Aristotle On Imagination

In 1961 Grice gave the first part of a symposium for the Aristotelian Society. He entitled it, "The Causal Theory of Perception". It was responded by White. The proceedings (PAS, 35) were repr. by Warnock in "Philosophy of Perception" (1968).

In 1977, ten years afterwards, the Aristotelian met again, and Ayer, for lack of imagination or what, gave the first part of a symposium, which he entitled, totally unimaginatively and on breach of (c) as "The Causal Theory of Perception". The respondent was none other than L. J. Cohen, a well-known Oxonian arch-anti-Griceian.

In Section 5 of his reply, Cohen writes:

I shall NOT invoke the defence of Grice offered,
in the paper to which Ayer refers, for including
"looks to me" statements in the analysis of
perceptual reports.Indeed, I think that the substance of Grice's
defence, and in particular the appeal to the
a theory of conversational implicature is beside
the point.

Beside Cohen's point, that is. "Grice's essay was broken-backed". "The
theory of conversational implicature that he introduced there in a six-page
excursus contributes LITTLE OR NOTHING to the resolution of the
philosophical problems about perception that formed the main subject of his
paper". Nice, ennit! While we at the Grice Circle think it was
epoch-making! "It will take little time to show this. Grice considers the
possbility that a certain type of objection might be made to the thesis that

1. I am perceiving M

where M is a red object, implies the truth of

2. I am having a red sense datum.

where (2) is said to be equivalent to (3)."

3. M looks red to me.

Grice calls the condition which is fulfilled when one or other of the limbs
of a disjunction between doubt or denial is true, the "doubt-or-denial
condition". Cohen: "Grice's excursus presupposes a degree of internal
coherence in the anti-sense-datum argument which it does not in fact
possess. And that aspect of the analysis of perceptual judgements turns out
to be yet another* philosophical problem which his theory of conversational
implicature cannot help to resolve". "* Cf Cohen, Some remarks on Grice's
views about the logical particles of natural language" in Bar Hillel",
cited in my "Or And XOR" -- and 'Can the conversationalist hypothesis be
defended. Philosophical Studies, vol. 31, which is a reply to R Walker,
"Conversational Implicature" in S Blackburn, Meaning, Reference, and
Necessity". In any case, that Ayer found the Gricean defence important is
itself important, since Ayer was, inter alia, Grice's senior.

By that time, one wonders about White. His response to Grice is just so clever. And it was a great idea by Warnock to have BOTH things repr. in the well-known reader.