Grice on 'probable', not 'possible' (WoW: 368)

--- When I quoted Flew in my Jabberwocky essay, I credited Pears (also of Christ Church) with the insight:

For probability lower than .5, we use 'possible'
For probability higher than .5, we use 'probable'.

Grice is never so sure.

He writes on p. 368

One thing is:

"asserting it to be ... PROBABLE that [p]."

Another thing is, in a 'decreasing degree':

"asserting it to be possible that so-and-so".

[Grice uses 'so-and-so' throughout, but he was English (to the backbone) but some English use 'so-and-so' only to mean someone not something).

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"the so-and-so is such-and-such" ("in calling something a so-and-so, one would not be miscalling it a so and so." WoW:364).

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Re: "asserting it to be possible that so-and-so", Grice writes, is such that the interpretant will be as follows:

"Presumably," Grice writes,

""it is possible" means 'it is not certain that it
is not the case that so-and-so."

Whichever THAT means.

Surely if we say,

"It is possible it might rain tomorrow"

as opposed to

"It is possible that Apollinaire is using words for more than communication" (which Grice finds 'conceptually impossible,' p. 367)

we are NOT certain.

For a good sceptic, we are only certain of vacuous tautologies that are totally uninformative like "Women are women" and "War is war" (Grice's two examples in WoW:ii). (Contrdictions, Carnap and Bar-Hillel argue, are 'too informative to be true', on the other hand -- R. B. Jones has some say on this, this blog).

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So, why bring in 'certainty' (which can be either subjective, "I am certain that p", and objective, "It is certain that p" WoW:Descartes essay) with p < .5 only.

Surely when we say p > .5 we do NOT mean p = 1, because that's a tautology. It IS true that a tautology is probable and possible, but then everything, except p = 0 ("War is war", "Women are women", "Appolinaire is using words for purposes other than communication") is (or seems to be).