"Essays on Grice"

(Palgrave)

---- An overview of the 14 contributions:

1. Grice's Defense of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and Its Unintended Historical Consequences in Twentieth Century Analytical Philosophy
Jay David Atlas
----- Grice, In defense of a dogma. Grice's wit is in the rallying of an underdogma. I would think it was Strawson's publishing of Grice's Meaning (1948) in 1957 that had unintended consequences -- for Grice! Never mind twentieth-century analytic philsophy (she's dead now).

2. Paul Grice and the Philosopher of Ordinary Language--Siobhan R. Chapman.
Chapman keeps calling Grice "Paul Grice". Recall in the days of yore, that would have been so RUDE! It's always "H. P. Grice" even to your brother! I would NOT use "ordinary language" as the object of 'philosophy'. Rather it's "ordinary-language philosopher."

3. Some Aspects on Reasons and Retionality--J.Baker. This is a pun on Grice, "Aspects of reason" (Grice's 2001 book), originally entitled, "Some aspects of reason". She knows what she is talking about, and I love her most when she goes 'irrational'!

4. The Total Content of What a Speaker Means--A.Martinich
The implicatum, the explicatum, the dictum, and what have you! Fine-analyst as he was, Grice could not compete with R. M. Hare, who needed to accomodate a clistic and a tropic to the Gricean phrastic and neustic.

5. Showing and Meaning--M.Green. From the author of "Grice's Frown". He showed me the way to go home". "He meant that I was drunk". What are the analogies. Both take "that"-clause, but the first is natural meaning. Anglophones don't really understand the irony in Grice's terms ('meaning-non-natural') but they can be fun to read.

6. Communicative Acts - With and Without Understanding--C.Plunze. This is Continental Swiss Philosophy at its best.

7. Perillocutionary Acts. A Gricean Approach--K.Petrus. Idem!

8. William James + 40: Issues in the Investigation of Implicature--L.Horn. This was meant for publication in 2007

1967
+ 40
------
2007

Now it's WJ+43, but there are still 'issues', we trust.

9. Grice on Presupposition--A.Bezuidenhout. Or why Grice felt the notion wasn't important.

10. Irregular Negations: Implicature and Idiom Theories--W.Davis. Davis reviewed what he called (nfamously) the failure of Grice for Cambridge University Press, so this is a re-hash of his main point. That Grice fails to understand the importance of the idiom. Some people forget that Grice had a first in Lit. Hum, Oxon., so he knew what idioms are and what they meant.

11. Grice's Calculability Criterion and Speaker Meaning--J.Saul. Saul has criticised Davis elsewhere, but for the Palgrave contract, we are all good fellows and friends. The calculability was Grice's joke for a very informal 'working-out pattern': "She said that the cat sat on the mat; that was, presumably, what she meant".

12. A Gricean View on Intrusive Implicatures--M.Simons. If they are intended, they can never be intrusive. So she means 'as unwelcomed by the boring addresee". Who certainly has no 'say' in the matter!

13. Three Theories of Implicature: Default Theory, Relevance and Minimalism--E.Borg. None of this pleased Grice -- who was unique. What the contributors here should do is get a solitary reclusion at the Bancroft, and each should come out with an edition of some paper by Grice. So, instead of having more name-drops, we would have the real Grice strike back with a vengeance! THAT should provide a lesson to Griceians. Imagine if Aristotle's bulk of writings was still deposited somewhere and all we get were second-hand voices of his views!

13. Contextualism--N.Kompa. Overlaps with Emma Borg, because Grice hated 'contextualism', and contextualism hates Grice, so that's a tit for the tat, as they say.