The Best of all Possible Grices

-- by JLS
----- for the Grice Club.

AS R. B. JONES and I have elsewhere argued, 'possibly' is possibly one of the possibly most possible word to lead to possibly very possible misundertandings, possible.

It's easy to say, with D. K. Lewis, that "<>"
(and "possibly") does refer to possible worlds.
Even if we later take a "epistemic" view of
possible-worlds (a la G. Forbes in _The Metaphysics
of Modality_).

It is similarly easy to see the divergence between "<>"
and "possible", with Grice, as a mere matter of
mere conversational implicature.

This way we reach a nifty (in
my view) compromise. Univocity plus Implicature, or
Grice Saves. I.e. we may _not_ say that "<>" _diverge_:
first because we can always instil to <> any meaning
we want it, and second because there's the theory of
conversational implicature to show that the divergence
does _not_ belong in truth-conditions.


Forbes writes of Quasi-psychologism as being the idea that "the modal
status of truths and falshoods is ultimately gounded upon human
intellectual abilities". Forbes quotes from Stroud: "To explain "...is
possible" we need to pursue questions about the human mind and its
capacities". More interestingly for the Gricean is Fobes's ref. to D.
Wiggins -- an Oxford philosopher on whom Grice gave seminars in Berkeley.

Wiggins writes:

"We have here... is not a reduction or elimination of necessity and possibility but an _elucidation_:

1. The A may be B iff
it is possible to conceive of
the A that it is B.
2. The A must be B iff
it is not possible to conceive of
the A that it is not B"
(D. Wiggins, _Sameness & Substance_, Blackwell, p. 106).

Grice spent some time with Wiggins -- well, his book -- in a seminar in metaphysics at Berkeley. He concluded that possibly, "Grice", if it refers to all possible worlds where Grice exists does not yet yield that counterexamples to Leibniz's Law can be found. He concuded that a = b is best understood as time-relative, to say the least.