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J makes very good points about 'willing' (free will) in the commentary on "philosophical psychology" and how it 'evolved' from Ryle to Grice.

I agree with J that the ISSUE is in 'deciding'.

Oddly, very few philosophers of Grice's group dwelt on that. Perhaps P. H. Nowell-Smith -- a minor genius, who died last year. And D. F. Pears, another minor genius, who ALSO died last year.

Smith (the Nowell- is artistic) did write on 'free will' early in his career, and his "Ethics" is a gem. Antedating Grice in so many respects. Nowell-Smith would invite us to reconsider talk on 'choosing'.

As J writes, Sue cannot choose between being hungry or not. A taco or a burger maybe. So we need to analyse different types of 'choosing' and the 'mechanist' monster, as it were (i.e. how to make 'choosing' compatible with 'determinism' of some sort -- if at all).

Pears did write on 'predicting and deciding' in his British Academy Lecture, which predated Grice's explorations on this in his "Intention and Uncertainty" (another British Academy Lecture).

Yet, it seems there is a lot of 'behaviourism' in our talk on 'choices'.

"Sophie's Choice". Choice to think? More like choice to act. The idea that I do NOT choose to believe that it is raining (when it is) seems pretty otiose.

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My sort of defense of behaviourism was meant to show J that I do take behaviourism seriously. Not so much the American variety Watson through Skinner, but Ryle -- which as I say, is the immediate antecessor of the Oxonian group to which Grice belonged.

Let us recall that Grice's group ('the play group') was led by Austin, born in 1911. Nobody could be older than Austin. Ryle, having been born in 1900, did not qualify. So it is EASY to speak of 'schools of Oxford thought' in this regard.

For some reason, Oxford holds a Wilde Readership in the Philosophy of Mind, which has been quite influential for the development of 'philosophical psychology'.

I don't know of any Oxonian cartesian, though. It seems that nobody wanted to dwell on the ghost in the machine.

Let's recall that whatever we find of philosophical substance in cogn-sci comes from the sort of Oxford school -- Dennett was Ryle's student at Oxford, -- and of course Searle was even a younger Rhodes scholar who had Strawson (Grice's tutee) as DPhil supervisor.

So whatever Searle, Dennett, and most American philosophers of mind got, they got from the so-called "School of Ordinary Language Philosophy".

Stich and the Churchlands tried to impose their own different tradition, but I'm not sure they succeeded.

When it comes to Ontology, it is good to be reminded of what Grice calls "Ontological Marxism" (online). "If they work, they exist". He means entities. Odd that this is a stretch from Occam's razor. But not quite. So, he is willing to say that we can transmogrify the correlatum of a psychological predicate (like '... willing that ...'). Grice proposes two variants -- as ways of introducing such entities: Ramsified Naming and Ramsified Descriptions.

So, while not rehabilitating 'dualism', at all, he is playing with the idea of not to be too afraid about postulating entities which are correlata to our psychological talk.

The issue may be 'explanatory'. Do willings and choices EXPLAIN action? We hope so.

Sophie's choice.

She chose between a taco and a burger. She chose the taco.

Her choosing EXPLAINS her eating the taco.

What are the behavioural output of her choosing the taco? Her eating the taco. What are the antecedents of her choosing the taco? Her perceiving that the taco looked more appetising.

Yet, there is a world of difference between saying that all we have is Sophie's perceptual input and her behavioural output, and Grice's functionalist picture (Block, in is influential collection of essays in the philosophy of mind agrees the caracterisation offered here of Grice as a functionalist).

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The difference is a matter of what is within the scope of an existential quantifier. There is a 'choice' by Sophie. It is this 'choice' or willing that bridges Sophie's perception ('the taco is more appetising than the burger') and behaviour (she eats the taco).

Etc.