Austin's my man

Dale kindly notes:

"[Speranza's] writing on Grice (and others) on the early reception of Chomsky seems ... interesting ... Is there a single repository for this knowledge (the early reception from 1957 - 1960, say) of Chomsky at Oxford?"

---

One thing to reconsider here is Chapman's way of putting. That in 1983 (that "Tape") where Grice expands on this in 1983 -- and which should have been for Grice the 'basis' for his written recollection, now in "Reply to Richards" --

Grice is 'parodying' Austin.

Let me check with Chapman. It's on p. 86 of her book, _Grice_, Macmillan:

"Austin, in particular [emphasis mine -- Speranza -- i.e. rather than Grice or the other members of this big group, the Play Group --]

was EXTREMELY impressed. Grice characterised
and perhaps parodied [Austin] in
revering Chomsky for his sheer audacity
in taking on a subject even more sacred [not trivial! -- Speranza]
than philosophy: the subject of grammar."

The footnote here is a reference to that Tape.

I can be very irreverent in my own marginal notes to my books, and have TWO for that page (or the UPPER section of that page).

* The first is a reference to 'trivium'. Grice played with this when he says that:

---------- It is raining
----------
Therefore, it is raining

is "trivial" -- a trivial piece of reasoning. Oddly, sexist OED has that as 'woman's reason'. So, here the reference to the 'sacred' reminded me of that TRIVIUM:

(1) grammatica
(2) dialectica
(3) rhetorica

Matter of fact, I have done SOME work in the history of 'dialectica' (what others call "Logic") and am impressed. So Grice may be referring to or making as if he is ignoring what 'trivial' is all about. Grammar was part of the trivium.

There was, of course, the quadrivium -- which not everybody completed, etc.

---

* The other marginal note is more along the lines of 'black humour' (so-mis-called). When Chapman writes:

"The Play Group worked their slow and meticulous way
through [Chomsky's _Syntactic Structures_] during
the autumn of 1959" -- here the reference is to Warnock.

I add, marginally, "and then he died".

For, truly, this was perhaps the worst thing that could ever happen, will happen, has happened, etc. to ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY: the early death of Austin, with cancer. Apparently nobody knew he had it. Grice is silent about the personal effect on him, and Chapman notes that perhaps they were never very close anyway -- which I can see (who IS close to who in Oxford?). But reading George Pitcher's memoir of Austin, I was pretty moved (it's in Berlin et al, Essays on Austin).

In the passage about the Play Group in a previous post of mine, I skipped an important point that Grice makes to the effect that while the Play group was 'conducted' by 'philosophers under the leadership' of Austin, -- AFTER Austin's death, the same group (more or less -- this is anti-topological) continued to meet now under _Grice's_ tutelage, as it were.

And one wonders if he did continue with 'formal-syntactic'/semantic questions. Austin did write quite a bit about this "Science of Language" and how he saw that all the linguistic botanising he had been engaged and had others engage in should eventually get into a 'systematic' picture of thing.

But interests change. But I DO find those intervening years, or rather, early 1960s, the most fascinating period for at least 5 reasons:

----- For one, Grice was now the _head_ of the play group, which is NOT a small or minor thing.

----- Albritton was possibly attending, since I like to think that it was through him (who was Chair of Philo at Harvard in 1967) that Grice was appointed, of all people, the William James lecturer.

---- Chomsky is citing "A. P. Grice" in "Aspects of a theory of syntax", 1966.

---- People, including the OED -- thanks to a casual note and exchange, elsewhere, now public, between yours truly and L. Horn -- credits Grice 1967 with 'implicature'. But as Chapman notes, there is much earlier use by Grice of this particular locution in lectures Grice gave at Oxford, under the title, "Logic and Conversation".

---- Grice was revising some notes on 'negation', as from 1938, and he lectured on 'negation' at this time.

---- He was continuing with his own original research in what he thought perhaps was HIS niche in Oxford (with Warnock): the philosophy of perception. Nobody was doing it! So, he is asked by Butler to contribute with "Some remarks about the senses" in "Analytic Philosophy", 1966.

---- There were intersections: e.g. his early -- still sixties, 1961, "Causal theory of perception" introduced the idea of 'implication' and this general conditions on discourse, etc.

Plus, there was the teaching. It was the time where students -- graduate students -- were making very original research, and some of the tutorials were indeed Grice's.

----

By the time Grice did arrive at Harvard, it is only logical and natural to think that Chomsky, who was at M. I. T., would have an informer, as it were.

Chomsky, incidentally -- when I was getting familiar with his early views -- does quote Grice, "Sentence meaning, word meaning" (Foundations of Language, 1968) in his "EST" -- Extended Standard Theory. It was the time when "Generative Semanticists" as indeed Katz, but also people like G. N. Lakoff and others -- were starting to wonder about the 'model' behind all this. Fodor and Dennett were starting to question an independent account of the content of propositional attitudes which would NOT rely on 'linguistic' stuff.

As a result, the TWO big venues of Grice's research started to go hand-in-hand: his IBS programme proper (utterer's meaning as cornerstone of philosophical interest) and work on 'implication' and 'implicature'. How is an implicatum, which IS a representamen, after all, connected with the 'deep structure' of a, say, sentence or utterance.

Grice's first example of divergence here in 1967 is one I have adapted elsewhere:

How is Smith getting on at his new job at the bank?
--- He hasn't been to prison yet.

Grice wants to say that what U _MEANT_, simpliciter_ is that Smith is potentially dishonest. He would never have considered a disquotational context alla Tarksi-Davidson to the effect:

"By uttering "Smith hasn't been to prison yet", U means that Smith hasn't been to prison yet.

--- But he IS relying on a oratio-obliqua account of 'saying that'. Only on the assumption that U is said to have SAID (or explicitly communicated) that Smith hasn't been to prison yet can we posit that what he meant was that Smith is potentially dishonest.

--- On top of that, Grice claims that the implicatum is cancellable. Indicating that if you actually do cancel it, your utterance becomes devoid of --- meaning, almost!

("He hasn't been to prison yet; by which I mean just what I say -- without in the least intending you to think that he is potentially dishonest" -- Grice plays with cancellations of similar remarks in "Causal theory" with interesting attending notes: "Not that the cancellation will have ANY effect on what the addressee will come to believe, you know.").

--- On top of that, he never published. So, it is just typical of him that his first book was a posthumous one.

(c) Herbert Paul Grice, 1989.

But Grice died in 1988.

His later books, Grice 1991, and Grice 2010, are NOT Grice's copyright, but his Estate.

And so on.