The Latitudinal Unity of Grice -- and His Longitudinal Unity, Too

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

In comments to "One Strand Too Many", Jones writes:

"It is a good idea to ask whether you have too many here."

Strands, he means.

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Yes. There is a good problem here.

Grice would speak of "UNITY" even if you didn't pay him. "The underlying unity" and Grice -- gives a few hits, notably by Chapman, blurb to her book.

But there's

Grice's idea of

the

longitudinal unity -- he means Leibniz and Aristotle, and Wollaston and Descartes -- i.e. BIG longitudes. But surely 1937 and 1957 (the year "Meaning" got published) and 1967 (the year "Logic and Conversation" was delivered) and 1977 (the year he gave the Kant lectures) and 1987, the year he wrote "Retrospective Epilogue" with the 8 strands) is long enough.

---

More importantly:

latitudinal unity.

The Richards attempt this when they have this rather too textbookish for my taste intro to Grice in "PGRICE". I love them! But in a way it's like Chapman's book on Grice -- textbookish. She does apologise: "I apologise", she says -- she means: to all who know something about philosophy. It's the type of book whose blurbs would read: "The book will be appropriate reading for those who don't know about the topic". Why didn't Agatha Christie never care to write such blurbs?

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By latitudinal unity it's the implicature Grice detected:

"Grice?! He is the man of the implicature, right?"

NO!!!!

To say, "he is the man of the implicature, no?" is RUDE. Because it means he is NOTHING but the man about the implicature.

JOURNAL
--- (by Grice)
--- For the Carus, I was introduced
to the faculty. The chair introduced me
to Mr. Puddle, "our man in aesthetics and
eighteenth century German philosophy". The
moment I heard that I knew I didn't want
to shake his hand".

Grice did shake hands because he realised the idiot had been the chair in presenting Puddle as he did.

----

So, philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Grice says.

So what's this game of identifying 16 strands? They are all one and the same: philosophy.

Consider what unites them:

Strand One: Philosophy of Perception. Or how to make sense of the word 'perceive'. Field: EPISTEMOLOGY. PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION. This is a British thing. We don't have 'filosofia della percezione" in Italian!

"The first of these strands belongs to the philosophy of perception". I am sticking, with Jones, to the 'headlines'. Grice speaks here of 'main' strand (as opposed to non-main) and he uses 'theses' to qualify them. There are, he finds, two theses in this main strand for example. -- actually three theses: a. causal analysis, b. experientialism, and c. physicalism defined in terms of phenomenalim --which was very "prominent" at one time, but is unrepresented in his publications.

Strand Two: analytic vs. synthetic. Field: PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. KEYWORD: SEMANTICS.

The analytic-synthetic distinction. Grice/Strawson, In defense of a dogma.

Strand Three: METHODOLOGY rather. KEYWORD/AREA: Meta-Philosophy.

'Ordinary-language philosophy': the man in the street encounters Eddington's OTHER table and has to choose. The idiocies referred to by Malcolm and Moore on behalf of the philosopher.

Strand Four: SEMANTICS/PRAGMATICS. RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. Grice was serious when he said that in his view "philosophy of language is a branch of rational psychology" (psychologia rationalis). Cited by Chapman, archival material.

"Meaning". What to make of it. Relativised meaning as basic.

Strand Five: SEMANTICS/PRAGMATICS

"What U centrally means by x" --

Strand Six: Implicature. Field: PRAGMATICS. RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY.

The cooperative principle and rationality in discourse and elsewhere. This is "Grice for the masses" and Asa Kaher, a disciple of a disciple of Carnap, managed to reprint this whole strand in his book (expensive one) with Routledge: "Pragmatics: Critical Concepts: Implicature").

Strand Seven: PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC, PHILOSOPHICAL LOGIC.

Grice's feet (one of each) in the camp of the modernist and the neo-traditionalist. THIS IS MY FAVOURITE strand, especially, since, hell, my PhD dissertation claimed it's "the essential Grice".

Strand Eight: PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC, PHILOSOPHICAL LOGIC. What's wrong with classical logic, as Jones puts it. (This is vague. Jones does not put it vaguely).

The post-modern move. How to get both feet OUT of the warring camps and get away with it.

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Strand Nine. Value. This becomes his "Conception of Value" book. FIELD: AXIOLOGY.

Strand Ten Reason. This becomes his "Aspects of Reason" book. As a matter of fact, we foresee a "Philosophical Papers" volume which should contain strands not here touched. FIELD: PSYCHOLOGIA RATIONALIS proper.

Strand Eleven. Actions and events. This is his "Pacific Philosophical Quarterly" essay for 1986. Touches on Reichenbach, von Wright, Davidson. It does not fit with the 8 strands he lists in WoW. PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. (or as Grice prefers by far -- he never uses 'philosophy of mind' because it's common -- philosophical psychology.

Strand Twelve. Intention. This would include his very influential (as England goes), "Intention and Uncertainty" which was his 1971 Annual Philosohical lecture as a member of the British Academy. This important essay -- published in the Proceedings but also distributed as a separatum, by the Clarendon Press, is not really covered in the 8 strands. It concerns the analysis of 'intention' in terms of 'willing' AND 'believing' and is labelled by Grice as 'neo-Prichardian'. KEYWORD: intention. FIELD: Rational psychology.

Strand Thirteen. Method in philosophical psychology. This fortunately got repr. as appendix I of Gr91. It is an extended treatment by Grice of "Ramsified naming" and "definition" as it applies to psychological predicates. It contains detailed thoughts and arguments against what he dubs, after a remark by Myro, the 'devil of scientism'. FIELD: PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY. ONTOLOGY. THEORY-THEORY.

Strand Fourteen Details of calculus. This would be his "Vacuous Names", for the Quine volume, and where Grice provides a detailed account of a formal system (which he calls "System Q" in honour of Quine). It deals wit very technical logical material, as it pertains the specific topic of 'ontological commitment' vis a vis cancellation by negation (hence the 'vacuous' in the title) for both names AND his favoured topic, 'definite descriptions'. Field: PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC, PHILOSOPHICAL LOGIC.

Strand Fifteen Longitudinal Essays. I.e. on the history of philosophy. Here Jones has espeicially expanded, elsewhere, on Grice on izzing and hazzing as per Grice's "Aristotle" paper (PPQ 1988, but written in the early 1970s). Essays on Descartes. Big book on Kant, owned (c) by Judith Baker, and which she should publish before too long. Or at least leave copy in Grice Papers at Bancroft.

Strand Sixteen. "Odds and Ends" -- Folder 16b in Cardbox 14, "The H. P. Grice Collection", The Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, Access Code: MSS 90/135c. Ask for "Odds and ends". FIELD: ETHICS.

Etc.