´Tis the Voice of the Jubjub!: Grice on Method

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


``'Tis the voice of the Jubjub!'' he suddenly cried.
(This man, that they used to call ``Dunce''.)
``As the Bellman would tell you,'', he added with pride,
``I have uttered that sentiment once.
``'Tis the voice of the Jubjub! Keep count, I entreat;
You will find I have told it you twice.
Tis the song of the Jubjub! The proof is complete,
If only I've stated it thrice.''

SOMETIMES we wonder about method in this or that philosopher. Imagine Bergson. Henri Bergson. Did he have a method? Were his discoveries (e.g. on laughter, "la rire") informed by the method he used?

We think so. But people read what philosophers say because of WHAT they say ("what is said", in Grice´s technical interpretation of this colloquialism). It takes a STUDENT of philosophy to wonder about method, and obviously to be TESTED on it. ("Compare the methodology of Socratic maieutic with Zeno´s reductio ad absurdum").

What about Grice?

I did say that a method is productive, and open-ended. On the other hand, is there a Gricean method. When we examine a diagram like R. B. Jones with J. L. Austin as prototype we have to be reminded also of our notes in JonesSperanza ("CarnapGrice") to the effect that there WAS diversity ("as one would expect from a group including such luminaries as Hare, Urmson, Warnock, Nowell Smith, Hamsphire, Hart" and not just Austin and Grice -- Grice, words to that effect).

Consider:

Hampshire/Hart, "Intention and certainty". In Mind, 1958

Grice, "Intention and UNcertainty". Proc. Brit. Acad., annual philosophical lecture, 1971 (Grice had been apointed FBA in 1966).

Same method, different results.



For Hamsphire/Hart,

"I intend to go to London" ENTAILS, "I know I will" (certainty)

Grice was unhappy. "certainty" can be objective ("it is certain that p") or subjective ("I am certain that p"), to start with. And in any case for a probability which ranges from .5 to 1 we STILL speak of "intend".

------

Davidson got enamoured of that, and he went on to say,

"I intend to go to London"

only IMPLICATES that I believe the probability of my going there ranges from .5 to 1.

"WRONG!!!!", Grice shouted. And publicly so. The mimeo, "Davidson on intending", is deposited in the Grice papers.

In that paper Grice provides the evidence for the report in Pears, "Motivated irrationality": "Grice thought the conversational implicature ((as applied to this particular piece of analysis)) was too social to be true."

Grice would say, "I have been no foe to interpreting an entailment ((or logical implication)) as an implicature, but in this case, I wouldn´t think it holds water" -- or words.

For Grice, then

"I intend to go to London"

ENTAILS

"I believe that the probability of my going there ranges between .5 and 1"

I.e. it is part of the "analysis" of "... intends that ..." that a necessary if not sufficient clause will yield, "... believes it feasible that ...". The OTHER condition, in his Prichardian analysis, concerns the CAUSAL role that the belief will play on the willing which constitutes the intending itself.

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So, there we do have a subtle case of two people (could be the same at different stages) sharing a method, a way of analysis, but disagreeing as to what counts as implication and implicature, or logical implication (or entailment) and nonlogical implication. To postulate a conversational implicature, for example, one would need to appeal to conversational factors, "too social to be true", in the case of something as basic as an intentional action.

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Yet a different disagreement with Strawson. Strawson would hold, in "On referring":


"The king of France is bald"

PRESUPPOSES or "implies"

"There is a king of France".

He changed his mind and idiom there. It was first "imply", then "presuppose". The disageent with Grice for whom indeed,

"The king of France is bald"

entails

"There is a king of France"

is major. Only

"The king of France is NOT bald"

´conversationally implicates´ that there is a king of France.

---- The rationale for the Gricean option is this antipathy towards truth-value gaps. A subtler divergence with Strawson is handled by Grandy in "Legacy of Grice" (organised by the undergraduate Linguistics Society at Berkeley in 1990, published in the Proceedings).

For Grice,

if p, q

implicates, conversationally, q is inferrable from p.

For Strawson there is indeed no eccentric appeal to truth-value gaps here. The utterance of the conditional indeed "implicates", rather than "presupposes", etc. But what it implicates is NOT done conversationally. It is done "CONVENTIONALLY". Strawson had made a case about "therefore, and he thinks that "if" yields the "SAME implicature", only in nonasserted contexts.

For Strawson, "therefore" IS the logical particle par excellence, and having to have that word depend on something as social as Grice´s conversational maxims was too much of a swallow.

---- There are similar points to be made with EACH of the members of Austin´s "Play Group", even before Austin´s demise in 1960. In all cases, we see the sharing of a methodology, within limits, with the deliverance of somewhat contrary or contradictory claims.

The moral: Go for the substance, not the method!

If the style is the man, the method is the man, too. In philosophy, unlike logic, dentistry, psychoanalysis, etc, method is NOT so important. It is PRESUPPOSED.

If Heidegger concluded,

"Nothing noths"

one may wonder. "And what method allowed him to infer that?". And then you are explained, and you end up agreeing. "Indeed, accepting the Da-sein as in-der-welt constitionality, plus the problem of Zeit, one can´t be conclude that nothing noths."

Philosphy is not like science. Philosophy is NOT propietary. You can conclude, e.g. that ´la rire´, i.e. laughter, is, as Bergson notes, the manifestation of the anxiety of the élan vital. So what? He used intuition to arrrive at that, and he expressed it pretty well.

In philosophy, there is no lab. We don´t need protocols, informants, percentages, statistics, and boring reports. We have only our rationality to follow -- the voice of Reason. Not to be confused with the Jubjub.

``'Tis the voice of the Jubjub!'' he suddenly cried.
(This man, that they used to call ``Dunce''.)
``As the Bellman would tell you,'', he added with pride,
``I have uttered that sentiment once.

``'Tis the voice of the Jubjub! Keep count, I entreat;
You will find I have told it you twice.
Tis the song of the Jubjub! The proof is complete,
If only I've stated it thrice.''