Grice and Peacocke: the nature of content

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

IT IS VERY EASY to fall onto some sort of 'cottage industry', with new gimmicks, technologies, and jargons, to explain something that may eventually bear no philosophical weight!

While Grice's better-known work develops at the level of 'the propositional primacy' (although there are at least two references in WoW:V and WoW:6 on 'subsentential' or nonsentential expressions), he was a philosopher of perception, first and foremost.

In this respect, it is best to consider Peacocke (who succeeded Strawson as Chair to Metaphysical Philosophy in Oxford) and his various manifestos vis-a-vis propositional content (of 'representations' and psychological attitudes.

Like Grice, but unlike many authors dealing with Gricean matters without the level of philosophical subtlety that characterised Grice, Peacocke takes his time to analyse subpropositional, nonpropositional, perceptual, non-representational (even) content of sense-data, and succeeds!