The Gricean Vacuum

R. E. Dale was encouraging me when he writes, "Commentary on Grice's forte":

"Is there a single repository for this knowledge (the early reception from 1957 - 1960, say) of Chomsky at Oxford? Is there an article or book that talks about this in a rigorous and complete (or complete enough) way? I would love to read it."

I was thinking. Just as fascinating (if I may say so) seems to be the OTHER way round. I mean, you get

"A. P. Grice" -- cited by Chomsky in "Theory of Syntax" (1966).

---- and you wonder about D. Kaplan's riposte to B. Bartee (online), as I recall. The OTHER way round, as it were: the way Grice's (but also Austin's, and Strawson's) ideas were so soon incorporated onto a tradition that wasn't necessarily philosophical in principle (i.e. in contraposition as to why a bunch of philosophy dons would care to learn of a book on mathematical syntactic rules written, in an engineering sort of way, by one Noam Chomsky!).

--- If I recall, Partee was referring to the early work on implicature on this and that (Horn was one of Partee's children). They were vacuuming, I think it's Partee's word, what philosophers (rather than linguists) -- like Grice -- were saying.

As I recall, Kaplan replied, "but isn't one to suppose to vacuum the _dust_?" I mean, linguists easily enough incorporated all the technical notions by philosophers like Grice (the conversational implicatum, the conventional implicatum, the presuppositum, the truth-value gap, the 'scope indicating device' of common-ground status, and so on and so on. They were using philosophical (originally) concoctions to expand on more simplistic analysis. Take Hare's tropics and clistics and neustics and phrastics -- (My focus has always been Play Group, hence Hare _is_ important).

But ...

Is there a definite rigorous treatment on the subject? I wouldn't think so.

Myself, I did start some research on, say, linguists influenced by Grice -- but gave up! I narrowed my focus to philosophers influenced by, after all, a philosopher -- 'a philosopher's philosopher', even -- like Grice.

Just a mention then of this two-way interaction and why it should matter (It does not, necessarily to all: Dale mentions in his thesis the work of B. Nerlich, with whom I have corresponded -- as an example of someone who is interested in the strict history of a strict discipline like linguistics and that, I agree with Dale completely, fails to detect what Dale rightly calls 'the history of ideas'. Lakoff considers something like this, too, in this post where he recalls Lewis -- this club.

And so on.

Will see if I find the Partee-Kaplan quote, then.