Grice and Hampshire

--- by JLS
---- for the GC

WE KNOW A BIT AS TO HOW Grice felt he was from the 'wrong side of the tracks' to have joined Hampshire's group in pre-war Oxford.

This quote from Doyle's entry on Hampshire in "Informationphilospher" good:

Hampshire writes:

"by Sartre, with the suggestion that many cases of failing to do something, because of an alleged inability, are to be counted as cases of lack of will to do it. When, exhausted on the mountain, I say

'I cannot take another step,'

Sartre suggests that I ought rather to say something like

'I prefer to sit down rather than painfully continue to walk.'

"These proposals for a thorough-going conceptual revision properly have a systematic and metaphysical basis, which I am omitting. But they do make contact at certain points with the

apparent incoherencies and complacencies of ordinary usage

---------------------- [versus Grice, "How clever language is!"]

and belief. Psychologists may persuade us, in the light of new experimental evidence, to question the normal methods of distinction, and may reclassify many apparent cases of lack of ability as 'really' cases of lack of desire. Simultaneously, they revise the criteria attached to `He wanted,' or of 'He really wanted to do so-and-so,' with the suggestion that there are repressed and normally unconscious desires, which are to be discovered and identified only in certain special circumstances.