Grice and Griffith on freedom and trying

by JLS
for the GC

In the blog, "Gricean pragmatics", I have dropped a harmless blog post on Kantotelian Eleutherism where I intend to collect references by Grice and Griceians on "free" for an eventual consideration towards what B. Doyle is doing elsewhere ("Info Phil"). In any case, here to drop this cross-section.

Checking with Chalmers, as linked by Doyle, I see this reference to Griffith, on trying and freedom, which should relate to at least two bits by Grice,

His seminar on Freedom, cited in the Grice papers.

His seminar on Trying, at Brandeis, cited by Harman.

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Chalmers supplies the abstract for Griffith, "Freedom and trying". Griffith argues, along Griceian lines, that trying is the locus of freedom and moral responsibility. Thus, any plausible view of free and responsible action must accommodate and account for free tryings. I then consider a version of agent causation whereby the agent directly causes her tryings. On this view, the agent is afforded direct control over her efforts and there is no need to posit—as other agent-causal theorists do—an uncaused event. I discuss the potential advantages of this sort of view, and its challenges. So there.

Grice´s analysis of "trying" is an interesting one. While in WoW:I he considers the mistakes by Hart and others, at Brandies he looked for an implicature-free analysis of things like:

"Smith tried to bring down the wall; obviously knowing he would never succeded. He was just trying to exercise his muscles."

and such.

References

Grice, H. P. Lectures on trying. Brandeis.
---. 1967. "Trying" in Prolegomena to "Logic and Conversation"
Griffith, Meghan (2007). Freedom and trying: Understanding agent-causal exertions. Acta Analytica 22.