Methodological Aspects of "Causal Theory of Perception"

---- IF WE LOOK AT IT, GRICE´S "MEANING" should not count. The thing was submitted BY STRAWSON to the Philosophical Review! It was really (1961), The Causal Theory of Perception that should count as Grice's second essay. The first being his "Mind" essay in 1941. -- exactly 20 years after. A good rate for a philsopher who, unlike most of the American ones of our day, would not perish if he did not publish. (Oxford is so snob, that to ´publish´ is to get looked down. Pretentious smartasses publish).

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OF COURSE he had no intention of publishing that, either. When I was researching for "Negation", I got hold of Gilbert Ryle´s ingenious (i.e. candid and naive) account in the Aristotelian Society. It opens with the caveat: "I lost the copy of this lecture, so I´m relying on memory"! Some memory!

Grice is into a crusade with A. R. White. Symposiums are meant for exchange of ideas. White provides what Grice was meant to be provided. An excellent exercise in the best of the linguistic philosophy of the day. White was a colonial, which did not help, but it could have been worse. Much worse.

White´s reply is not often considered. It was reprinted in full, thank God, by Warnock, in "The philosophy of perception" (Oxford readings in philosophy, 1967). I find it VERY rude when a co-symposiast´s commentary is not reprinted).

There are various methodological points in "Causal Theory".

---- Many pertain to what Grice has as the Very First Strand. E.g. is the philospher giving way to the scientist to fill in the gaps when it comes to what it means to perceive? Don´t think so. Yet this is one reading of Grice´s contribution that has made the rounds. Surely the man in the street or the philospher in the library could care LESS about what the ´psychology of perception´ should say about this or that.

----- The excursus on "implication" should be studied by heart by any historian of analytic philosophy. It presents a more detailed analysis of the gist of "Prolegomena" in ´Logic and Conversation´. Unfortunately, Grice did not reprint it in WoW, but S. R. Bayne has uploaded the full text in his History of Analytic Philosophy site. What looks like a cursory examination of four examples of "implication" has to be reread in methodological key. Grice is considering an "implication" which is "non-logical". He is suggesting that the philosopher take into account this "implication", even if he will go on and distinguish it from an "entailment". Only when the ground is cleared of weeds like that, can linguistic botany proceed smoothly. Or rather, the POINT of botany is to weed the ground off.

DELIVERANCES.

Once the "implication", which he dubs, "of doubt or denial", is attached to "seems", and other "perceptual phrases" can we proceed to do justice to the causal theory. It was because of the aparently opaque reading of such idioms that Phenomenalism may seem to have a strong hold than it does.

Etc.