Grice: Theme A and Theme B

-- by JLS
----- for the GC

WITH R. B. JONES (elsewhere, notably his pdf CarnapGrice in his site coauthored (c) JonesSperanza) we are examining the logic of the strands and the monsters. Here I would like to add:

-- the aspects

and

-- the themes

The 'aspects' are three, and listed in the first page of the Retrospective Epilogue. They refer to:

aspect I: everything Grice says is important.
aspect II: everything Grice says is important to ANYONE.
aspect III: everything Grice says is important AND the first word (if not the last word).

----

As for the themes:

This is the second, third, and fourth paragraphs of the "Foreword":

Grice writes:

the main focus ... is on the nature
and philosophical importance

rather than linguistic importance, anthropological importance, or what have you,

of TWO closely linked ideas

-- here Grice has a bracket: "(Theme A)".

and which he characterises as:

Ingredient/Element/Problem/Topic a. ONE idea (because the ideas are TWO in total):
assertion and implication

Ingredient/Element/Problem/Topic b. THE OTHER IDEA:
meaning.

(He uses 'problem' in plural on p. vi -- 'the problems [of assertion/implication AND meaning] form the topic'. He uses 'element' on p. vi, too, as well as 'ingredient'. (Ingredients for a Gricean cocktail).


So that we would have rather

Sub-theme/topic A: assertion and implication (i.e. not assertion -- it being defeasible).

Sub-theme/topic A: what U meant.

----

Grice introduces Theme B:

"But besides the topic," something is "persistently discernible"

---- He likes the simile: something persists, or recurrs, as with the strands -- this has to do with his research on relative identity contra Wiggins --

"another theme (theme B)"

---

What is that?

This is "a METHODOLOGICAL or programmatic
theme,"

and this is "manifested in a recurrent
endeavour"

--- what in Reply to Richards he describes as "The school of ordinary language philosophy", but which by 1987 he has come to regard, and justly so, as more of a Gricean trait of character than an application of the Austinian code.

----

But which, for the purposes of this Club we do regard as having some general traits shared by other philosophers, and which we thus identify by the keyword:

"ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY"

----

Grice is emphatic (and Italic) with 'ordinary' on p. vi of the Foreword. He is being reactionary, becuase there is nothing 'ordinary' about the way a Clifton old boy and first with Lit. Hum., uses it -- i.e. language.

---

He then proposes to see his essays as:

"the consideration of ordinary
language in philosophising",

-- i.e. Theme B.

---

As he notes at least two essays ("Common sense and scepticism" and "Philosopher's Paradoxes" [not a typo there, he does mean the individual philosopher]) expose "Common Sense" which he regards as being "closely related".

The idea that there is indeed this conceptual connection:

Ordinary Language Cannot Deviate From Common Sense.

-----


(At this point, when he discusses "Causal Theory of Perception" on p. vi, and he notes that it contains "an EARLIER VERSION OF ... the notion of conversational implicature", we can use that for a forthcoming edn of WoW that reprints the whole essay without the excerpting note which cut the excursus. For we can imagine that it was Grice's idea at one time to reprint the essay in full -- Otherwise, why note it "contans an earlier version" if the reprint does not?)

----

Grice had in mind a retrospective with Warnock on perception (Warnock died in 1996 and wrote the DNB entry for Grice). So Grice is careful that the reprint of "Causal Theory of Perception" -- that Warnock had reprinted in full -- and indeed, as it should, with A. R. White's reply in the symposium -- what's the good of a symposium if you cut it? -- is justified in WoW vis a vis "the double character" as he calls it (Janus-like would be fairer) of the essay, which is not so, if you cut out the excursus. It's interesting that the double character of ONE ESSAY ("Causal theory") justifies the inclusion of TWO essays ("Causal Theory" and "Some remarks about the senses") in WoW.

When the Warnock retrospective IS published then, both essays would need to be reprinted there, along with the discussion of the Strand -- which is Number 1, no less.

----

Just because he includes his "Eschatology" paper he feels justified in entitling the Part II of WoW as "Explorations in Semantics and Metaphysics". I note this as of interest, lest we read too much metaphysics in the stuff that Grice did not mean as such.