Wiggins on Grice

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


---- I know all of the links, not less because I was happy to be able to hold conversations with J. C. D'Alessio, who was Wiggins's student (along with D'Alessio'w wife, Teresa Zavalia) back in All Souls of the Day.

---- Later I was involved in rehashing some of Grice's arguments in his earliest, "Negation" (1938) and the 1961 "Lectures on negation" (still unpublished -- but cfr. Chapman, 2006 for some good quotes from archival material at the "H. P. Grice Papers", Bancroft -- and was re-reading Wiggins on Plato's problem with negation.

---- Later still, and mainly due to this latter 'concern', I got hold of the Wiggins festschrift and I was slighly disappointed -- no real historical account of things, but hardly D. G. P. Wiggins's fault, of course.

NOW, as I tidy up the Swimming-Pool Library I see my yellowed photocopy of the Steinberg/Jacobovits's Semantics volume which reprinted Grice's "Meaning". So I'll quote from the three or four pages where Wiggins (the London-born, Oxford-educated philosopher) writes about his beloved tutor, and one that loved his tuttee as well (Grice dedicated one long seminar in metaphysics to Wigggin's extremely brilliant "Sameness and substance").

Griceains will NOT quote from Wiggins. They don't care. I do, and I'm a Griceian, so when I say, "Griceans will not quote from Wiggins", I should not be taken to imply that I don't, because I do. Etc.


On p. 17 -- the reference is directly to Grice (1948), 'Meaning'. Wiggins notes that he is not going to be as philosophical as Grice. Wiggins will be concerned with an undefined notion of 'truth', and not propose or touch on a 'theory constructed' in terms of psychological attitudes such as 'intending' "after the fashion of Grice". 'After' strikes me as ambiguous. I treasure an old sheet music of "After the ball" (is over -- the waltz). It has a caricature attached to it -- a boy running after a big ball. Ah well).

Wiggins continues to quote from Grice on p. 19 -- at this point he refers to Brian G. Loar. Loar was WARNOCK's, rather than Grice's tutee at Oxford (One of the main reasons why Warnock existed: to educate Loar -- Loar's thesis, "Sentence meaning", DPhil, Oxford).

Wiggins reports from Loar:

Wiggins is making a distinction (typical) between:

"non-designated conditions"

and

"designated conditions"

and goes on to confide that Loar 'conviced him' (he says 'persuaded him, as far as I can see') that:

the difficulties of keeping OUT
non-designated conditions are intimately
connecte ... with the answer to the
difficulties of ... completing
Grice's (1948) definition of '... means ...".

Recall this Wiggins piece predates the publication of the William James Lectures on Logic and Conversation, of which Wiggins is aware but won't quote -- It was outside (c) -- and he of course, morally, just stuck with Grice's PUBLISHED views in "The causal theory of perception" of 1961.

Wiggins goes on:

"and these difficulties" have to do
with the fact that one has to

leave room for the fact that

--- VERY ROUGHLY PUT IT -- I hate such loose uses

people sometimes say what they
don't mean etc..

----

Next is p. 20. Here I do think Grice gets a misquote too. But I should have to revise the actual wording in "Causal Theory" -- why Grice felt he had to leave Section II out of WoW -- while very clever wasn't 'apt' for me who don't suscribe to the "Aristotelian Society" and to have the vol. 61 in the Swimming-Pool Library would be too much. For Wiggins makes a point, which Grice does not really really really do -- at least as Far As The William James are concerned -- unless I'm skipping, on purpose, some silly omission -- between


implication implicature


---

How come?

Well -- this seems like such an obvious Gricean distinction that one wonders. But no. I stick to my words. If one revises the introduction of the lexeme (first used in the English language and thus recognised by the OED3 -- thanks to yours truly:

'implicate', 'implicature' -- (The latter, first use).

------

we see that he is not concerned with that distinction. Rather he is using 'implicate' to get to a verb that will do 'general duty' for:

a. mean
b. suggest
c. imply


--- the nouns that we correlate with this are:

--

a. meaning --
b. suggestion
c. implication.

So, an implication can and WILL be (before Grice's manoeuvre) a 'conversational implicature'.


--- Yet, Wiggins writes:


"Grice has looked for similar distinctions
(of greater generality than Frege's ['Causal Theory of Perception' which Wiggins misquotes as 1962), "and in subsequent work as yet, unfortunately, unpublished" -- I'm never sure about 'unfortunately'. If the man DID not publish, that was his fortune. Why publish and perish? Plus, he was NOT an American! Recall that Wiggins is writing this as an 'American' in the United States. Grice was invited to DELIVER the William James Lectures, NOT to publish them. There is this 'consumer obsession' with New-Worlders etc. that a thing HAS to be published, etc. Some females are like that, too --]).

Wiggins continues:

"and [Grice] distinguiushes between
the implications [italics Wiggins's]
of a sentence s, what follows from it
if it is true, and the implicatures
[again italics Wiggins's] of it which are
distinct from its implications"

--- for why would anyone care to distinguish them, anyways (sic)?

" -- the situational import of a speaker's saying s."

----

"This import," Wiggins goes on:

"typically arises from conventions [emphasis not mine, and I wouldn't emphasise this if it were not for Wiggins's perfect misuse of the term here]
of helpfulness, sincerity, etc., which Grice argues govern the conduct of speech-exchanges)."

Wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Imagine if Grice were reported: "Grice went to Harvard to argue that people speak the truth!". The thing is so ridiculous that to have Wiggins, who should be speaking on his behalf, only, to say argue, or write 'argue', if you must, is totally otiose. Grice argued OTHERWISE. Grice COULD be jocular and so fastidious that he WOULD say he would ARGUE for that -- but in his typical "good English" (that Wiggins perhaps lacks being a Londoner -- they are more cosmopolitan down there) amusing way: "I will be enough of a rationalist", "I will be as far as to argue that truth is an important idea", "I shall be presenting some evidence towards the suggestion that, as Searle remarks, we are taught to tell the truth -- by our parents, which Searle omits in his account of regulative rules", etc. etc.


---


Next comes Grice on p. 21 (the next page to p. 20, if you must).

Here Wiggins follows Grice in distinguishing

"what is said", strictly,

"before we can explain how circumstances, ... or whatever else add implicatures".

"The suggestion, implicit in Grice"

--- and thus not said???! Give me a break! --

"is that there relates to the strict
meaning of a sentence s".

----

Wrong wrong wrong wrong. Grice is SO CAREFUL there. He would have an attack if he sees Wiggins using "s" like that -- Wiggins's example of a 'sentence', while not Colourless green ideas sleep furiously, which I suggested was Chomsky's infamous claim to infame, is, rather, 'all mimsy were the borogoves' --.

Grice is yet again quoted on p. 24, this time a footnote coming really from the previous page (who edits those things so clumsily?). It is an elaborated Wigginsian defense onto this or that Wigginsianism, for which he'll bring in Grice for good measure, and uninvitedly, "It seems obvious" -- he writes -- this phrase struck me as funny-peculiar: how can 'it' SEEM obvious? -- "that any THOROUGH discussion" [by someone thoroughly dead, we hope] "would have to touch on or work its way back to Grice's project". It's like -- if you see a problem here, blame it on Grice?!

----

Wiggins goes on with his essay! Etc.
In fairness to Wiggins, I am possibly misquoting him -- i.e. Surely there is a better 'intention' to adjudicate to his casual remarks. Plus, he has a great merit. When I say "this is American Wiggins", I wad underestimating the fact that he had LEFT Oxford by then (and was receiving a salary from Bedford College -- you see what I mean by his cosmopolitanism?) and he was affiliating with the by-far best university in Cambridge (Mass.-- joke there: but I feel I cannot SAY -- without hurting -- the 'best university in America' and that's NOT because Buenos Aires is American! ha! --): to wit: Harvard --. And so, one looks at the long title of his thing,

and compares it with

Grice, "On utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word meaning" (Foundations of Language, 1969, originally William James Lecture VI, but cfr. "Meaning and Saying" -- unpublished bit of William James Lecture V -- 'published' for the first time in WoW (?): V) and one cannot fail to detect a stronger Griceanism than one shouldn't!

Three cheers for Griceian Wiggins, then!