Barry Stround on the synthetic a priori in Grice

Well, not quite. On Strawson (as per abstract below, from online source). But hey, Stroud was possibly Grice's best friend at Berkeley (after his five other best friends he had there: Davidson, Myro, and a few). Perhaps what Berkeley gave most to Grice was that brilliant PhD student, Canadian Judith Baker. We have to encourage her to publish all the (c) she holds of Grice's stuff!

This is Stroud -- when he says "Strawson", feel free to replace for "Grice". After all, they wrote a joint, "Defense of a dogma"!

Stroud writes that his essay

"deals with the project of

demonstrating the possibility of

conclusions with a distinctive metaphysical

status, both in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,

which for its success depends on

the analytic-synthetic distinction, and

analogously in Strawson's Kantian project

that does not appeal to transcendental idealism

but which nevertheless exploits the notion of

a priori knowledge."


The essay

"identifies two conditions for the

possibility of propositions with a

distinctive metaphysical status."

"First, necessary conditions between

the possession of certain concepts or

conceptual capacities and others

can be discovered."

"Secondly, certain conceptual capacities

can be shown to be required for the

possibility of any thought or

experience at all."

"The distinctive status of these propositions ...

can be described without any appeal to

the analytic-synthetic distinction and without

supposing that if we know them, we know them a priori."

---

Stroud has discussed Grice's "Causal Theory of Perception" explicitly in his Scepticism book, and wrote the Berkeley memorial for Grice, online, along with Sluga and Neale. He also wrote the entry for Grice (with Strawson) in the Dictionary of National (British) Biography.