Grice's Grand Plan

--------- By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed), &c.
--------------- For the Grice Club

--------- I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO circulate, in a sort of circular for the Grice Circle a little about what people may call Grice's project, or what I (and Grice) used to call the Gricean (or Grice's) 'programme' (WoW:vi). Grice does use 'programme' at the beginning of his WoW:vi. And there are two little caveats, delightful, though with this:

(a) A programme? More like a channel, if you ask me! I.e. Griceian sort of proliferate, and we may need sometimes to distinguish. Actually, I think I would like to take this proposal by Jason Kennedy. He uses, rightly, Grice-ian, Griceian (Katz too). So one may want to distinguish between Griceian (for Grice's very own) and Gricean for the rest. Etc.

(b) A pro-gramme? What about a post-gramme. It seems 'programme' has this 'entailment': "not yet done". Whence the pro- otherwise? So we don't want that. Pro-ject may suffer from the same sort of thing. It's like, and I've heard them, "Grice's idea of defining this in terms of that (e.g. personal identity in terms of memory, from his early 1941)" is just a 'pro-posal', it's more of a talk than a walk. We don't want that! necessarily.

In any case, this to share that indeed Grice, also, when in less of a formal environment -- e.g. when in a plane, he would jot the right word. Thus Chapman p. 149quotes from archival material to the effect that Grice spoke of his own

* * * Grand Plan * * *

This was in connection with a _specific_ little grand plan as it were: It was on the plane to Harvard, back in 1967. Some of these papers are even earlier, "from Oxford from 1966." Chapman writes:

"[Grice] in fact originally planned [but never carried it over] to include discussion of this [bizarre, pirotic] topic in the William James [rather more traditional] lectures [at Harvard, bi-annual, philosophy-cum-psychology]." Chapman continues: "Papers from Oxford from 1966 included

a jotted note entitled,

* * * '(Provisional) Grand Plan' * * *

"for James Lectures and Seminars". Nothing in it really concerns his big plan which is the one that I would like to refer to vis a vis his private conversations with the editor of Harvard University Press. Chapman, rather in a non-authorised way (? I love her) quotes from the man in the Press who said, "Grice knew this was his last battle". And so we suffer with the man who was exchanging little notes from Berkeley to Cambridge, Mass. -- and back, and here we do see something like this idea of a programme. In WoW:vi:117 he had established his programme as follows:

"[My] enterprise", he wrote, "forms part of a wider programme", which he proposes to 'delineate'. "This [wider] programme", Grice writes, "arises out of a distinction which I wish to make" within the total signification of a remark, between what an utterer has explicitly communicated -- in a 'favoured' 'sense' and what the utterer has implicated, "talking into account the fact that what he has imlicated may be either conventionally implicated, "or conconventionally implicated", and which in turn divides onto 'conversationally and nonconversationally'. All this is pretty systematic, and it's an abstraction he has in mind. But in any case, it shows that 'what-is-meant' and 'what-is-implicated' do relate. It's only a much later stage of the programme (He delineates _six_ of them, on pp. 118-19) to shed his analytic skills to an examination of what an 'expression' means. Finally, then, for this post, this passage which I found charming in his correspondence with Harvard University Press, and now in the H. P. Grice Papers. (Archival material): Chapman ventures:

"Grice was adamant from the start that whatever else the book contained, the William James lectures should be kept together and distinct from other papers. In a letter to his publishers he wrote,
- - - - - Berkeley
- - Harvard UP
- - Cambridge, Mass.
-- -- ...
---- the link between two two
---- main topics of the James
---- lectures is not loose
---- but extremely intimate.
---- No treatment of Saying or
---- Implying can afford
---- to omit a study of the notion
---- of Meaning which plainly
---- underlies both these ideas.
------------------------------ H. P. Grice

The reference here -- Chapman for (c) reasons has of course to provide the footnote with the full reference. So here the note -- and someone should compile a "Catalogue Raisonee" for all the archival material -- is as per below (*). Incidentally, in a marginal noted: "Good, but linguists (!) won't see!" -- for how many have you met that are willing to discuss "Meaning"! They go straight to "Logic and Conversation"!)(* H. P. Grice -- "The Way of Words, Studies In: Notes, offprints and draft material', H. P. Grice papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

The Grand Plan in retrospect, then. We see then Grice as a methodologist par excellence: a philosophical methodologist. He had witnessed a 'manoeuvre', even among his Oxford colleagues, and his earlier self, that would rely, informally or in perhaps an ad-hoc, or unprincipled, or slightly opportunistic way, on the 'vagaries of' usage. He knew he would be pigeonholed as an 'ordinary-language philosopher' whatever. He was, afer all, from Oxford. He disliked the phrase "Oxford School of Ordinary Language Philosophy". For how many are going to take the trouble to distinguish between varieties of Oxford analysis? But he was no Strawson, no Austin, no Urmson, no Warnock, no Hare. He was, er, ... Grice. He had a talent for formalities.

The outcome of this is that most of what he writes can be then provide fodder for, say, both the formalists and the informalists, as they are sometimes called. Not to mention the linguists who will go on to apply Griceianism to, say, an analysis of, say, 'bottle'. S. Yablo's remark, "Implicatures happen", is an interesting one. He suggests that Grice did regret having come across the implicature. In some of the material he ellided for WoW (from Presupposition and Conversational Implicature) he does make comments to the effect that the application of this 'tool' or 'technicism' should be _very_ principled -- it's no good just to postulate an ad-hoc maxim and proceed. He provides like 6 criteria to distinguish the beast (nondetachability, cancellability, calculability, indeterminacy, defeasibility, etc. -- and more). And the particular interface with the equally bestial idea of an 'entailment' was one to take with a pinch of salt. Plus, it's not like the Grice programme saves. You love it or leave it! It's not like say, Monguism + Implicature "Saves", say. It _may_ save, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. What the eye no longer sees the heart may no longer grieve for, but as many have noted, the implicatum is not just eliminated: it has been carefully identified, and its appearance on context postulated, and its rationale defended on both rational and reasonable grounds.

If that's not a grand plan, I don't know what is.