Grice: From Monologos to Dialogos

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

SORRY FOR THE BORING, pretentious title, but it's a reply to Hyslop, "Grice without an audience", in vol. 37 of Analysis vis a vis Kramer, "if a man is alone in a forest, and he does something wrong but a woman is not there, is that still wrong?" (sorry, -- his version is better -- read it from comments). This was vis a vis S. Wright:

"if you make a joke and nobody laughs, was it a joke?"
(simplified: Wright adds, "when you are alone in the forest -- but I take the perlocutionary lack of effect as definitional, not the locale -- killing the joke of course).

This is Grice, WoW: 113

"The examples which my account [of '... means ...'] should cover fall into three groups."

"First group: utterances for which U thinks there may (NOW OR LATER) be an A[ddressee]. U may think taht some particular person, for example, himself at a future date in the case of a diary entry, may (but also may not) encounter U's utterance,"


---- This actually relates to another Wrightism: "My friend has a baby. I'm writing down all the noises he makes, so that I can ask him at a later stage what he meant" --

Grice continues:

"or U may think that there may or may not be some
person or other who is or will be auditor [or addressee]
of his utterance."

--- Then there's a second group.

"(b) Group B." These are "utterances which the U knows NOT to be
addressed to any ACTUAL A[ddressee], but which U PRETENDS to
address to some particular person OR TYPE of person, or which
he thinks of as being addressed to some IMAGINED A[ddressee]
or type of A[ddressee] (as in the reshearsal of a speech or
of his part in a projected CONVERSATION."

Then there's a third group.

"(c) Group C." These are "utterances (including 'internal' [sic in scare quotes] utterances) with respect to which the U
neither thinks nor imagines himself as
addressing an A[ddressee], but nevertheless
intends his utterance to be such that it WOULD
INDUCE a certain sort of response in a personal
fairly indefinite kind of A[ddressee] were it the case
that such an A[ddressee] was present. In the case of
silent thinking the idea of the presence of an
A[ddressee] will have to be interpreted liberally,"

---- almost anarchically, I would say!

---- He goes on:

"as being the idea of there being an A[ddressee] for
a PUBLIC COUNTERPART of the utterer's internal speech. In
this connection, it is perhaps worth noting that some cases
of verbal thinking fall outside the scope of my account."

---- Because they don't exist! This is his polemic with Ryle. Ryle will be so heavy on this. His interest on this survived Grice's -- for Ryle was writing on Thinking and Meaning up to 1975. He died in 1976. I have discussed this elswhere with Bayne, vis a vis 'verbal thinking' and "Le penseur" by Rodin, as I recall.

(The point about nonexistence of such cases is best articulated by Grice in 1975 ("Method"), repr. "Conception of Value", where he quotes from Anscombe's Witters, "No psychological concept without the behaviour that manifests it". So it is a CONCEPTUAL point for Grice. He is a functionalist; not, like Ryle, a behaviourist. Grice is best defined as an 'intentionalist', though.

Grice continues:

"When verbal thoughts merely PASS through my
head as distinct from being "framed" by me, it
is INAPPROPRIATE to talk of me as having meant
something by them;"

I agree. "Mean" is a strong verb in English -- it's the 'mind' ("mean" is cognate with "mind") outreaching for another mind! It's the Buber "We" -- "the I" meets "the though" -- and some other mystical magicalisms.

Grice continues:

"I am, perhaps, in such cases more like a
listener than a speaker"

--- which is good rhetoric, but no more than that. It fails as an exact simile. For a listener is the 'addresse' and the speaker is the 'utterer'. So Grice is playing on there being a listener without a speaker! Silly at face value! Geniality at Grice's value!

----

Grice goes on:

"I shall propose a final redefinition which, I hope, will ... allow as SPECIAL CASES the range of examples in which there is, and it is known [or assumed, as I prefer. JLS] by U that there is, an actual A[ddressee]."

I.e. he is having conversation as the paradigm and monlogism as a 'borderline' case. Good for Grice!

If Cantabrigenses were obsessed with "other minds" and the fear of solipsism, none of that in ever convivial Oxford.

Grice goes on to provise his 'fifth redefinition', which I have referred to elsewhere in the club. And which features things like "anyone", and "should there actually be anyone", and Phi versus phi': "we do not require that U should intend his possible A[ddressee] to think of U's possible A[ddressee] under the same description as U does himself". Genius! On the other hand, Hyslop did raise very good points, and it was a pleasure to be his addressee.