The Usual Suspects: Grice suspects of Grice

By J. L. Speranza
--- for the Grice Club.

In 'Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation', now in Way of Words, Grice deals, inter alia, with Oxford examples of linguistic analysis provided by Austin, Hart, and Strawson -- if we restrict to Grice's "generation". Viz:

Austin, b. 1911 in Lancashire
Grice, b. 1913 in Staffordshire (became Warwickshire in 1889)
Hart, b. 1914 (I think) in, I think, Harrogate.
Strawson, b.1919 born London

-- the rest of authors that Grice don't matter (Wittgenstein, etc.) because they never attended Austin's "Saturday Mornings" (so what can they know?)

Each of these (Grice included) attempted an analysis of what we may call
Pragmatically Odd Utterances. Respectively:

Austin ====== Mr J. murdered Mrs J. voluntarily.
Grice ====== That pillar box looks red to me
Hart ====== He drove the car very carefully.
Strawson ====== She had a child and got married.

Fig. 1

The expressions they want to focus are, respectively:

Austin ======== "voluntarily" (or more generally M-ly)
Grice ======== "seems"
Hart ======== "carefully"
Strawson ====== "and" (as involving temporal sequence).

Fig. 2

Grice's idea is that the utterances in fig. 1. constitute _suspect examples_,
since they are brought about to analyse the meaning of particular
expressions (or families of expressions) are represented by figure 2.

It is in this context that Grice speaks of "suspect condition", I
think? (as encompassing _all_ examples, and not just Austin's observations
about "modifiers" in the "X did A M-ly" schema). I.e. since Hart's, Austin's, Strawson's and Grice's are all "suspect" or "problem" examples, they involve some condition which pose a _problem_ for the analyst because they are conversationally _misleading_ (but all true).

So, as Grice uses, "suspect" applies to this conversational
misleadingness. Not to the "fishiness" of the act that the act must have in
order to allow for a permissible use of a modifying expression, I would
think. I.e. I would think there's no implicature of "fishiness" in Grice's use of
_suspect_. He calls it _suspect_ because he thinks the whole maneouvre of
the philosophers who try to build this _misleadingness_ into the semantics
of the relevant expressions is _suspect_ (But then, it's odd that Grice
suspects of his earlier self).

L. M. Tapper, to provoke me, uses 'fishy'. "I guess because it's the shortest way to put it." But "odd" is shorter! But please note that I (and I think Grice) would make a distinction as to _what_ is _odd_. In the case of Austin's examples ("no
modification without aberration"), "aberration" seems to apply to the
linguistic aberration which the modification will IMPLICATE? So here
"aberration" is like conversational misleadingness. The expression would be
"aberrant". _Uttering_ "I sit voluntarily" is _aberrant_, not my _sitting_?

I wish there were a noun to signify "the possibility of one being misled". Since "misleadingness" is too strong, implying as it does that something
_is_ _misleading_ rather than, what we need, that something only _may_ (or
even _might_) be misleading. E.g. people find the use of "believe" when
"know" may just as well (or better) do, as _misleading_. I don't (I guess
my Gricean background helps. Ha Ha).

Consider:

naked photo -----> photo of a naked
body.
-- this is Aristotle's paronymy as analysed by Grice in "Aristotle on the
multiplicity of being" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 69 -- published
posthumously). In your latter case, the transference now would be


special special
feeling --------> circumstance


I don't see anything wrong with that. In fact, I can't see how a
circumstance can be _special_ unless you _feel_ it to be that way...

Grice uses "aberrant" versus "nonaberrant"
(Studies, p.13). (I re-read the whole "Prolegomena" to check Grice's
modifiers -- and got somewhat groggy).

Obviously, Grice is having Austin's
"aberration" in mind when mentioning "aberrant". But if what I say holds
water, I think Austin is in turn having in mind some _linguistic_ oddness
(aberration) rather than the aberration or oddness or fishiness (bore by
the action itself) implied (or conversationally implicated, techincally) by
the use of the modifying phrase.

Incidentally, Austin uses "modification without aberration" (his version of "Taxation without representation"), but then he always thought that the Boston Tea Party was a waste (of tea).