity. A convoluted time-variable view of '='. E.g. Judith Butler is a lesbian. But Judith Butler says, "I am many identities". So, it's Judith Butler at one particular time that she is a lesbian. Before the generation of sexual characteristics, she wasn't. She also calls herself a 'philosopher' and a 'woman'. These are her identities. In the ZF set-theoretical sense. But before a woman, she was a girl. So JB = a woman, is a time-relative identity in the Grice-Myro account. Pretty obvious, but enough to give Frege a headache (who couldn't see beyond his nose as to whether Hesperus = Phosphorus).

What other -ian words does Grice use? Not Lockean, but Alston did call Grice a Lockean in proposing an 'ideational' theory of meaning (in Alston's 1964 classic, Philosophy of Language).

Not 'Hobbesian,' but Hacking thus calls Grice in his influential 1977 Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy (analysing Hobbes as paleo-Gricean: "what an utterer of "Stone" means when he utters "Stone" is not the 'thing', "stone" but the intention of the idea of the utterer that he is thinking about a 'stone'". Big deal. Hacking married a student of Grice's. So that's a small world. Her name is also Judith, like LaButler, and her surname also starts with a "B", like Butler. But it's, rather, "Baker". She should before too long get her combo work with Grice published or something. I love her.

Then there's "Austinian". Grice uses the epithet, derogatorily. Grice had such a healthy big ego that he'd rather be seen dead (as Judith Butler would have it) than a mere -ian, so he says he never endorsed the 'full Austinian Code', by which he does not mean Augustinian (alla Confessions or when we say that Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteininans endorse an Augustinian approach to language learning). No. He means the Lancaster born philosopher who held the chair of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, and who never published ONE book during his lifetime.

I would think Grice uses "Russellian", too, but since that is boring, he prefers "Russell" simpliciter -- as in the mimeo cited by G. P. Bealer: "Definite descriptions in Russell and the vernacular". The fact that he manages to combine "the vernacular" with "Russell" like that I find amusing. Especially since he cares to drop the hateful "Lord" -- in "Lord Russell".

I think he would use "Socratic," too, and more interesting, 'neo-Trasymachean'. (or neo-Trasymachus). This in his only serious study (well, along with his "Aristotle on the multiplicity of being") in the history of Ancient philosophy (he also has stuff on Descartes, in WoW, and Hume -- as cited by Haugeland -- and more recent stuff on Moore and Davidson -- of an exegetical nature). In his discussion of neo-Socrates and neo-Trasymachus he identifies, I would think, T. Nagel, with the latter, to god effect. Or people like Nozick. (Grice is concerned with the neo-Trasymachean positivist defintion of 'justice' along Kelsenian lines).

And there may be more.

Now a few notes on what "Gricean" may mean:

--- "Gricean" should mean, first, what Schiffer, improperly (but I love him) calls IBS (not IBM -- but:) "Intention-Based Semantics". You cannot be a Gricean and deny that what the utterer intends to do is minor. It's like when you were in primary school and the teacher was teaching you the moods: indicative, imperative, interrogative. "What's that?". "Well, the intention of the speaker", she would say, "when she utters a subjunctive is a volition -- hence the drop of the 's' in "God Shave The Queen"" (See "Misheard Lyrics).

--- "Gricean" should mean giving room to 'implicatum' as PART of (seriously) what-is-meant. You cannot say that 'and then' (e.g. "She had an abortion and got pregnant") is merely represented by the truth-functional 'and'. The bracketed expression is SO clumsy that the utterer is either idiotic or never read Grice's "Conversational Implicature" essay. His loss.

--- "Gricean" is most infamously attached to 'maxim'. It seems that linguists who (some of them) never passed a course in Kantian deontological ethics -- which is dedicated, 75% of it, on the 'maxim' and the 'universalisability' of the maxim -- are so scared by the word, 'maxim', that they NEED to add 'Gricean'. As if the monster gained some respectability in the proceedings. Recall that Grice came out of nowhere. And this was so especially for non-philosophers, or non-philosophers who were NOT of Grice's circle, when circulation started of his "Conversational Implicature" paper (I won't call it "Logic and Conversation" because he NEVER meant the thing to be titled thus and he NEVER entitled his William James lectures thus either -- what he does in that lecture iii is just introduce the idea of a conversational implicature -- never mind about logic OR conversation). (By the time he was diagnosed with emphysema and dropsy it was too late, as he recognises in WoW:Foreword -- to make any change onto things which had gotten (sic), perhaps against his will, into the Public Domain -- so he just kept the order and the titling of the things as they had been published on request before then).

---- "Gricean" can mean many other things. If you are into 'presupposition' and like to use "neo-Strawsonian" (like Noel Burton-Roberts, the only one I know who uses the sobriquet with a straight face) you can drop "Gricean" to indicate that you deny the existence of the beast.

--- "Gricean" can mean a 'functionalist' regarding a folk-psychological introduction of the bizarre terms used by philosophical psychologists (if you've read, and learned, as Bennett says you should, Grice's Method in philosophical psychology, now repr. in Grice 1991 -- by heart.

--- "Gricean" you can oppose to "Harean" (in the language of morals) or "Urmsonian" (in the topic of parentheticals), or "Nowell-Smithian" (re: contextual implication), etc.

So what's your brand? Horn onced referred to some stuff as "Speranziana", so I should go by "Speranzian". Then there's Kramerian (the idea of evolution and the efficiency principle and the physical/logical device), and there's Jonesian (alla Roger Bishop Jones's idea of philosophy as a formal calculus for the elaboration of eternal truths) and Kennedian (for the idea of the limits and margins of language as it is used in various genres of performance, etc.). And there's Whartonian (if you are Timothy Wharton) and Allottian (if you are Nicholas Elwyn Allott) and Baynesian (if you are Steven R. Bayne) and Alphickian (if you are Alphick). And there may be others.

Let's distinguish some neo-Griceans:

There's "Hornian". A Hornian is basically a dualist. Unlike Grice who favoured a square (of categories -- four of them), Horn, like Zipf, features a dual model. A Hornian, unlike perhaps a paleo-Gricean, is very clear as to what 'meta-' stuff is (especially metalinguistic negation: "I don't own four cars; I own six!", Trump declared).

There's "Levinsonian". This man, who published a book on Conversational Implicature, is like Grice, only different. That thick (in terms of pages) book proposes various principles which differ from Grice's own ("Co-operative Principle" and four attending categories). However, I found relief to learn, after following Levinson's argumentation -- a linguistic rather than philosophical one, even though he is an anthropologist, rather -- that he (Levinson) concludes that "something like the original set of four maxims by Grice is perhaps was is going on when we implicate and stuff" (or words).

-- And that's just for the Implicature stuff. The non-Implicature stuff has been of less prominence so it would be otiose to say that we have a Peacockean (after C. A. B. Peacocke) account of content internalisation with differs in various important respects with Grice. I mean, who cares? (I love Peacocke). It's like when Worsley was asked to write a candid memoir of his sexual proclivities. Ditto Coward. Payne said to Coward, "You should follow the example of Worsely in Flanneled Fool and be explcit as to who you go to bed with." 'There is a difference, though', Coward remarked. 'People don't care a fig as to who Worsley goes to bed with'. Implicating they do care at least one fig as to who Sir Noel does. THIS NOT to minimise Peacocke, who is a genius. But to point out that to use 'brand names' with respect to rather minor points of disagreements seems 'futilitarian'? (Or something).

--- Ah, and Grice does use "Schifferian" (or 'pseudo-Schifferian' rather) in WoW to refer to this bright student of Strawson's back in the day: Atlantic-City born author of "Meaning" and stuff.

And there may be more. Myself, to echo Grice's Ariskant, coined Plathegel, but failed.