Grice on Shem and Shaun: The Kicker, The Kicked, and the Kick

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In PPQ, vol. 67, p. 16, Grice is in a campaign, typically, against the only person at UC/Berkeley he found it pleasurable to discuss with: that 'cowboy' of a philosopher: Donald Herbert Davidson. We all love him!

Grice is criticising the complete adhocness of 'z' as the third place in a notably dyadic predicate, 'kick' which Davidson, for reasons totally unclear to Grice and me, turns into triadic (In general, for any predicate that the man in the street or the philosopher in the library seeas as n-adic, Davidson proposes we view it as n+1-adic).

Here we would have:

the kicker: Shem.
the kicked: Shaun.
the kick.

But, unlike Shem and Shaun, the kick features in nothing but in occurrences of itself.

As Grice expresses it:

"While one who kicks, or one who is kicked
will be involved in something other than
himself, namely a kick, the kick will not
be a participant in any item other than
itself" (p. 16)

And this is completely ad hoc.

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