Grice on freedom

By J. L. Speranza
-- For the Grice Club.

A review of his sayings on the matter.

"Personal identity" (1941). In his earliest published essay Grice propounds to enrol with Locke in a mnemic-based account of personal identity. A few points connect with his later views on Freedom. (a) Personal identity is perhaps a grand label, but what Grice has in mind is Aristotelian and Kantian variances of "I", "you", and "he". After all, Aristole´s main contribution to the freewill debate was to consider, in ways that predate Epicurus, that some actions are "up to us". "Eph´hemin" and "en hemin" are the words that Aritotle, rather majestically, uses. In the singular, this translates as "up to me" or "up to him". One should follow Kant in distinguishing a first-person from a third-person account to these matters. And what is "me" in the "up to me" expression. It seems then that both Aristotle and Kant are presupposing a theory of personal identity. In the case of Kant things get more complicated by his insistence that his thoughts pertain to the "transcendental ego". In Bratman's complex enrichment of Grice's 'pirotological' programme we see that a mnemic approach to personal identity is a precondition on free. The agent is free to will, and usually acts on condition that he will held similar desires in the future. A person is not a time slice, as it were. (b) The later Grice will certainly claim that it´s a "person" that is "free" in the Kantian usage of the expression. So it is to Grice´s "Personal identity" that we go back not just for a mnemic account of consciousness, but to ideas of freedom at sub-personal levels.

"Meaning" (1948). What particularly interests us here about this landmark in the philosophy of action is Grice´s rather abrupt introduction of 'intention', for which, as he recollected, he got the inspiration from his readings of G. Stout (notably his 1986 "Voluntary action"). Stout connects his 1896 Mind paper with an analysis of frewill in his later 1899 "Manual of psychology". Stout was engaged in a discussion with Prichard. Prichard was at that time composing his notes on "Willing" (1945), only published posthumously by Urmson in 1968. So this was very much alive philosophy for Grice. There is a second connection with freedom at large. When we say "free", what do we mean? Here we have lots of specifications by Grice on the matter. An obsession with him, in view of what he regarded as rather sloppy uses of "mean" by other philosophers, even Oxonian ones, was to distinguish between what "free" may mean and what, say, we may implicate by it.

"Disposition and intention" (1949).(nondated) Influence of Stout. From Chapman: "As a solution to the problems inherent in the notion of conventional behaviour, Grice intrroduces intention, doing so abruptly and without much elaboration. However, the concept would probably not have been much of a surprise to his original audience in 1948. Grice later commented that this interest in intention was inspired in part by G. F. Stout's "Voluntary action". Sout was a previous editor of "Mind" and his article was published there in 1896. In it he argues that if voluntary action is to be distinguished from involuntary action in terms of 'volition', it is necessary to offer a unique account of volition, distinguishing it from will or desire. He suggested that in the case of volition, but not of simple desire, there is necessarily 'a certain kind of judgement or belief', namely that 'so far as in us lies, we shall bring about the attainment of the desired end' (p. 356 ). Indeed, if there is any doubt about the outcome of the volition, expressed in a conditional statement, this must refer to circumstances outside our control.This explains the difference between willing something and merely wishing for it. However, there is another crucial distinction between voluntary and involuntary action. In the case of the former, the action takes place precisely because of the relevant belief; a voluntary action happens because we judge that we will do it. An involuntary action may be one we judge is going to take place, but only because other factors have already determined this." In his "Disposition and intention",. The first criterion, familiar from Stout's original paper, is that the speaker's freedom from doubt that the intended action will take place is not dependent on any empirical evidence." ("Hamphsire's and Hart's claism are similar to those of Stout. ... Stout is representative of an older style of Oxford philosophy, complete with sweeping generalisations and moralistic musings. In discussing the tendency of voluntary determination to endure over time and again obstacles, he comments that: 'If we are weak and vacillating, no one will depend on us; we shall be viewed with a kind of contempt. Mere vanity may go far to give fixity to the will' (p.359 ). The essay is important for Grice´s discussion of Ryle, Concept of Mind, just out from the presses.

"G. E. Moore and philosopher's paradoxes" (1953). Grice challenges the sceptic about things like freewill and causation (x willed y, x caused y). I. PHILOSOPHER. There are no material things. MOORE. You are wrong. For here's one hand, and here's another. So there are at least TWO material things.
II. PHILOSOPHER: Time is unreal. Moore. You are wrong. If you mean that no event can follow or precede another, you are wrong. For after lunch I went for a walk, and after that I took a bath, and after that I had tea. III. PHILOSOPHER. We do not know for certain the truth of any statement about material things. Moore. You are wrong. Both of us know for certain that there are several chairs in this room, and how absurd it would be to suggest that we do not know it, but only believe it, and that perhaps it is not the case! A FOURTH example can easily be given. IV. Philosopher: There is no free will. Moore. You are right, and the sad thing is that I cannot FORCE you to think otherwise, no? Grice considers in that paper the use of 'lucky' that some find irritating. Recall that Greek 'tykhe' has become fashionable again after writings by Williams on "Moral Luck".

"The Causal Theory of Perception" (1961). Grice was enamoured with the idea of 'cause' and thus he found it puzzling to resort to chance and causal indeterminism when dealing with 'free'. Like Kant, he looked for a synthesis. In "Actions and Events" he discusses various fine points in action theory. His analysis of "Raise your right arm!" as uttered by a gym instructor. The audience will _monitor_ what's going on with this. This monitoring presupposes a belief in causal efficacy. The agent, or indeed the philosopher, need not be aware of complex neurophysiological connections involved here. It's a bit like 'perceiving'. In this respect, this quote from Grice's early "Causal theory of perception" helps us to see his view regarding these matters, on how neurophysiological talk may help, rather than inhibit, the philosopher who believes in freewill. "I suggest that the best procedure for the Causal Theorist is to indicate the mode of causal connection by examples; to say that, for an object to be perceived by X, it is sufficient that it should be causally involved in the generation of some sense-impression by X in the kind of way in which, for eample, when I look at my hand in a good light, my hand is cuasally responsible for its looking to me as ifthere were a hand before mr, or in which ... (and so on), WHATEVER THAT KIND OF WAY MAY BE; and to be enlightened on that question, one must have recorse to the specialist. I see nothing absurd in the idea that a nonspecialist concept [like 'perceive', or 'act'] should contain, so to speak, a blank space to be filled in by the specialist. ... We do not, of ocurse, ordinarily need the specialist's contribution; for we may be in a position to say that the same kind of mechanism is involved in a plurality of cases without being in a position to say what that mechanism is." (WoW: 240).

"Trying" (1963) A set of three lectures at Brandeis. Meghan Griffiths has recently taken up some of the Oxonian dispute about Austin´s ifs and cans, as seen in early reflections by Nowell-Smith. Grice was concerned with providing an implicature-free analysis of "try". Consider his apt remarks in WoW:ii. Harman provides a counterexample. Smith tried to topple the wall (as he exercised his muscles) assuming he would never succeed in so doing.

"Descartes on clear and distinct perception" (1966). Grice on 'certain' Cfr. Heisenberg's Unsicherheit and Unbestimmtheit. "x is certain that p", "it is certain that p". Similarly, "x is uncertain that p". "it is uncertain that p". Antidote against the abuse of 'certainty' from Stout onwards including the middle Grice period. Later evolved from a certainty-approach to intention (based on Stout) to a neo-Prichardian position based on UNcertainty.

"Logic and Conversation" (1966). In this set of Oxford lectures, Grice predates the Kantian logic for "implicature" that will make him famous. Here he speaks, without explicitly "echoing Kant" of a principle of "conversational self-interest" interacting (sometimes indeed clashing) with a principle of "conversational benevelonce" that treats the other as "another I".

"Logic and Conversation" (1967) . Implicatures of "trying" in 1967. While Grice does not consider ´free will´ in the Prolegomena, one can reconstruct, along Danto´s lines, of ways to systematise Griceian thoughts on this. Grice provides a clever analysis of "trying" locutions already armed with the notion of "implicature" (that he lacked when lecturing at Brandeis). The Austin connection. While Doyle has appropriately used Searle's monicker in the title of a book -- we may do with some Grice/Searle interactions! Grice had a lot of respect for Searle (why wouldn't he?). In the "Prolegomena" to "Logic and Conversation" he quotes extensively from Searle, "No modification without aberration" (now in Grice, WoW, the lecture is 1967, but Grice postponed publication for 20 years -- the revised "Prolegomena" dated 1987, published 1988 (with Grice dead at 1988, the first posthumous book by a philosopher NOT published by an executor). Searle is into Austin. How could he NOT be? He had studied _under_ Austin. While Doyle aptly quotes from so many of Grice's and Austin's play group (Nowell-Smith, Hare, Strawson, Pears, and the rest of them) we need to bring in Austin into the 'scandal'. He possibly initiated Consider Grice's example, "a freely moving body". "The thing moved freely". (Grice uses 'object', but I prefer 'thing'). Why do we think that 'free' has a different 'usage' in _free_ fall, and free tickets (for the opera)? I dunno! For Austin, there is an aberration in the modification -- the beautiful nouns are (c) Austin, after "No representation without taxation" -- Austin was William James lecturer so he knew. The thing moved. To add, "The thing moved FREELY." may be to say more than you need to hear. I will have to check if Austin especially chose 'freely' -- but surely he played with things like, "He scratched his head INTENTIONALLY." So, we have a pretty good type of a scandal there. Now, if we read Grice's "Actions and Events" (this is Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1986, vol. 67, pp. 1-35 (not posthumous for a change) we see Grice playing (perhaps as he reminisces A. G. N. Flew) with the idea of "freewill problem". Is _it_ a problem? Not for Aristotle, whom Doyle calls the first 'indeterminism' (Yet Grice does provocatively write, on p. 34, that "any attempt to remedy this situation [that has 'free will' as problematic] by resorting to the introduction of chance [Epicurus 'tukhe' -- not a notion in the full-blown determinism of Democritus] or causal indetermination will only infuriate the scientist without aiding the moral philosopher." Grice can be a hoot sometime. In the entry at the "Stanford Encyclopedia" online, Grandy/Warner make much of Grice's reference to the Devil of Scientism. In Grice 1975 Grice is NO incompatibilist. He suggests that there are different levels. There is biological emergence or supervenience, and, more to the topic of his interest, the theoretical introduction of things like 'will'. So, there may be 'fully deterministic' law of nature at one level, yet ceteris-paribus default generalisations in folk-psychology at another. These remarks Grice draws from his collaboration with George Myro, his colleague at Berkeley. But Grice 1986 somehow reconsiders the closing paragram in his "Prejudices and predilections, being the life and opinions of Paul Grice" (by Paul Grice of course). Chapman, in her book on Grice aptly closes the book with this quote: "If philosophy generated no new PROBLEMS it would be dead, because it would be FINISHED; and if it recurrently regenerated the same old problems it would still not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries up" ---- Grice, 1986, in PGRICE, ed. Grandy/Warner, Philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. I am never too comfy with that bit about 'bread-and-butter'. I know it's a British thing and that Alice (in Wonderland) loved it (bread-and-butter) -- but still. In any case, reconsider the use of the word 'problem'. As it relates to Searle's scandal (of free will) as stated by Doyle in the opening bit and title to his monumental "Free scandal" pdf. Now, compare it with the subtlety of Grice's wording in the closing section to "Action and Events". A problem can be SOLVED. But a problem can be "dissolved". While it is good to see A. G. N. Flew (the best proponent of the paradigm-case argument for 'free will') I rather, with Grice, concentrate on _Moore_ ("Some like Witters, but Moore's my man", he overheard Austin said, and took his word for it). Grice analyses some statements of ordinary-language (as propounded by Moore and Norman Malcolm) as they contradict some technical philosophical recherche views (e.g. Democritus). So there is a lot to be said about 'ordinary-language' as it pertains to good old Moore was saying back in the day. The point by Moore, Malcolm, and Grice (in one of THOSE days) is that the 'problem' may be 'dissolved' rather than 'solved'. This is Grice in the last paragraph of "Actions and Events", then: "So, attention to the idea of freedom may lead us to the need to RESOLVE or DISSOLVE the most important UNSOLVED
problem in philosophy." "Free will"? Well, yes, but in his Kantotelian rewrite.
Grice goes on: "namely how we be can at one and the same time members both of the phenomenal and the noumenal world." Do you find that cryptic? I don't! -- But Grice thinks I should. He goes on: "Or, to put the issue less cryptically."
"To settle the internal conflict between one part of our rational nature, the scientific part which calls (or seems to call [vide Grice, Intention and UNCERTAINTY, British Academy lecture]) for the universal reign of deterministic law, and that other part which insists that not merely moral responsibility but EVERY variety of rational belief demands exemption from just such a reign." Actually, the point -- made I think by Doyle and others -- is that moral responsibility demands some level of efficient causation. How responsible (morally) can I be towards "p" -- where "p" is the object of a goal of mine -- if I have no control over _stuff_? I think there is a bit of strawman's arguments here, and Grice may be making a rhetorical point. After all, for Aristotle (Grice sometimes referred to "Ariskant" as his favourite philosopher) things happen "kata sumbebekos", by accidence -- and he is not referring strictly to 'mental' "causation" or mental events (in Davidson's odd terminology). Kant, perhaps, was more of a deterministic beast (when it comes to the
'law of nature') -- but again, we should not forget that in at least ONE
formulation of the categorical imperative (vide J. Baker, "Counting the
categorical imperatives", in Kant Studien, 1988 -- Baker was Grice's PhD student)
it is all about making the categorical imperative as a matter of "law of
nature". So Kant held a sort of ambivalent attitude towards these things. I
propose to analyse that in my "You Kant Do It: noumenal difficulties of a
phenomenal world" -- to deliver sometime, someplace, or something. So, when Searle speaks of a 'scandal', we have to revise what we think about stuff. Grice often said that problems HAVE been solved. But sometimes it is a matter of 'introjecting into the shoes' of some old grand philosopher, who obviously used a different terminology. He referred to the "Latitudinal Unity" of Philosophy. In general, it is best to see Democritus as totally marginal (in the history of philosophy) and it may be worrying (as it seems to worry Doyle) that students of philosophy (those who never attended a Kant-seminar by Grice, that is) are indoctrinated into the worst types of devilish scientism. Grice has a good caveat here. He would often criticise neurobiologists, or other non-philosophical types, for venturing in the reign of philosophy. When justifying some research for the Faculty at the Univerisity of
Berkeley, he wrote: "It repeatedly astonishes me that people who would themselves
readily admit to being DEVOID OF TRAINING, experience, or knowledge in philosophy, and who have plainly been endowed by nature no special gifts of philosophical
intelligence should be so ready to instruct professional philosophers about the contents of the body of philosophical truth." (Miscelaneous notes, The Grice Papers, Bancroft Library, Berkeley). Mutatis mutandis, perhaps, for philosophers who have some superficial reading on this or that area of, say, astrophysics or neurobiology, and are so ready to postulate that we are, after all, mere automata! I enjoy the type of philosophical analysis that B. Doyle engages in, and engages us in. His exegesis of Bobzien of the many types (in Epicurus) of what we mean by 'free' as unattached to 'will' and other is fascinating. Again, I see some good overlap with this four-stage sequence. If 'free' has only ONE MEANING, why is it that the following is elucidatory to us, "A thing does not move freely." This is the first, fully Democritean, stage: "External, or 'transeunt' causation in inanimate objects, when an object is affected by processes in other objects." We need to postulate, philosophically, perhaps, this level which is freedom-free (did you see how people oversuse -free: 'alchol-free', 'sugar-free', context-free. Cfr. my "free"-free). There is a first stage (second in the sequence) where we speak of "Internal, or 'immanent' causation in INANIMATE objects" -- NOT the realm of Motu Animalium, as cited by Doyle, aptly -- "where a process in an object is the outcome of previous stages in the process, as in 'freely moving' body." It is tempting to think of this use (adverbial) use of 'free' ("freely") as being the first occurrence of 'free' in our conceptual vocabulary. In this respect, 'free', which asks for an analogical theory of semantics, behaves differently from 'healthy'. Healthy applies first and foremost to
the substantial individual (the 'animal') and analogously to other items
('healthy urine', 'healthy food'). With 'free' it seems it is this use of
'free' in the realm of inanimate objects which has some chance of winning
the day when it comes to the ultimate analysis of the notion. Then we have a third stage, which connects with the argument that B. Doyle suggested he would give to J. Huggins, and which Doyle drew in part from Heisenberg's son about 'free' in ANIMATE stuff. An ivy 'decides' where to cast its branches; an eagle 'decides' a nice sunny (but not too sunny) spot to build a nest, and so on. Grice. "Internal causation in LIVING THINGS, in which changes are generated in a creature by internal features of the creature which are NOT earlier stages of the same change, but independent items, like beliefs, desires, and emotions, the functions (or finality [-- or 'goal, telos, purpose' in Doyle's terminology]) of which is, in general, to provide for the GOOD of the creature in question." Grice called these creatures 'pirots' (which we learn from Carnap and Russell are things which karulise elatically -- Pirotology's the word). The reference to 'desire' is basic, because Grice had qualms with the belief-desire psychology, as he found him and as he practiced, as being able to elucidate our notion of 'free'. "Desires" after all, are thought of as _given_. So, in this type of argumentation, we need to postulate a full semantic 'freedom' regarding our logic of desire. Consider what he says about
iterating attitudes like 'desire': "Moving on from operators to consider the psychological aspect of reasoning, Grice proposes two basic propositional attitudes: J-acceptance and V-acceptance, to be considered as more or less closely related to believing and wanting. Generalising over attitudes using the symbol 'psi' he proposes "X psi-1" for J-accepts and "X psi-2" for V-accepts. These are reflexive: atttitudes that x can take to J-accepting or V-accepting. psi-3 is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting TOWARDS either J-accepting (p) or J-accepting (-p)." (x wants to decide whether to believe p or not). "psi-4" is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting towards either x V-accepts (p) or x V-accepts (-p)." (x wants to decide whether to will p or not). (cited by Chapman from Grice, 1971, "Probability, desirability, and mood operators"). If this is not a formulation of the so-called free will problem I don't know what is! Yet, in "Actions and Events" he is cautious and consider that such an iteration may involve a 'vicious circle'. In "Do one's motives have to be pure?" Baker (in PGRICE, ed. Grany/Warner) considers the issue. If someone is _addicted_ to philanthropy (we know such ladies in New York), it is never good that a good action is done out of the wrong reasons. Baker thinks it is never good, but it is never bad, either. Baker relies on iteration of want-attitudes: the ideal arguer wants that p, and that he wants that he wants that p, and so on ad infinitum. But in "Actions and Events", Grice casts some doubts about these sort of iterative way to reach of extrinsically weighed rationality (the rationality of the end, rather than the means): "Seemingly, the higher-order ends [goals, purpose, telos -- in Doyle's parlance] involved in the defense [of a given end] would themselves stand in need of justification, and the regress thus started might well turn out to be vicious." But then Grice had a problem with 'vice'. He was irritated by the sentence: "Smith was caught in the grip of a vice". Do we mean a carpenter's tool -- what Americans spell 'vyse'? Similarly, he noted that "LOOSE LIVER" is similarly irritating: "loose liver" "may be used" "by a nurse in a hospital who complained about the number of patients with loose livers". But what about 'loose'. Do we mean, Grice wonders, "unfettered", or do we mean "unbridlged". "It seems to me," Grice argues at his moral-philosophical best (Grice 1967:WoW:1989:48), "that (in the absence of any further sense of either word [liver and loose that is], one might expect to be able to mean more or less the same by 'a loose life' and 'an unfettered life'; the fact that, as things are, 'loose life' is tied to dissipation, whereas 'unfettered life' seems quite general in meaning, suggests that perhaps 'leoose' [but not 'liver'] does, and 'unfettered' does not, have a derivative _sense_ in this area. As for 'unbridled life' (which one might perhaps have expected, prima facie, to mean much the same as 'unfettered life'), the phrase is slightly uncomfortable (because 'unbridled' seems to be tied to such words as 'passion', 'temper', 'lust' and so on.)" So he knew what he was talking, and I agree with Ronnie that it is fascinating to connect free-will problems with incontinence (or continence, for that matter) problems (vide Grice/Baker, "Davidson on weakness of the will?" -- against Davidson's denial of such a notion!). Oddly, D. Wilson, best known for her work on 'relevance' ("On defining relevance", in Grandy/Warner, co-authored Sperber) authored a novel, "Slave of
the passions", which seems to be all about what we mean by having a 'free
will' which is not quite yet 'free' (for why do we use 'slave' in such
idioms?) And so on. So, take Searle's idea of the 'scandal', as Bob Doyle precisely does, just jocularly! Plus cognateness of 'eleutheros' and 'liber'
In a message dated 4/4/2011 3:00:13,bobdoyle@INFORMATIONPHILOSOPHER.COM
writes: the word for free is eleútheros (ἐλεύθερος), and it always meant
"freedom from" or "negative freedom" in Berlin's terms. It was used of things to
say there was no cost or prohibitions against use - free as in "free beer,"
The online Liddell/Scott, Greek, has 'eleutheros' as being
"Cognate with Latin, "līber" -- fr. Italic "loufero" (cf. Osc. Luvfreis
'Liberi') -- Ultimately from the Indo-European root, "eleudhero""
I point this, because I'm fascinated by roots. And if "liber" and
"eleutheros" _are_ cognate. -- The online Short/Lewis Latin dictionary does not
seem to see this, and rather connects the Latin root to another word in
Greek "liber -- loebesum et loebertatem antiqui dicebant liberum et libertatem.
Ita Graeci λοιβὴν et λείβειν, Paul. ex Fest. p. 121 Müll.; cf. 2. Liber), adj. Gr. root λιφ-, λίπτω, to desire; cf. Sanscr. lub-dhas, desirous; Lat. libet, libido..." If they are cognate ('liber' and 'eleutheros') perhaps one should be careful as to what a word meant or always meant, etc. I loved B. Doyle's example of the 'free beer'. In checking uses of 'liber' in Latin, I was fascinated by this use of 'liber' in Ovid to refer to the waters in the sea. They are, as he aptly notes, 'more free' than the waters in a river. Here again we seem to have this 'negative' "usage" (rather than 'sense' although I'm never clear as to what I mean). Next would do to analyse the etymology of 'free', on which the present scandal is partly based! Seeing that I don't know much of the etymology of 'free' I am inclined to refer to Grice now as an 'eleutherian' (since 'libertarian' has post-Strawsonian implicatures which may not be desirable!) -- and refer to Grice's four stages for 'free' in "Actions and Events" as 'eleutheric', rather (?) Incidentally, it was googling for 'eleutheria' "tes vouleseos" (modern Greek) that led me to Chalmers's extensive bibliography on this), and cfr. this Russian author complaining that English 'free' fails to make a nice Russian distinction between two words he would rather have as meaning 'eleutheric'. Enough to have Austin thinking that the monicker "Play Group" was "vulgar enough"! (Chapman: "Grice recalled how Austin described these meetings, perhaps semi-seriously [I don't share Chapman's sense of humour. I find all that she finds semi-serious to be semi-jocular], as a weekend break from the regular work of 'philosophical hacks', enabling them to turn their attention to less narrowly philosophical topics (Grice 1986a:51, Grice 1987a:181). Perhaps with this explanation in mind, Grice labelled the meetings 'The Play Group'. He seems to have been inordinately pleased with this
name, and employed it in both spoken and written accounts of Oxford philosophy
throughout his life. He used it at the time with some of his colleagues,
but never, it seems, with Austin himself. Austin was not the sort of man
with whom to share such a joke. (Grice 1986a: 49)." (not 'vulgar' enough?)
Oddly a few pages back and I'm indeed with Austin's use of 'free' (as in
'freely') which should make it to lists of free-will stuff. Chapman"
"[For Austin and for instance] excuses are only offered for actions performed FREELY." "A consideration of the ordinary use of "FREELY" to describe an action reveals that it does NOT introduce any particular property."
It's not the word that wears the trousers. And cfr. this essay cited
by Chalmers, on 'free' as a "negative" word -- semantic echoes of Berlin's
thesis. I think Hall would call this an 'excluder'. Chapman goes on: "but ["FREELY"] serves to negate some opposite, such as 'under duress'. It would be used only when there is some suggestion" --- as per implicature -- "that the opposite could or might apply. There would be something strange" ----- odd, but true -- as per Grice's theory of implicature, which I have elsewhere referred to as, "Grice Saves, But there is not such a thing as a free lunch") "about applying the term 'freely' to a NORMAL action performed in a normal manner." "He freely scratched his head." But a borderline case, "Grice frowned freely" is discussed by Green in his
online, "Grice's frown". "Austin sums up this cliam in the slogan 'no modification without aberration'" Grice of course discusses Austin's cases in WoW:I Grice uses "M" to stand for "free" as in 'Freely': Grice writes: "Perhaps the most interesting and puzzling examples in this area are those provided by Austin, particularly as he proponed a general thesis in relation to them" -- which predates Grice's concerns with the quantity of information to be provided in clauses and stuff. Grice goes on. "The following quotations are extracts from the paragraph headed, 'No modification without aberration'.: "When it is sated that X did A, there is a temptation to suppose that givein some, indeed, perhaps ANY, expression
MODIFYING the verb we shall be entitled to insert either it or its opposite or
negation in our statement. That is, we shall be entitled to ask, typically, "Did X do A Mly or not Mly?" (e.g. Did X murder Y voluntarily or nonvoluntarily? -- [cfr. "of his own free will"]" "and to answer one or the other. Or as a minimum it is supposed that if X did A there must be at least one modifying expression that we could, justifiably and INFORMATIVELY, insert with the verb." "He smoked freely."
Austin, as cited by Grice, goes on: ("Freely" being the adverb selected by Austin, "Plea for excuses" discussed by R. B. Jones, online). "In the great majority of cases of the great majority of verbs ('murder' is perhaps not one of the majority) such suppositions are quite unjustified." It's good that Grice doubts about 'murder' -- as Flew had: "A crime is a symptom of a disease" -- cfr. Nicolai Hartman's Socratic idea that no eleutheric can be ill -- the freewill is good free will -- some wishful thinking there?) Austin, as cited by Grice goes on: "The natural economy of language dictates that for the STANDARD case covered by any normal verb (e.g. 'eat', 'kick', or 'croquet') no modifying expression is required or even permissible." - where permissible is perhaps a bit too strong. Surely "He kicked freely", provided it's true (while odd) should be a permissible enough thing to say. Austin, as cited by Grice goes on: "Only if we do the action named in
SOME SPECIAL way or circumstances is a modiying expression called for, or even in order." -- Only that when dialoguing with the determinists, the most
unimaginable circumstances _are_ imagined (by them!) Austin, as cited by Grice, goes on: "It is bedtime, I am alone, I yawn; but I do not yawn involuntarily (or
voluntarily!) not yet deliberately. To ywan in any such particular way is
just not to just yawn."" Grice concludes: "The suggested general thesis is then, ... that for most action-verbs the admissibility of a modifying expression [such as 'freely'] rests on the action described being a nonstandard case of the kind of
action which the verb designates or signifies. Odd that Austin would use 'yawn', which is a bit like Grice's frown. Occam saw this. (And B. Doyle discuses 'semiosis' in his research on free will). For Occam, laughter signifies interior joy and a tear signifies interior pain -- much as a stone outside a pub may signify that wine is being sold. Now, a yawn then should 'signify' something -- to anyone who cares to witness it. It is this point that Green focuses on when bringing these issues of 'deliberateness' to ordinary behaviour (the example of the frown is Grice's himself, in his early "Meaning" 1948 -- "Though in general a deliberate frown may have the same effect (with respect to inducing a belief in my
displeasure) as a spontaneous frown, it can be expected to have the same effect only PROVIDED the audience takes it as intended to convey displeasure. That is,
if we take away the recognition of intention, leaving the other circumstances (including the recognition of the frown as deliberate), the belief-producing tendency of the frown must be regarded as being impaired or destroyed" (WoW:219).
Note that "A plea for excuses" is early enough (Aristotelian Society, 1956)
but not yet as early as Flew's "Crime or disease" (1954) -- a different
type of argument, though -- Nothing strictly or explicitly about 'free will'
in Austin's witty remarks (if ignoring 'disimplicature' and stuff) on
'freely'. I would like to add a point which may be useful. Austin refers to some
things as 'aberrations' (he could be hyperbolic in his talk). What I mean by a
Gricean (or Griceian as I prefer) aberration is not really an 'aberration'
then. But I submit -- First, doublechecking S. Blackburn (an authority mentioned by B. Doyle in the BBC radio programme he linked), entry on 'paradigm-case argument' in the Oxford Dict. of Philosophy. Blackburn adds a criterion: behavioural
evidence. As I recall from memory from his entry: A smiling bridegroom ----> the bridgegroom married on his own free will. ------- (I will check the reference at a later date). The idea that we can have, combining Grice, Flew, and Austin (and
Blackburn) would be: "Smith married." (informative enough). cfr. "Smith married on his own free will." "Aberration" for Austin. So, how are taking THAT as a case to 'teach' anything? Grice's solution: while it is 'aberrant' to say "Smith married on his own freewill" it is yet completely true. I have not studied a lot of reports of marriages and weddings, but it would seem that "on his own freewill" as applied to a particular verb -- say 'marry' -- only makes primary conversational 'sense' vis a vis precisely those 'forced' 'social pressures' that Flew is referring to -- and which are indicated when a bridegroom does not _smile_ during the ceremony. Or something like that. You should supply the missing premisses! Blackburn writes: "paradigm case argument." "The argument that since a term, such as ‘certain ’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘free will’, is taught partly with reference to central cases, any sceptical philosophical position denying that it applies in
those cases must involve an abuse of the term." "In one famous example, we might point to the *smiling* [emphasis mine. Speranza] bridegroom and say that his choice of his bride is a paradigm example of free choice [and that, to echo Flew 1954/5, he 'married on his own free will' for how else would you teach that?]; hence any philosophies that reject the notion of free choice are surreptitiously changing the meaning of the notion, and are therefore out of court." "The argument is widely rejected, on the grounds that even if a term is taught with reference to central cases, it may only be because of a cluster of false beliefs that those cases are singled out in the first place." "We may think of the bridegroom as free, but it may be that in so thinking we have a vision of his decision-making processes (not to mention those of his bride) that philosophical reflection discredits." "However, investigations of meaning are partly constrained by what we say about central cases, and there may be fields where some restricted form of the paradigm case argument is not entirely worthless." but quite the contrary! As I have found Blackburn's ever so brilliant discussion of Griceianism in that monumental epic in the philosophy of language ("Spreading the word: groundings in the philosophy of language", Oxford, Clarendon). Blackburn, S. W. (formerly of Pembroke College, Oxford): "paradigm case argument" The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

"Intention and uncertainty" (1971). This landmark in Grice´s development on these ideas is meant as a reply to Hart´s and Hampshire´s more conservative views on this, he proposes to consider things like, "I shall but I won´t", or "I will but I shan´t" -- he is considering also Pears´s previous British academy lecture on the predictability of one´s decisions. A dialogical illustration by Grice much discussed by Davidson et al. A: I intend to go to the opera on Tuesday. B: You will enjoy that. A: I may not be there. B: I am afraid I don't understand. A: The police are going to ask me some awkward questions on Tuesday afternoon, and I may be in prison by Tuesday evening. B: Then you should have said to begin with, "I intend to go to the opera if I am not in prison", or, if you wished to be more reticent, something like "I should probably be going", or "I hope to go", or "I aim to go", or "I intend to go if I can". Grice who quotes Stout, prefers Prichard and defines himself as a neo-Prichardian. The fact that Grice's colleague, J. O. Urmson, was recently popularising Prichard's views on 'willing' helped. From the Stanford Encyclopedia: "Often we do not know what activity is involved when one body causes a change in another. But when it comes to human actions, we do know. First, we know that we are looking for something mental, and second, we know that the word for that special kind of mental activity is ‘willing’. Very little can be said about this mental activity of willing, though we are all, of course, perfectly familiar with it. But we can ask about its proper object. What is it that we will? Two possible answers present themselves: we will actions, and we will changes. The first of these must be wrong because it generates an infinite regress. So the second must be right. An action is the willing of a change." A freewill variant. "I intend to go to that concert on Tuesday IF I DON'T CHANGE MY MIND". "In all of these, action within a future range of time is contemplated. However, in all cases, the sentences are actually voiced in the present tense, since there is no proper future tense in English." Unlike Greek, but cfr. "katsseis" and the actual words used by Epictetus.
"It is the *implication* of FUTURITY," Grice notes, "that makes these present tense _auxiliary_ constructions amount to a compound future quasi-tense." "An additional form of expressing the future is "I am going to..."." "This reality, that expression of futurity in English is a function of the present tense, is born out by the ability to negate the implication of futurity without making any change to the auxiliary construction." Thus, "[w]hen a verbal construction that suggests futurity (such as "I shall go") is subsequently followed by information that establishes a condition or presupposition, or the active verb stem itself contradicts a future indicative application of the construction, any sense of future tense is negated -- especially when the auxiliary will is used within its literal meaning, which is to (voluntarily) 'will' an action." For example: Person A says: "You will go now. You will not stay." Person B answers: "I shall go nowhere. I will stay." The second 'will', in B's response, is not only expressing _volition_ here but is being used in contradistinction to the usual first person 'shall' in order to achieve emphasis." "Similarly, in the case of the second and third persons, 'will' operates with 'shall' in reverse." For example: A: Will he be at the café at six o'clock? B: He will be there. [Normal affirmation] HOWEVER, B: He shall be there. -- stresses that this is not the usual pattern that was previously established or to be expected ("Last time he was late or did not show up")]."
Grice goes on to quote a genial passage from Brecht's _Regufee Conversations_:
"Denmark was at one time plagued by a succession of corrupt finance ministers [...] To deal with this situation, a law was passed requiring periodic inspection of the books of the Finance Minister. A certain Finance Minister, when visited by the inspectors, said to them 'If you inspect my books, I shall not continue to be your finance minister.'"[cfr. Epictetus, "If you keep twisting my arm, you will break it."]"They retired in confusion, and only eighteen months later it was discovered that the Finance Minister had spoken nothing other than the literal truth."
Grice comments: "This anecdote [...] exploits a modal ambiguity in the future tense, between (a) the future indicated or factual, and (b) the future intentional. This ambiguity extends beyond the first person form of the tense; there is a difference between (a) 'There will_F be light' (future factual) and (b) 'There will-I be light' (future intentional)."God might have uttered the second sentence while engaged in the Creation. Sensitive Englsh speakers (which most of us are not) may be able to mark this distinction by discriminating between 'shall' and 'will'. "'I shall-I go to London' stands to 'I intend to go to London' analogously to the way in which 'Oh for rain tomorrow!' stands to 'I wish for rain tomorrow'." This last bit below is what fascinates me about Grice, as it has fascinated Suppes, Chapman, and Pears:Grice: "Just as NO ONE *ELSE* can say JUST what *I* say when I say "I shall-I go to London". "If someone else says, "Grice will go to London", he will be expressing his, not my, intention that I shall go." (p. 11). And so on.

"Probability, Desirability, and Mood Operators" (1971). Discussion of things like 'to decide to believe whether p". "You're too formal" Putnam complained, and Grice changed his attitude. Important for the formalisation of self-imperatives, too imperative for the Libertarian to be true.

"Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre" (1975). One way to consider the paradox of "he willed, but not freely" as pleonastic may do with this attempt (of which I first learned via Grandy, Journal of Philosophy, 1973 -- but now in Grice 1991:152) "X judges that p" iff "X wills as follows." "Given any situation in which (PROTASIS) 1. X wills some end E 2. There are *two* _non-empty_ classes, K1 and K2 of action-types, such that: the _performance_ (by X) of an action-type belonging to K1 will realise E just in case p IS TRUE, and the performance (by X) of an aciton-type belonging to of K2 will realise E just in case p is *false*. 3. (Closure clause): There is _no_ third non-empty class K3 of action-types such that the performance (by X) of an action type belonging to K3will realise E whether p is true or p is false, APODOSIS: in such situation, X is to will that X performs some action-type belonging to K1." Grice was William James lecturer for 1967, and this bit above comes from what was his "Dewey" lecture, and there's a bit of voluntarism involved of the type James and Dewey would have enjoyed. Grice is actually amusing himself with refuting Ryle who found all talk on 'the will' hopelessly illusionistic. Thus, Grice is defining himself as something OTHER than an analytic 'behaviourist'. He is defining himself as a 'functionalist' (alla D. K. Lewis). And he is noting that WHILE he is proposing this 'reduction' of 'judging' to 'willing' (_modulo_ p, as Grandy has it), he is not postulating the fixedness of voluntarism (as he casually suggests that a very similar 'symmetrical' definition of 'willing' in terms of 'judging' is just as possible!). In the current discussion on 'free', the point to note is the appearance of the disjunction 'or' -- with Grice postulating _options_ or alternatives (two, strictly -- and perhaps this is too much of a 'constraint' or 'bound' on liberty -- to echo Galen Strawson?) opened to the agent. Grice, in "Intention and uncertainty" will indeed go on with Prichard in defining 'intending' as a combo of 'willing' and 'judging' (you only intend what you will PROVIDED you are pretty sure what you will is 'within the realms of realisation' -- I can freely will that p, but I can only intend that p if p is NOT 'uncertain' -- Grice uses Heisenberg's trick of a nominal -- and Grice is just punning on Hart's and Hampshire's dogmatism regarding regarding intention and _certainty_. Willings then are _freeer_ (for 'free' is not a 'flat' notion -- vide "Aspects of reason") than judgings. Judgings involve a 'reasoned' (or willed) choice between alternatives (K1 and K2) with respect to some factivity. (Why would you believe that it is raining if it's sunny outside so that the action type of getting an umbrella becomes otiose?). And intendings are less free than judgings, in that we require a narrowing down to non uncertain outcomes (Pears followed Grice in his "Intention and Belief" in the volume to which Grice/Baker contributed with "Davidson on weakness on the will"). Oddly, Peacocke, who perhaps unlike Pears or Grice, was most influential in Oxford (as Waynflete prof. of metaphysical philosophy) learned all that from Grice at Berkeley in the early 1970s and spread it abroad (i.e. back in Oxford) -- even if few were attentive enough to over-quote him! Etc. Browsing the Oxford Dict. of Proverbs one finds two with Gricean echoes -- with appropriate caveats: "We soon believe what we desire", and "Wish is the father of the Thought". Again, we see Grice as confirming "how clever language is" (Unlike his dear friend Albritton who, when in a more deterministic (or is it 'undeterministic'?) vein, exclaimed, "yet it is not always the case that where there is a will there is a way" -- cited by B. Doyle, Information Philosopher).
"My purpose in this section is to give a little thought to the question 'What are the general principles exemplified, in creature-construction, in progressing from one type of pirot to a higher type? What KINDS of steps are being made? The kinds of step with which I shall deal here are those which culminate in a licence to include, within the specification of the content of the psychological state of certain pirots, a range of expressions which would be inappropriate with respect
to LOWER [emphasis mine. JLS] pirots; such expressions include connectives, quantifiers, temporal modifiers, mood indicators, modal operators, and (importantly) names of psychological states like "judge" and "will"." ---- or perhaps 'free' as applied (or attached now to 'will') rather than more generally as when a 'pirot' thinks that a body moves freely. "Expressions," Grice goes on, "availability of which leads to the structural enrichment of specifications of content."The connection with 'evolution' theory is made obvious by Chapman in her
book on _Grice_ (now on paperback). I notice that Chapman uses 'evolution'
and 'evolutionarily' I think twice and she quotes from a paper by Grice
where he writes: "read [Dawinks] The Selfish Gene" but then we have to be
careful. Mackie also read that book, "but only because it was given to me as a
Christmas present." Grice writes: "In general, these steps"-- rungs up the ladder, as he puts it -- elsewhere, cited by Chapman -- as they advance from the 'brutes' (word he used Chapman quotes) to 'the peak' that man is ("Method") -- "will be ones by which items or ideas which have, initially, a legitimate place outside the scope of psychological instantiables (or, if you will, the expressions for which occur LEGITIMATELY outside the scope of psychological verbs) come to have a legitimate place within the scope of such instantiables: steps by which (one might say) such
items or ideas come to be INTERNALISED. I am disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to us, and which is very important to him; name, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects' to project into the world items which, properly (or primitively) considered, are really features of our states of mind. I shall set out in stages the application of aspects of the genitorial programme.” CONNECTION with 'free choices', 'decision making' in a probablistic environment. The stages have been 'advanced' by M. Bratman and others in a sort of sequential order -- with a very fine-tooth combing that Grice would have loved. And this only for what I have elsewhere called pirot-3: with pirot-1 and pirot-2 being vegetals and animals respectively -- very simplistically. And one can wonder: how much of this was already being practiced in continental philosophy by people like Nikolai Hartmann (a genius) and Max Scheler? Topics as to the hierarchy of the universe in terms of stages which are proper yet with communication (emergence in biology, e.g.). The following HIERARCHIES adapted from Bratman and Smith. Bratman et al consider a sequence. We start with a ZERO ORDER (Stage 0). We start with pirots equipped to satisfy unnested judging and willing (i.e. whose contents do _not_ involve judging or willing). 1ST ORDER Stage 1. "It would be advantageous to pirots if they could have judging and willing, which relate to their own judging or willing." Such pirots could be equipped to control or regulate their own judgings and willings. They will presumably be already constituted so as to conform to the law that CAETERIS PARIBUS if they will that p and judge that ~p, if they can, they make it the case that p [in their 'minds']. "To give them some control over their judgings and willings, we need only extend the application of this law to their judging and willing.""We equip them so that caeteris paribus IF they will that they do not will that p and judge that they do will that p, (if they can) they make it the case that they do NOT will that p "And we somehow ensure that sometimes they CAN do this." Grice writes: "It may be that the installation of this kind of control would go hand in had with the installation of the capacity for evaluation; but I need not concern myself with this now." 2nd ORDER Creature 2's intentional efforts depend on the motivational strength of its considered desires at the time of action. So far we have been seeing the process by which conflicting considered desires motivate action as a broadly CAUSAL process, a process that reveals MOTIVATIONAL strength. But a creature -- call it CREATURE 3 -- might itself try to weigh considerations provided by such conflicting desires in DELIBERATION about the pros and cons of various alternatives. In the simplest case, such weighing treats each of the things desired as a prima facie justifying end. In the face of conflict it weighs such desired ends, where the weights correspond to the motivational strength of the associated, considered desire. The outcome of such DELIBERATION will match the outcome of the CAUSAL motivational processes envisioned in our description of Creature 2. But since the weights it invokes in such deliberation correspond to the motivational strength of the relevant considered desires (though perhaps not to the motivational strength of the relevant considered desires), the resultant activities will match those of a corresponding Creature 2 (*all* of whose desires, we are assuming, are considered). To be more realistic we might limit ourselves to saying that Creature 2 has the capacity to make the transition from unconsidered to considered desires but does not always do this. But it will keep the discussion more manageable to simplify and to suppose that *all* its desires are considered. 3RD ORDER Stage 3. We shall not want these pirots to depend, in each will act in ways that reveal the motivational strength of considered desires at the time of action, but for creature 3 it will also be true that in some (though not all) cases it acts on the basis of how it weights the ends favoured by its conflicting, considered desires. It is time to note that Creature 3's considered desires will concern matters that cannot be achieved simply by action at a single time. It may, for example, want to nurture a vegetable garden, or build a house. Such matters will require organized and coordinated action that extends over time. What it does now ill depend not only on what it now desires but also on what it now expects it will do later given what it does now. It needs a way of settling now what it will do later given what it does now. The point is even clearer when we remind ourselves, what we have so far ignored, that Creature 3 is not alone. It is, we may assume, one of some number of such creatures; and in many cases it needs to COORDINATE what it does with what others do so as to achieve ends desired by all participants, itself included. 4TH ORDER These costs are magnified for a creature whose various plans are interwoven so that a change in one element can have significant ripple effects that will need to be considered. So let us suppose that the general strategies Creature 4 has for responding to new information about its circumstances are sensitive to these kinds of costs. Promoting in the long run the satisfaction of its considered desires and preferences. Creature 4 is a somewhat sophisticated planning agent but it has a problem. It can expect that its desires and preferences may well change over time and undermine its efforts at organizing and coordinating its activities over time. Perhaps in many cases this is due to the kind of temporal discounting emphasized by (among others) George Ainslie. So for example Creature 4 may have a plan to exercise every day but may tend to prefer a sequence of not exercising on the present day but exercising all days in the future, to a uniform sequence the present day included. At the end of the day it returns to its earlier considered preference in favor of exercising on each and every day. Though Creature 4, unlike Creature 3, has the capacity to settle on prior plans or plaices concerning exercise, this capacity does not yet help in such a case.A creature whose plans were stable in ways in part shaped by such a no-regret principle would be more likely than Creature 4 to resist temporary temptations. 5TH ORDER So let us build such a principle into the stability of the plans of creature 5 whose plans and policies are not derived solely from facts about its limits of time, attention, and the like. It is also grounded in the central concerns of a planning agent with its own future, concerns that lend special significance to anticipated future REGRET. So let us add to Creature 5 the capacity and disposition to arrive at such hierarchies of higher-order desires concerning its "will". 6TH ORDER This gives us a new creature, CREATURE 6. There is a problem with Creature 6, one that has been much discussed. It is not clear why a higher-order desire--even a higher-order desire that a certain desire be one's "will" -- is not simply one more desire in the pool of desires [Berkeley God's will problem] Why does it have the authority to constitute or ensure the agent's (that is, the creature's) endorsement or rejection of a FIRST-ORDER desire? Applied to creature 6 this is the question of whether, by virtue solely of its hierarchies of desires, it really does succeed in taking its own stand of endorsement or rejection of various FIRST-ORDER desires. Since it was the ability to take its own stand that we are trying to provide in the move to creature 6, we need some response to this challenge. The basic point is that Creature 6 is not merely a time-slice agent. It is, rather, and understands itself to be, a temporally persisting planning agent, one who begins, and continues, and completes temporally extended projects. On a broadly Lockean view, its persistence over time consists in relevant psychological continuities (for example, the persistence of attitudes of belief and intention) and connections (for example, memory of a past event, or the later intentional execution of an intention formed earlier). Certain attitudes have as a primary role the constitution and support of such Lockean continuities and connections. In particular, policies that favor or reject various desires have it as their role to constitute and support various continuities both of ordinary desires and of the politicos themselves. "For this reason such policies are not merely additional wiggles in the psychic stew."Instead, these policies have a claim to help determine where the agent -- that is, the temporally persisting agent -- stands with respect to its desires. Or so it seems to me reasonable to say. 7TH ORDER So the psychology of Creature 7 continues to have the hierarchical structure of pro-attitudes introduced with creature 6 -- pirot_0.6. The difference is that the higher-order pro-attitudes of Creature 6 were simply characterized as desires in a broad, generic sense, and no appeal was made to the distinctive species of pro-attitude constituted by plan-like attitudes. That is the sense in which, following Grice, the psychology of Creature 7 is an "extension of" the psychology of Creature 6.Let us then give CREATURE 7 such higher-order pollicies with the capacity to take a stand with respect to its desires by arriving at relevant higher-order policies concerning the functioning of those desires over time. Creature 7 exhibits a merger of hierarchical and planning structures. Appealing to planning theory and ground in connection to the temporally extended structure of agency--to be one's "will" in Frankfurt's technical sense. A pirot_0.7 has higher-order policies that favor or challenge motivational
roles of its considered desires. When Creature 7 engages in deliberative weighing of conflicting, desired ends it seems that the assigned weights should
reflect the policies that determine where it stands with respect to relevant
desires. But the policies we have so far appealed to--policies concerning what
desires are to be one's will (in Frankfurt's technical sense of "will")--do not quite address this concern. The problem is that one can in certain
cases have policies concerning which desires are to motivate and yet these
not be policies that accord what those desires are for a corresponding
justifying role in deliberation. 8TH ORDER A solution is to give our creature--call it CREATURE 8--the capacity to arrive at policies that express its commitment to be motivated by a desire by way of its treatment of that desire as providing, in deliberation, a justifying end for action.Creature 8 has policies for treating (or not treating) certain desires as providing justifying ends--as, in this way,
reason-providing--in motivationally effective deliberation. Let us call such policies self-governing policies--I will suppose that these policies are mutually
compatible and do not challenge each other. In this way Creature 8 involves, as Grice would want, an "extension" of structures already present in Creature 7.
The grounds on which Creature 8 arrives at (and on occasion revises) such self-governing policies will be many and varied. We can see these policies as crystallizing complex pressures and concerns, some of which are grounded in other policies or desires.These self-governing policies may be tentative and will normally NOT be immune to change. If we ask what creature 8 values in this case, the answer seems to be: what it values is constituted in part by its higher-order
self-governing policies. In particular, it values exercise over nonexercise even
right now, and even given that it has a considered (though temporary) preference to the contrary. Unlike creatures 3-5, what Creature 8 now values is not simply a matter of its present, considered desires and preferences. NOW THIS MODEL OF CREATURE 8 SEEMS IN RELEVANT RESPECTS TO BE A (PARTIAL) MODEL OF US. So we arrive at the conjecture that one important kind of valuing of which we are capable involves, in the cited ways, both our first-order desires and our higher order self-governing policies. In an important sub-class of cases our valuing involves reflexive polices that are both first-order policies of action and higher-order policies to treat the first-order policy as reason providing in motivationally effective deliberation. This may seem odd. Valuing seems normally to be a first-order attitude. One values honesty, say. The proposal is that an important kind of valuing involves higher-order policies. Does this mean that, strictly speaking, what one values (in this sense) is itself a desire--not honesty, say, but a desire for honesty? No, it does not. What I value in the present case is honesty; but, on the theory, my valuing honesty in art consists in certain higher-order self-governing policies. An agent's reflective valuing involves a kind of higher-order
willing.

Aspects of Reason: The Kant lectures (1977). Grice takes up a discussion which can be traced back to Alf Ross ("Imperatives and logic", 1941) via Kenny, B. Williams, and Hare. The Ross paradox (so-called) being: Post the letter! Therefore, post the letter or burn it! A few have attempted to disqualify Hare's Griceian defence of the validity of the above in terms of conversational implicature, applying, instead, a free-choice permission, as it may or may not involve 'semantic' entailment. Chapman has identified a few points on 'linguistic botanising' by Grice on 'free'. Chapman writes: "Grice's notes from the early 1980s show him applying the familiar techniques of 'linguistic botanising' to the concept of freedom. He jotted down phrases such as 'alcohol-free', 'free for lunch' and 'free-wheeling', and listed many possible definitions, including 'liberal', 'acting without restriction' and 'frank in conversation'" ---- (Grice, "Notes with Judith Baker", The Grice Papers, Bancroft Library, UC/Berkeley). 1.1. Reason & Reasoning. The concept of reasoning. Why is the elucidation of the notion of 'reason' important? Well, it just _is_. Grice suggests one good way to start: the notion of 'reason' qua _verb_ ("Reasoner R reasons from Premiss to Conclusion"). The rationale being, as it were, that reason, qua 'faculty' is manifested in _reasoning_. There will be a connection between 'reason' qua verb and 'reason' qua noun. 1.2. Reason and reasoning. Grice proposes as a 'stalking horse' for reasoning the occurrence (entertaining, often acceptance) -- in either speech or thought -- of a chain of inferences, or more precisely, a sequence of ideas (or propositions) which consist of an initial set (initial premisses) -- which may be suitably expanded on request by the reasoner from the premisses actually entertained (an expansion thought by R to be formally cogent) -- together with further members each of which is thought by R to be derivable by a principle of inference intended by R to be a canonically formally valid one. An alternative formulation: R reasons from P to C if R think that P & R intends that, in thinking C, he should be thinking of something which would be the conclusion of a formally valid argument the premisses of which are a suplementation of P. In this occurrence, the premiss P (or antecedent sequence) is the 'reason' for the conclusion C.
1.3. _Mis_-reasoning. Not all actual reasoning, however, is _good_ reasoning. ("Some is actually downright appalling"). Hence the proviso: the conclusion is _thought_ by R to be derivable, rather than that it _is_ indeed derivable. Consider:
(1) (Jack to Jill). Career women always smoke heavily. You certainly smoke heavily.
You must be a career woman. "|- ((x) Ax -> Bx) & Ex.Bx) -> Ex.Ax" is _not_ a theorem. ("|- ((x) Ax -> Bx) & Ex.Ax) -> Ex.Bx" is). While there is, indeed, _bad_ reasoning, 'reasoning' is a value-paradigmatic notion (unlike, say, 'climate'). We have to know what _good_ reasoning is in order to elucidate 'reasoning'
_simpliciter_. 1.4. 'Incomplete' (_sic_ with scare quotes) reasoning. A bit of reasoning can be 'incomplete' (albeit expandable). Here his account of conversational maxims is made to work. Most actual reasoning is enthymematic:
(2) Jack is an Englishman. He is, therefore, brave. The 'supressed bit' may be understood as 'an inferential schema': "To infer Bx from Ax if whatever satisfies 'A' _also_ satisfies 'B'. Whatever satisfies 'Englishman' also satisfies 'brave'). Alternatively, we may speak of a _suppressed premiss_: "All Englishmen are (always/normally(usually/likely to be) brave." Finicky elaboration of steps is frowned upon, as it offends against conversational maxims, particularly "Do not be more informative than is required". Grice recalls at this point his fellow undergraduate ("Shropshire") in Oxford way back in the 1930s, who in one tutorial, claimed "that the immortality of the human soul is proved by the fact that if you cut off a chicken's head, it will run round the yard for approximately 15 minutes before dropping. A rational reconstruction for "Shropshire" may go:
(3) If the soul is not dependent on the body, the soul is immortal. If the
soul is dependent on the body, it is dependent on that part of the body in which it is located. If the soul is located in the body, it is located in the head. If the chicken's soul was located in the head, the chicken's soul would be destroyed if the head were rendered inoperative by removal from the body. The chicken runs round
thde yard after head-removal. It could do this only if animated, and controlled by a soul. Ergo, the chicken's soul is _not_ located in, and _not_ dependent on, the chicken's head. Ergo, the chicken's soul is _not_ dependent on the chicken's body. Ergo, the chicken's soul is immortal. If the chicken's soul is immortal, _a fortiori_ the human soul is immortal. Ergo, the human soul is immortal. Grice one notes one problem here: he has reconstructed Shropshire's reasoning, but would Shropshire have exanded the reasoning exactly like that. There is an uneliminable 'indeterminacy' here, just as there is in the canonical case of the conversational implicature. 1.5. Too _good_ to be reasoning. Having allowed for _bad_ reasoning, we also face reasoning which is 'too good to be reasoning' (like a child who is too well behaved for his own good). Examples: (4) John has arrived or Mary has arrived. Ergo Mary has arrived. (5) John has arrived. Ergo John has arrived.
(6) My wife is at home. Someone is at home. A related problem: we require, to ascribe reasoning to R, that R is trying to solve _some_ problem. We are reluctant to call 'reasoning' a pointless sequence of formally valid steps as in (7) I have 2 hands. If I had 3 more hands, I would have 5 hands. If I were to have double 5, I'd have 10 hands. If 4 hands were removed, 6 hands would remain. Ergo I would have 4 more hands than I have now. The goal of resoning -- the solution of a problem -- gives us a criterion for _successful_ reasoning. Successful reasoning achieves its goal. Intention pervades reasoning: merely _judging_ that there _exists_ a formally valid supplementation does not _count_ as reasoning. It may be that |- P -> C, but if that's not the object of R's _intention_, there's no need to call it even a _possible_ reasoning. "We think of the reasoner as intending the production of C to _be_ the consequence of P (which clearly is different from R merely _judging_ that C is derivable from P. 1.6. What can't logic catch. There are factors in reasoning seldom touched on by logic. Consider the philosopher who many months ago understakes to give a set of 10 lectures. One month before the starting date, he is asked for the titles of the individual lectures, and reasons to himself as follows: (8) Oh God. It's all a mess. I have piles of material. None of it seems worth listening to. It isn't in shape. I am in a terrible muddle. If I give them the titles I had in mind I'm not sure they will fit what finally emerges (if anything). Why do I do these things? Why don't I learn? If I cancel the whole thing, though my name will be mud. What I'll do is give them those titles I had planned and ask for latitude to depart from them if need be. This lament illustrates what Grice calls the degree-variant notion of 'reasoning' (as opposed to the 'flat' notion). Reasoning is a gradational notion. It's also specific: one may be good at mathematical reasoning but
not good at theological reasoning. There are, however, basic 'excellences'
as it were (also degree-variant). He lists 4: simplicity, economy, accuracy, and inventiveness. 1.7. A final point. We usually distinguish between 'rational' and
'reasonable'. Does the distinction hold water? Grice engages here in a bit
of linguistic analysis, old Oxonian style: Consider the negation contexts: "not rational", "not reasonable". While it would not be 'irrational' to expect my wife to clean my football boots but it might be _unreasonable_. Those boots, too, were not bought at a very _rational_ price; only at a very _reasonable_ price. In a different context: to cheat someone in a business deal (as such) is not _irrational_ and is not _unreasonable_ -- it's just repulsive. And, while it would not be irrational to cheat a man when you knew you might be found out and as a result lose a valuable
client, that would be a rather unreasonable thing to do. Irrational would be to cheat him when you knew it was quite likely that you would be found out, and when, if you were, you would lose your job at a time when employment is very difficult to obtain. A third context: yielding to a tempting invitation to go out drinking when you have already decided to spend the evening working on tomorrow's lecture would be (as such) neither irrational nor unreasonable -- Just weak and foolish. To yield to that temptation when you have _not_ yet decided what do do but know you ought to
get on with that work for tomorrow would yet not be irrational although it _might_ be unreasonable. A fourth context: if you have bungingly got your firm into a difficulty, and you go and confess the matter to your boss, your boss might be both rational and reasonable about it. Rational if he cooly and in a reasoned way tells you what is the best course to take. Reasonable in that he is not to hard on you. This suggests some _rationale_: "reasonable", but not "rational", is, a _privative_ adjective, an excluder. It's _unreasonable_ the word that wears the trousers: to be
reasonable is to be relatively free from unreasonableness. II. The 'rational' is the realm of what Aristotle in _Nichomachean Ethics_ calls, the ratiocinative soul which is _intrinsically_ rational. The 'reasonable' is the realm of the desiderative: the appetites and feelings, the pre- or sub-rational 'soul' -- which is only _extrinsically_ rational as it heeds to the dictates of the ratiocinative. This _privative_ notion of reasonableness is beneficial for the characterisation of a rational being. Akrasia is not the stumbling block in the theory of rationality, but, quite contrarily, something the possibility of which we must provide from the
very start. 2.1. Reasons: justificatory and explanatory. If reasons are the stuff
of which reasoning is made it is proper to proceed to a consideration of
the nominal "reason" 2.2. Flat and variable reason. Grice features five features of _flat_ 'reason': It's not variable, basic, non-valuational, essential to the idea
of rational being, and the source for degree-variant reason. He lists thirteen manifestations ("excellences") of this degree-variant reason: clear headedness, critical acumen, thoroughness, tenacity in argument, felixibility, orderliness, breadth, a sense of relevance, intellectual caution, nose (intuitiveness), inventiveness, subtlety, and memory. Some of these are truly specificatory (e.g. orderliness, critical acumen); some are just ancillary (memory) -- just as in tennis a good eyesight is while indispensable is not itself a part of excellence as having a powerful service is. 2.3. Justificatory reasons. Grice proposes to focus on what he calls the 'justicatory' use of the word 'reason'. He distinguishes it from a
purely 'explanatory' use by a number of criteria for Reason: justificatory
and explanatory:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _| | Distinctive Features |
| |_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|
| Canonical Form |factive|explanatory |causal|mass/count|relative |
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|_P _C_ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _|
|i. Justificatory:|No Yes |P justifies C|P ->X | mass | Yes |
|P is a reason for| | | | | |
|x to C. | | | | | |
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _| _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ | _ _ _ _ _| _ _ _ _ |
|i. Explanatory: |Yes Yes|P explains C | P->C | count | No |
|P is a reason | | | | | |
|why C | | | | | |
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _| _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ _ _ | _ _ _| _ _ _ _ _| _ _ _ _ |
Explanation. A justificatory 'reason' always allow the qualification "good" or "bad" (or "little" or even "no" reason) Not so with explanatory 'reason' "There was a bad reason why the bridge collapsed" sounds terrible. A justifiatory reason may become an explanatory. This happens when the reasoner _thinks_ that P is a _justificatory_ reason for C, and acts accordingly. 2.4. Alethic and practical reason. Justificatory reasons can be, to borrow from von Wright, "alethic" or "deontic". With this Grice introduces what is in my opinion Grice's main thesis in the lectures, viz. the
so-called Univocality Thesis: is 'reason' univocal in the collocations "alethic" and "deontic"? His approach to conversational implicature suggests so. Grice discusses Davidson's arguments in 'How is weakness of the will possible' viz:
(9) If the barometer falls, it will probably rain. The barometer falls. Ergo, ceteris paribus it will probably rain. -- underlying form: Prob (h, p) = Good (h; a, b). More prob (h; p, q) = Better (h; a, b). (10) If, prima facie, Act I would be a lie and Act II would not, P is better than Q Act I, but not Act II, would be a lie.
Ergo, ceteris paribus, P is better than Q. Grice notes one problem with _deontic_ or non-alethic modality: for anyone else, though, a non-alethic conclusion is _nothing_ that one can draw, either logically or decently or sensibly. What is a reason for a reasoner R1 to do something may _not_ be a reason for R2. His example: (11) If Tommy has been tormenting my cat, it's best that I ambush him on his way home from school.
Tommy _has_ been tormenting my cat. Principle of Total Evidence Ergo, I shall ambush Tommy. 2.5. Mood Indicators. Grice introduces the operator "Acc": "It is reasonable that...". "Acc" is followed by a neustic (or mood operator: .and !) and a phrastic or radical. The scheme for Procedure Specifiers for Mood Operators being:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
| mood | sub- | | |
| operator | mood | differential | complement |
|_ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|
| |exhibitive| | |
| | !1 | none | |
|imperative|_ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _| wills that p |
| ! |protreptic| | |
| | !2 | wills addreseee | |
|_ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|
| |exhibitive| | |
| | .1 | none | |
|indicative|_ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _| judges that p |
| . |protreptic| | |
| | .2 | wills addressee | |
|_ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|
Explanation. "Willing" and "Judging" are treated as primitive concepts in a functionalist theory of psychology ('Method in philosophical psychology'). For the neustic, Grice draws from the idea of "direction of fit", as distinguishing alethic and deontic or boulomaic. Perceptual beliefs are _caused_ by the word (the world affects the doxastic system), but in the case of the boulomaic subsystem it is the system (the will) which _affects_ the world. Grice remarks that he does not limit the scope of the phrastic for !-utterances: "_They_ shall not pass" as a legitimate intentional (indicative exhibitive); "The sergeant is to muster the men at dawn" --
uttered by a captain to a lieutenant -- as a legitimate imperative. There is no need to restrict the realm of the intentional to the first person, or the imperatives to the second. 2.6. Conditional and Unconditional Rationality: relative vs. absolute. Further to his Univocality thesis, Grice considers "S must get the Oxford Chair of Pastoral Theology" (i.e. "There is (some) reason for S to get the Chair"). Unlike 'alethic' modality, there seems to be a agency-relative necessity. It's either S or _us_ who must do something about that. How are we to deal with this apparent asymmetry? Grice examines general introduction and elimination rules a la natural deduction system: "Derive Nec.P from P" and "Derive P from Nec.P". This rules may be interpreted as syntactic (= 'provabilitiy') or semantic (= validity or
demonstrability). In the alethic realm, for example, Fermat's conjecture is not provable yet valid. The apparent asymmetry ("[]p -> p" vs. "ObligatoryP ~-> P") Grice judges a matter of interpretation only. If R says that R must eat his hat, R is committed to his saying that he shall eat it. The agency-relativity of "must" is just _system_-relativity. Consider: "It is necessary for R1 that R2 becomes his ambassador". We mean: R2's becoming an ambassador will be advantageous to R1, and that it's R1 who shall bring about that R1 becomes so. It is as if the introduction rule were: If it is established in R's system that P, "Nec (relative-to-R) P" is establishable (i.e. satisfactory-for-R). The elimination rule would read: If it is
necessary (relative-to-R) that R shall eat his hat, 'R shall eat his hat' will be establishable. A further problem concerns utterances which contain a _double_ agency-relative modality. E.g. "It is necessary for Joe Gumb that the American public retains an interest in baseball". Here, we must distinguish between the agent R1 for whom something is a reason and the agent R2 the utterance is _about_ when it is said what there is a reason for. Grice proposes a general universalisability thesis to deal with these complex cases: It is necessary that, if it is necessary for R1 that p
should be the case, then let there be some condition C such that R1 satisfies & and necessarily for any R2 who satisfies it is also necessary for R2 that p should be the case". LECTURE III 3.1. Justificatory reason: alethic and practical. Justificatory reason can become explanatory: If R judges that P is a justificatory reason for accepting that Q, and if R does accept Q on account of P, then P
_explains_ his accepting Q. One must distinguish three readings of "Acc", though: i. The Kantian "must" (full, indefeasible, acceptability). E.g. "A bishop must get fed up with politicians". Associated conditional: "If x is a bishop, (unreservedly), x will get fed up with policians". ii. The weaker "ought" (ceteris paribus acceptability). E.g. "To keep his job, a bishop ought not to show his irritation with
politicians". Associated conditional: "If one is to keep one's job and if one is a bishop then ceteris paribus, one is not to show one's irritation with politicians". iii. Degree-Variant acceptability: it is to such-and-such a degree acceptable that..." There is _another_ distinction to be made, a progress as it were, from 'technical' (Kant's "rules of skill"), via (ii) 'prudential', to (iii) 'categorical' modality. 3.2. A fuller exposition of the initial idea. Given akrasia, we can't accept that if R concludes, via practical resoning, that it is
acceptable that R shall go home', he would _ipso facto_ _will_ to go home.
Similarly, if R concludes, via alethic reasoning, that it is acceptable that it snows, would, _ipso facto_ _judge_ that it snows. We should allow for the conditionality involved here formally. Grice proposes: (12) Acc (Given that S has a red face, S has high blood pressure) and this from "Acc (Given that x has a
red face, x has high blood pressure)" S has a red face Ergo, Acc S has high blood pressure. While for indicative-doxastic reasoning we qualify the conclusion with the
phrase "with some degree of probability", for imperative-boulomaic reasoning we use "with some degree of _desirability_: "Let it be that A. It is the case that B. Ergo, with some degree of desirabiity, let it be that C"). Consider (13) and its more formal counterpart (14): (13) It is acceptable that, given that R is to keep dry
and that it the the case that R is such that it rains, that R is to take an umbrella.
R is to keep dry. It rains. Ceteris paribus, it is desirable that R takes an umbrella. (14) Acc (Given !A & .B, !C) (via Acc (Given !Fx & .Gx, !Hx) !A .B
(Principle of Total Evidence) Ergo, it is desirable that !C Consider: (15) Acc, given that x is to one survive that x is to eat. by Universal Instantiation,
Acc, given that R is to survive that R is to eat. R is to survive. Ergo, by Det, Acc, R is to eat. _Ceteris paribus_ generalisations permeate boulomaic reasoning. Consider: (16) Ceteris Paribus, Acc (given that R1 likes R2, R1 wants R2's company
R1 likes R2 No DEFEATER (e.g. R is ill) Ergo R1 wants R2's company. (17) Ceteris Paribus Acc (given that R is to leave USA, & R is an alien, that R is to obtain a saling permit from the Internal Revenue R is to leave USA and is an alien. No Defeater (e.g. R is a close friend of the President and R arranges a travel in Air Force I) Ergo, R is to obtain a sailing permit. 3.3. The principle of total evidence. Can it be made explicit? Consider R, the owner a firm which makes & sells ornaments from sea-shells. Concerned if business will improve during the coming year, R reasons: (18) These days, every beachcomber is collecting seashells like mad (so as to sell them to firms such as mine), so I can get seashells more cheaply.
It is thus likely that given that I will get seashells more cheaply, the
business will improve. Yet, my not easily replaceable craftsmen are getting
restive for higher pay. I accept that given that the craftsmen are restive,
the business will _not_ improve. Ornaments from seashells are all the rage
at the moment, so I may be able to put my prices up though & make more
money. Ergo, it is pretty likely, given that I will get seashells more
cheaply, that my employees are restive, & that everyone is eager to buy
sheashell ornament, my business will improve. Grice provides a correlative boulomaic version. Now R is head accountant of a firm in Redwood City (it's accounting time) & gets an invited from his mother to visit her in Milwaukee. Further, his wife has hada head a bad car accident and is lying in a hospital in Boise, Idaho. We can represent R's reasoning as: (19) Acc (Given that R is to give his mother pleasure & that R is her favourite son, R is to visit her in Milwaukee next week). Acc (Given that R is to get ready his firm's accounts -- he's head accountant & it's accounting time, R is to spend next week in his office). Acc, given that R is to give his mother pleasure and he's to get ready the firm's accounts, & that he's the favourite son, & head accountant and it's accounting time, that R visit his for a long weekend & return to the office on Tuesday. Acc, given that R is to sustain his wife & she is lying, after with two broken legs, internal injuries, & much pain, that R is to spend next week in Boise Idaho. Acc, given that R is i. to give his mother pleasure and ii. get ready the firm's accounts and iii. sustain his wife, and that iv. R is the favourite son and v. he's head accountant at accounting time, and vi. R is
a husband with a wife lying in Boise, Idaho, that R is to spend next week in Boise, Idaho, and telephone the mother and the office daily. Ergo Acc (R is to spend next week in Boise, telephoning his mother and office daily. A slightly different case concerns a doctor examining a patient: should he give him electromixosis?
(20) Given that the patient is to be relieved of cephalalgia (symptom:
headache) & he is of blood group G, the patient ought to take an aspirin.
Given that the patient is to be relieved of cepahlalgia _and gasteroplexis_
(symptom: stomach cramp) and that the patient is of blood group G, the
patient ought to be treated by electromixosis. Given that the patient is to
be relieved of cephalalgia and gasteroplexis and that he is of blood group
G & that his blood has an abnormally high alcohol content, the patient
ought to be given gentle message until his condition changes. R does not
find an abnormally high alcohol content in the patient's blood. Ergo (via
the Kantian switch on the face of unqualified indefeasibility), the patient
not just ought, but _must_ be given electromixosis. The principle of total evidence here seems to be: If R accepts-at-t an acceptability conditional C1, the antecedent of which _favours_ to degree d the consequent of C, and R accepts-at-t the antecedent of C1, and C is optimal-at-t for R (i.e. after _due_ (or proper -- sic valuational) search by R for such a further conditional, there seems to be _no_ conditional C such that R accepts-at-t C2 & its antecedent, & the antencent of C2 is an extension of the antecedent of C1, & the consequent of C2 is a _rival_ of
the consequent of C1, & the antecedent of C2 favours the consequence of C2
more than it favours the consequent of C1, R may accept-at-t, to degree d,
the consequent of C1. 3.4. Satisfactoriness, embedding & mixed mood markers.
"Satisfactory" is the term chosen by Grice to do general duty for both
"truth" -- the radical of an indicative utterance -- and "goodness" -- the
radical of an imperative utterance. It may be possible to define goodness
in terms of truth as follows: It is acceptable that !p if 'It is good that
!p' is true. Satisfactoriness provides general versions for the
truth-conditions of usual operators: "p AND q" is satisfactory if p is
satisfactory AND q is satisfactory. "p OR q" is satisfactory if p is
satisfctory OR q is satisfactory. "IF p, q" is satisfactory if p is not
satisfactory or q is satisfactory. This presents complications with
"mixed-modal" utterances. 'The best is filthy & don't touch it' is alright,
but it's reverse, 'Don't touch the beast & it is filthy' is dubious. 'Touch
the beast & the beast bites you' is not the _conjunction_ that "and"
suggests it is. And, while 'Either he is taking a bath or leave the
bathroom door open' is alright, 'Either leave the bathroom door open or he
is talking a bath' seems less so. Grice proposes that in case of these
utterances, we take the boulomaic operator as having broader scope. There's
also problem with the operation of negation. With doxastic modality there
is really no problem: ".~p" and "~.p" are truth-conditionally equivalent.
With "!" the issue is more complex. It looks as if "~!~A" may read as "you
may (permissive) do A" (one signifies one's refusal to prohibit the
addressee's doing A. Yet another complication is brought by utterances like
"The bicycle is to face north", which he regards as value-indifferent. None
of this complications is insoluble, though. 4.1. Crossing the divide. Inferential relations between alethic & boulomaic modality. Is boulomaic modality reducible to doxastic modality. Consider: "To preserve a youthful complexion, if one has a relatively insensitive skin, one should smear one's face with peanut butter before
retiring at night". More formally: It should be, given that R is to
preserve a youthful complexion & that S has a relatively insensitive skin,
that S is to smear the face with peanut butter before retiring" ("SHOULD
(!p, .q; !r). Now, the boulomaic acceptability here seems to be based on
the flat doxastic acceptability of "SHOULD (.q, .r; .p)": "It should be, given that R smears the face with peanut butter skin before retiring & that R has a relatively insensitive skin, that R preserves a youthful complexion". There is one problem with
the reducibility thesis: in the boulomaic version, the phrastic "p"
features in the antecedent; in the doxstic version, it features in the
consequent. Some defeater may be so for the former but not but not for
latter. This, Grice notes, is what concerned Kant in the _Grundlegung_.
Kant's example was: "It's fully acceptable, given that R is to bisect a
line on an unerring principle, that R is to draw from its extremities two
intersecting arcs". Such a conditional is vouched for by the analytic claim
of geometry: "If R bisects a line on an unerring principle, R does so as a
result of having drawn from its extremities two intersecting acts". In its
more general terms, we need to explore the basis for "He who wills the end,
wills the indispensable means". Grice proposes seven steps in the
derivation. Step I: It is a fundamental law of psychology that, ceteris
paribus, for any creature R, for any P and Q, if R wills P & judges if P, P
as a result of Q, R wills Q. Step II: Place this law within the scope of a
"willing" operator: R wills for any P & Q, if R wills P & judges that if P,
P as a result of Q, R wills Q. Step III: "wills" turns to "should": if
rational, R will have to block unsatisfactory (literally) attitudes: R
should (qua rational) judge for any P & Q, if it's satisfactory to will
that P & it's satisfactory to judge that if P, P as a result of Q, it's
sastisfactory to will that q. Step IV: Expliciting mood specifications: R
should (qua rational) judge for any P & Q, if it's satisfactory that !P &
that if it .P, .P only as a result of Q, it's satisfactory that !Q. Step V:
via (p & q -> r) -> (p -> (q -> r)): R should (qua rational) judge for any
P & Q, if it's satisfactory that if .P, .P only because Q, it's
satisfactory that, if let it be that P, let it be that Q. Step VI: R should
(qua rational) judge for any P & Q, if P, P only because p _yields_ if let
it be that P, let it be that Q. Step VII: For any P & Q if P, P only
because Q _yields_ if let it be that P, let it be that Q.
4.2. 'Counsels of prudence'. Prudential acceptability can be dealt
with in a similar fashion, i.e. as analtyical consequences of indicative
statemetns to the effect that so-and-so is the means to such-and-such, with
the proviso that there is a special end: "let R be happy". Grice regards
that end as what Hume would call a "natural disposition", i.e. a matter of
_natural_ necessity. One complication is drawn from Austin: one thing is to
know what is to be done (the realm of "wisdom" qua _administrative_
rationality), another how to do what is to be done (the realm of
_phronesis_ as the executive rationality). A further complication is
brought by ends which are not only _finitely_ non specific (I may want a
large fierce dog to guard my house, and don't care which kind) but
antecedently _indeterminately_ non specific -- i.e. not yet deliberated: I
may want a large fierce dog to guard my house, but may have not yet decided
which kind. Is the boundary between prhonesis and wisdom clear-cut?
Consider the case of ever dilligent Secretary. If a boss empowers his
secreatary to make determinate the boss's indeterminately non-specific
desires not on behalf of his boss, but as _she_ thinks best, she just
ceases to be a secretary. She's best described as an administrative
assistant. A further problem is that ends relating to prudence may be
nonpropositional (just as an amimal desires food, and not _to eat an
apple_). Grice explores at this stage an extremem scheme of "Crazy-Bayesy"
deliberation which rests on a mechanical model of the vectoring of forces
(with desires -- or animal spirits -- as such drives). In the scenario, R
has two ends E1 & E2; each has a different degree of desirability: d1 and
d2. Now for any action A1 which will realise E1 or E2 -- to this or that
degreee -- there is a probability p1 that A1 will realise E1 & a
probability p2 that A1 will realise E2. The desirability of the action,
relative to E1 & E2 is a function of the desirabiity of E1 and E2 & the
probability that A1 will realise E1 and E2. Only if A1 scores higher (in
action-desirability relative to E1) than any alternative action, should R
should choose to do A1. Provisions should be made for, e.g. long-term
(standing) vs. situational ends. R may priorise family over business, and
his children over Aunt Jemima (who's been living with R all these years).
On a particular occasion, though, R may priorise Aunt Jemima (to get her
out of one of her tantrums) over taking R's son to see the hippopotami at
the zoo. While prudential rationality is perhaps _not_ just means-end
rationality, the determination over desires certainly does involve
means-end rationality. 5.1. Ends, systems of ends, and 'happiness'. Grice proposes to
explore the_inclusive_ end of "counsels of prudence", viz. let R be happy.
Grice tries: to be happy is to be well-off, and this is analytic. Qua
inclusive end, this not only connects with the phenomenon of diminishing
marginal utility, but of _vanishing_ marginal utility. It may be, as Grice
puts it, that that, on occasions, the bucket of happiness is filled, and no
further inpouring of a desirable has any effect on its contents. One
feature to be preserved in the analysis is that what gives rise to the end
of happiness is not, strictly, a _means_ to happiness. Being a inclusive
end -- and a _rationally_ inclusive end at that -- it means it's rather, a
a set, or better, harmonic system, of ends, an end for the sake of which
certain desirables are desirable. 5.2. We need to analyse the contributiveness relation, i.e. the predicate "... is contributive in way w to ...". Grice proposes: R wills to do P for the sake of Q just in case R wills to do P because R judges his
doing P as somehting which is contributive in way w to the realisation of
Q, and R _wills_ Q. This involves all sorts of sub-modalities. Take
'causal': The causal element may be an initiating factor ("I stop Jones
talking by knocking him cold") or a sustaining one ("I stop Jones's talking
by keeping my hand over his mouth"). Take 'specificatory': A host's seating
someone at this right hand side at dinner may be a specification of
treating him with respect. Take 'inclusive proper': R may wish to take a
certainly advertised cruise because it includes a visit to Naples. R may be
hospitable to someone today because R desires to be hospitable to that
someone throughhout his visit to R's town. Perhaps Aristotle's
considerations on the practical syllogism may help us here. Grice notes two
versions of such a syllogism. R wills to realise Q, he enquires what would
lead to Q & decides that doing P would. So, R comes to will, & do, P. Or: R
conceives his doing P, enquires what doing P would lead to, sees that it
would lead to Q, which he finds himself willing. So R comes to will, and
do, P. There are complications, with regard to inclusive ends with _special
circumstances_. For one, a man wrecked on a desert island where he has thus
to spend some time (fixed scenario, not chosen) decides to study the local
flora and fauna. A second complication is with reason versus
rationalisation: a man wants to move to Ipswhich, but he decides it's
because of the salubrious climate. Here the reason (though not,
consciously, _his_ reason) why he desires to move to a salubrious climate
is that such a desire will justify the desire to move to Ipswich. A third
type of case is illustrated by the tyrant who punishes a minister by
conferring to him the organisation of the disposal of the garbage of the
palace. Now, just to frustrate the tyrant's plan to humiliate the minister,
the ministe decides to take pride in the discharge of his duty. Here a
higher-order desire is involved: the minister wants to discharge his office
efficiently, "for its own sake" as it were, and he wants to want this
because he wants by so wanting to frustrate the tyrant. Grice thus notes
that "wanting p for the sake of q" covers indeed two different cases: R
wants P because R judges it to be a means for R, and (the minister case), R
wants P because he judges that _wanting_ P will help to realise Q. This is
important: with the inclusive end, "that R be happy", its components are
not, strictly, the realisation of a specific end but, rather, the desire
for that realisation. Wanting p for the sake of q, where q is happiness
does not strictly require that R judges P is a means for Q; only that R
judges that _wanting_ P will help realise Q; or, in other words, judging P
is one of a set of items which collectively exhibit the open feature
associated with happiness. 5.3. "R is to be happy" being a rationally inclusive end, it follows that happiness is a higher-order desire, i.e. a desire to have, and
satisfy, a set of desires which exemplifies some open feature. Willing is
crucial here: R's _decides_ that certain items are constitutive of his
happiness. One may still wish to list some features which are conducive to
stability and flexibility, which will characteristic of happiness qua
realisation of a system of ends. Such features are: Feasibility: the
adopted system of ends should be workable. Autonomy: or self-sufficiency.
It's better, for example, not to have to rely on government grants (p.132).
Compatibility or 'harmony' of component ends: i.e. the practical analogue
of consistency or coherence. Comprehensiveness: the practical analogue of
completeness. Supportiveness of component ends: one's devotion to one's
wife, for example, may inspire one to heightened endeavour in one's
business of selling encyclopaedias. Simplicity: related to feasibility.
Agreebleness, understood not as the mere satisfaction of a desire, but as
the idea of an activity being a source of delight, or an attraction
supporting an otherwise not very desirable principle. Grice is aware of
limitations. One may wish to add ideals such as maximal development of
one's natural talents, or the provision of scope for outstanding or
distinctive achievement. Perhaps a more serious problem is the closed
systematicity of the listed features. Except for "agreebleness" they seem
all internal, and thus prone to objections such as those directed to the
coherence theory of truth. It will thus be difficult, in the present
scheme, to decide between the real happy life, and, say, the life of a
hermit, a monomaniacal stamp collector, an unwavering egoist, and a
well-balanced, kindly country gentleman. A way out of this objection
concerns the importation of the notion of value. Rationality is after all,
man's metier of man, the capacity with which the Genitor has endowed us in
order to make us maximally viable in our living condition, i.e. in the
widest manageable range of different environments.

"Reply to Davidson on Intending, 1977" . Feeling eleutheric today? Eleutheric Implicatures -- Rather than 'constraints'!Aristotle on 'to per'hemin' Not really, but I found this in Chapman ("Grice", Palgrave, 2006) to be relevant. She is considering a tape (in the Grice collection) where Grice criticised Davidson's implicature-approach to 'intention' (!). The scenario includes things like the following. "The Dean intends to ruin the Department of Philosophy by appointing
Snodgrass Chairman." and such. Grice introduces a simile. An appointment book, where two inks are used: black ink for things which are not "to per'hemin" (up to us, cfr. 'par'hemas') as per Aristotle. We use red ink for things which are up to us.Chapman: "In his reply to Davidson, in his earlier unpublished paper, Grice
considers the role of intentions in actual everyday cognition. 'First we are
creatures who do not, like the brutes, merely respond to the present; we are
equipped to set up, in the present, responses in the more remote future to
situations in the less remote future.' Grice pictures our view of the future
as an appointment book in which various entries are inscribed. We are aware
of a distinction between entries we have no control over (inscribed in
black) and those that are there by our control, or depend on us for their
realisation (inscribed in red). These latter entries are intentions. If we can
forsee an unpleasant consequence of such entries, we will try to avert it if
we can by deleting a red entry. The Dean derives the conclusion from the
existing entries, 'Early December Dean gets fired'. He is understandably
unhappy about this, but is in a position to do something about it if he can
find that one of the entries from which he drew the conclusion is in red. He
is able to delete it, for instance, 'Dean appoints Snodgrass' inscribed in
red in mid-November." (p. 135). I will have to revise this, but when Grice analyses his squarrel "Toby" (like a squarrel, but more simple in habits) he does introduce "want" in terms of needing nuts, etc. The squarrel will eat nuts, and will want to eat nuts. (Will eat nuts if he can). The point relates to a sort of
Wittgensteinian point Grice is assuming throughout his "Method in philosophical
psychology": no psychological predicate without the behaviour the predicate
needs to explain." So, in this progression of stages for 'free' -- from a
first stage which is 'free'-free to a stage where inanimate objects may be
said to display 'free' patterns, to 'animal' (more strictly 'psychological' --
psuche for the Greeks included plants) stages (Grice's squarrel) to
strictly 'human' (and beyond 'personal') 'free', we should be guided by the
complexity of the behaviour in need of explanation, never mind description. And so on. ----- Incidentally, I have found this site, (http://yessenin-volpin.org/onthelogic.pdf) which must have been written originally in Russian. It notes that 'free' is ambiguous in English (but not in the Russian counterparts -- simpler said that done. They have two WORDS for it!). The author thinks that avoiding the vague and ambiguous 'free' for 'eleutheric' should do the trick -- if
you are magical enough! (I appreciate the attempt to disambiguate 'free' by sticking with the Greek, 'eleutheric'"). "By the term ‘freedom1’ (svoboda) [Since there are no English terms which convey the contrast of svobodny and vol’ny, subscripts will be used: ‘free1’ and ‘free2’] I mean the quality of acts of not being obstructed, i.e., impeded by obstacles; I call such act free1 (svobodny).
I call an activity free1 if in any of its situations every one of its acts
is free1, etc. I call an agent free1 if his activity is free1.
In this way the term ‘freedom1’ signifies a quality of both an action and
an agent. In this case, in particular, ‘obstacles’ are understood as eventual
obstacles. The organic possibility of an act or an activity is compatible with the
presence of an eventual obstacle which will not be realized. Therefore one may
have the possibility of performing unfree1 acts and carrying on an unfree1
activity. An activity encountering obstacles is not free1, but if these obstacles
are overcome, a wider activity, including overcoming these obstacles within
it, may be free1. A free1 act can be compelled. This often happens since a person compelling an act usually does not obstruct this act and may even eliminate obstacles. I call the quality of an act’s not being compelled its freedom (vol’nost) and the activity consisting only of free2 (vol’ny) acts free2,— in which case I ignore compulsions deriving from the requirements of the activity itself (i.e., describing its tactics). I call an agent free2 if his activity is free2 and if, in addition, he has not been compelled to choose it. I call this capacity in an agent his freedom2. A free2 act may be unfree2 , and the same is true of an activity or agent. Ordinary language uses these terms inconsistently, creating a powerful obstacle to their correct usage. "Therefore, a term is needed designating the combination of freedom1 and freedom2." "I will designate this combination by the Greek word eleutheria, and I will call acts, activities, and agents which are both free1 and free2 eleutheric." "Even this term is not felicitous in all respects. I call the absence of obstacles to the opposite act the independence of an act (understanding opposites as a pair of acts
[A, not-A]—not-not-A-acts can usually be identified with A; in the
contrary case the question becomes more complicated)." "I will call an act which possesses this property independent, an activity made up only of independent acts independent, and I will call the doer (agent) of an independent activity independent if the very choice of the activity is independent for him or if this activity is not selected by him and he did not have obstacles to prevent his selecting it." "Acts compelled by the rules of an activity (including rules of external activities) are not considered as obstacles here. Independence is certainly a narrower quality than freedom2 (i.e., an independent act must he free2, etc.)." "Sometimes it is convenient to consider ‘eleutheria’ as the combination of freedom1 and independence." "I prefer to call this eleutheria in the
narrower sense, keeping the previous meaning for eleutheria." "Morality can be established for the most varied purposes." "It may he as hostile to
the freedom1 and freedom2 of an activity as one could wish." And so on.

"The Conception of Value" (1983) . The Carus Lectures. In a footnote to his 1982 Paul Carus lectures Grice amusingly refers to a landmark in "pinko" Oxford: Strawson, "Freedom and resentment" and why it appealed to generations of Oxford philosophers.

"Davidson on Weakness of the will" (1985) -- and freedom.
"[Grice] had been a heavy smoker throughout his adult life [but his health was now failing and] in response he gave up cigarettes suddenly and completely in 1980. He insisted to his wife that his last, unfinished, packet of one hundred Player's Navy Cut stayed in the house, but he never touched it." (2006, p. 167) --- Moving. This relates to akrasia. In 1985, in collaboration with Judith Baker, H. P. Grice presented his "Davidson on "weakness of the will"" to Davidson's festschrift ("Essays on Davidson's Actions and Events", ed. Hintikka & Vermazen, 1985). Of course, Grice would have been familiar with the topic from his classic background.
Video meliora proboque sed deteriora sequor. --- Medea, in Ovid, Metamorphose, VII --Cfr. Urmson reference below. *). Grice, like Davidson, is concerned
with what Grice calls the 'paradox' of akrasia. With Davidson, Grice uses
'passion', and with Davidson, he refers to 'akrasia' as being a case where
'passion [is] the victor over duty'. Grice's example of the man who one
night stays in his warm bed rather than go wash his teeth (as he had forgotten
to do) (Grice/Baker, p.29). Some passionate acting, one would say -- but
this is the technical use of 'passion' that we should be concerned with.
Grice slightly modifies Davidson's symbolism and logical representation.
Notably, in the conditional judgements we are concerned with the protasis is,
perhaps, more naturally, written _before_ (as the name implies) the apodosis
(consequent), so we have the akratic as having in her mind _two_ things.
(i) Prima-Facie (All-Things-Considered, !p) (ii) !~p. At this point, Grice
refers here to his unpublication, 'Probability, Desirability, & Modal
Operators' -- delivered in Performadillo: A Conference on Performatives at
Armadillo, Texas in 1973, but the mimeo dates from 1971 -- cited by Levinson in
_Pragmatics_ (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). By 'modal' operator, Grice
is referring to the _mode_ as what grammarians call the 'mood', i.e. to
things, in the akratic, like "!". Grice notes that "Prima-Facie
(All-Things-Considered,!p is better than !~p)" can mean (at least) _two_ things:
(i) "!p" is _good_.(ii) !p is better than any alternative. At this
stage, Grice/Baker propose a 7-step derivation (p.34) that would cover not just
practical akrasia, but something that fascinated his intellect:
'theoretical akrasia' ("it is raining, but I don't want to believe it"). In the
Boulomaic Version Doxastic Version the seven steps are as follows:
********************* seven-step resolution of 'akrasia' ********
Stage 1. pf(A,!p) ---- pr(A,p). This reads: the fact that one finds "p" to be prima facie ("pf") acceptable, given antecedent condition "A", is correlative to the Agent A finding "p" _probable_ ("pr"), given antecedent condition "A".
Stage 2. pf(A&B,!p) -- pr(A&B,p). -- We merely enrich the 'antecedent conditions' to include "A and B". We are trying to capture the point in the phrase, "all things as they are considered" versus "all things as they SHOULD be considered". Again, there is an analogy between the "prima facie" acceptability of course of action "!p" given conditions A and B and the probabilistic ("pr.") acceptability of "p" given "A and B".Stage 3. pf(A&B&C&D,!p) pr(A&B&C&D,p). --- By mathematical induction, we keep adding antecedent conditions and note that the same analogy holds. In this case, we have advanced to a situation where the agent is considering to do "!p" (or to believe that "p") on the basis of the prima-facie practical acceptability, given the set of antecedent conditions "A and B and C and D" (or the probabilistic acceptability given similar antecedent conditions for the 'belief' case).Stage 4. pf(all things before me,!p) -- pr(all things before me,p). The agent has arrived at a universal quantifier, "all", which should be interpreted 'substitutionally': i.e. to stand for the set of antecedent
conditions _so far_: "A and B and C and ...". Again, there is an analogy between the practical ("the will") and the theoretical realm ("belief").Stage 5. pf(ATC,!p) pb(ATC,p). -- where "ATC" stands for "all things considered". In Davidson's
interpretation as _factive_ ("all things that are, as a matter of fact, considered") and, better, Grice's deontic interpretation ("all things that SHOULD be considered").Stage 6. !p --- |- p. --- Only on the basis of the agent having _deliberated_ and considered "all things as they should be considered" in the practical realm (and considered similarly in the theoretical realm) will he go on to _do_ the action "!p" (or believe that p). There is an analogy here.Stage 7 (Conclusion, from the six premises above).Therefore, R wills !p -- R judges p.
The agent's doing "!p" is indicative of his willing to do it. Analogically,
the utterance of "p" is indicative of the agent _believing_ or judging
that p. Grice goes on to see how this _allows_ for 'akrasia' as we usually
understand the term. As a student of Hardie (with Urmson, also at Corpus Christie)
he was aware of the refinements brought by Aristotle to Plato's theory.
Thus, in Plato, except in his spurious "Definitions", 'akrasia' is used
loosely (and always spelled "akrateia" (as in Rep. 461b: "meta deines akrateias
gegonos" '...was born in terrible licentiousness'). But in Aristotle
"akrasia" becomes the condition of the man who has right principles but whose appetite leads him to act contrarily to them. It's the "egkrates" who controls his appetite. Now, *both* the "egkrates" and the "akrates" are to be distinguished from the "agathos" and the "kakos" who act well or ill without internal conflict. Plato had not made this sharp distinction. Aristotle notes: "Ho akrates epithumon men
prattei, proairoumenos d'ou" -- 'the uncontrolled man acts in accordance with his appetite, not with his choice (E.N. 1111b 13-14). "Akrasia" proper is lack of self control with regard to the bodily pleasures of touch and taste. If self-control is lacking in other spheres the term must be qualified: "hetton aiskhra akrasia he tou thumou" -- 'an uncontrolled temper is less disgraceful' (Ar. E.N.1149a24)."If brushing one's teeth (or rather, not doing it) is not perhaps one's prime example of a passionate act, this quote by Chapman (2006, p. 167) should bring a moving human element to the proceedings:"[Grice] had been a heavy smoker throughout his adult life [but as his health started to failing], in response, he gave up cigarettes suddenly and completely in 1980. He insisted to his wife that his last, unfinished, packet of one hundred "Player's Navy Cut" stayed in the house, but he
never touched it." (2006, p. 167) ---- The problem of a 'mechanistic' interpretation of 'smoking' should perhaps be in order, as we consider the egkrates and his (good) company. Grice/Baker provide some detail about a 'deontic' interpretation of
Davidson's simple "All-Things-Considered" to read -- all which _SHOULD_ be considered -- and not merely as 'all things _de facto_ considered: "Surely an
account of akrasia should provide for the possibility of a measure of scrupulousness in the deliberation of the agent who subsequently acts incontently."
(p.35). Further, this fits with the standard definition of 'akratic'.
Grice/Baker define the akratic as the agent who "thinks that what she's doing is
something which she should _not_ be doing". Grice provides two views of
akrasia here: a naive one, and a more sophisticated one which he endorses.
According to the naive view of akrasia, the incontinent judges that he should
do p but does not p. In to the sophisticated view of akrasia, however,
akrasia becomes a "sin of thought" rather than a sin of agency. The thinker
thinks that he should judge that he should do p but does not actually judge that
he should do A. Grice and Baker write: "On the face of it, the naive view seems way superior." (p.41) "Why should our departure from the naive view be thougth to give a better account of akrasia?""First, it seems *easier* to attribute to people a failure to act as they fully believe they ought to act than to attribute to them a failure to believe what they fully believe they ought to believe.""Second, what
is there to prevent a person from judging that he should do p, when he
judges that he should judge that he should do p, except his disinclination to
do p.""Third, would it not be more natural to suppose that this disinclination prevents his judgement that he should do p from being followed by his
doing p than to suppose that it prevents his judgement that he should judge
that he should do p from being followed by his judgement that he should do p?"
At this point, one may heartily agree with the famous quote, I fear weakness of the will is too much like hard work.Grice/Baker seem to be certain that, here, it's all about 'pleasure'."The incontinent person forms an intention to do ~p to which she is promted by its prospective pleasantness. In spite of the fact, of which she is aware, that the conditions fo far taken into acccount (which include the prospective pleasantness of ~p) so far as they go favour p. It appears to the incontinent person that the claim of prospective pleasantness of ~p is or is being outweighed, but, nevertheless, she judges that the pleasant thing is the best thing to do and so acts on the judgement". (p.45). Back to 'theoretical akrasia', and
All-Things-Considered in _probablistic_ reasoning -- fallibilist reasoning -- Grice/Baker write: "If I am investigating probabilistically the possibility that it is now raining in Timbuctoo, the relevant ideal totality of evidence should _NOT_ include the fact that it is raining in Timbuctoo." (p.36). Grice refers at this point L. Carroll's 'Achilles & the Tortoise'. "The incontinent agent is _not_ like the Tortoise, who would accept modus ponens and p, and p -> q, but yet, do not infer "q". Grice approaches akrasia in _Aspects of Reason_, too. "I am going to be almost exclusively concerned with alethic and practical arguments, the proximate conclusions of which will be, respectively, of the forms (below)."Acc (|- p)
Acc (!p).E.g. "Acceptable (it is the case that it snows)""Acceptable (let it be that I go home)". We might regard it as a _sentential_ modifier: to utter
"Acceptable (let it be that I go home" will be to utter "Acceptably, let it be that I go home". Grice writes: "To adopt this view would seem to commit to the impossibility of incontinence; for since 'accept that let it be that I go home' is to be my rewrite for 'V-accept (will) that I go home', anyone x who concluded, by
practical argument, that 'Acceptable let it be that x go home' would *ipso facto*
will to go home." It is here that Grice traces the parallel with 'doxastic
akrasia'. "Any one who concluded, by alethic argument, 'acceptable it is
the case that it snows', would ipso facto judge that it snows. So, an
alternative reading seems preferable." And the debate may ensue. Some further
refs. to 'akrasia' are listed below, plus a few online links. As per Urmson, The Greek Philosophical Vocabulary: "AKRASIA: in Aristotle and later writers, lack of self-control, the condition of being akrates. The verb is akrateuesthai-to lack, or exhibit the lack of self control. Sometimes translated 'incontinence.' In Plato, except in spurious Definitions, used more loosely and always written akrateia, as in Rep. 461b; meta deines akrateias gegonos-was born in terrible licentiousness.
In Aristotle akrasia is the condition of the man who has right principles but whose appetite leads him to act contrarily to them, whereas the egrates controls his appetite. Both the "egkrates" and the "akrates" are to be distinguished from the agathos and the kakos who act well or ill without internal conflict, though Plato does not make this sharp distinction.Ho akrates epithumon men prattei, proairoumenos d'ou the uncontrolled man acts in accordance with his appetite, not with his choice (Ar. E.N. 1111b 13-14). AKRASIA proper is lack of self control with
regard to the bodily pleasures of touch and taste; if self-control is
lacking in other spheres the term must be qualified: hetton aiskhra akrasia he tou thumou -an uncontrolled temper is less disgraceful Ar. E.N.1149a24)." A few "Gricean" references on 'akrasia' should include: ALPHABETICALLY:
Akrill JL. "Aristotle", cited by Grice in Aspects of Reason", "Complete Works"
(Princeton University Press, ed J Barnes), "Nichomachean Ethics", revised by J.O.
Urmson. Classics of Western Philosophy ed S Cahn. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Davidson D. "How is weakness of the will possible?", in J Feinberg "Moral
concepts", repr. in "Essays on Actions and Events" (Clarendon), "Reply to Grice
and Baker on weakness of the will", in Hintikka/Vermazen.
Grandy, R. "Schiffer's desires" (Southern Journal of Philosophy", 17).
Grice, G.R. "Are there reasons for acting?", in P French, Essays in ethical theory (1980), Grice, H. P. "Intention & uncertainty" (1973) Proceedings of the British
Academy; ---- (with J. Baker) Davidson on 'The weakness of the will'", (1985), in
Hintikka & Vermazen, "Aspects of reason" (2001) (Clarendon),
Hardie WFR, "Aristotle's ethical theory", Joachim H H, "Akrasia", Kenny, AJP. "The
practical syllogism and incontinence" in "The anatomy of the soul: historical
essays in the philosophy of the mind" (Blackwell), Peacocke CAB. "Intention
and akrasia", in Hintikka and Vermazen. Pears DF, "Motivated irrationality"
(Oxford). PLATO, "Dialogues", esp. "Protagoras" and "Meno". URMSON JO.
"Aristotle's Ethics" (Blackwell), WIGGINS on akrasia.

"Actions and events" (1986). Grice propounds to tread some familiar ground to him, but which he thought was underestimated by analytic philosphers of action. Some quotes from "Actions and Events". Doyle concentrates on the final episodes of that essay where Grice provides the four-stages for 'free', and further reflections which were shared with this forum and elsewhere. Here are some quotes from the parts _leading_ to that conclusion, as I have just re-read the thing. The first sort of central quote seems to begin on p. 11, where he mentions Prichard. I do not have Davidson's essay to hand, but apparently he made a big case _against_ the notion (or locution), 'act of will'. So Grice may have an axe to grind (as they say?) since it is his contention, with Prichard, that such acts _are_. So this is Grice: "Frustrated in these directions [as to what constitutes 'to act' -- Latin agere] we might think of turning to a longstanding tradition in Ethics from the Greeks onwards, of connecting the concept of action [praxis -- does Democritus or Epicurus use this root? -- cfr. pragma] with that of the Will; a tradition which reads its peak in Prichard, who not merely believed that action is distinguished by a special connection with the will, but maintained that acting is to be _identified_ [italics Grice's] with willing."The trouble for Davidson: Grice goes on: "It is clear from Davidson's comments on Chisholm, that, at least when his article was written, he would have none of such ideas, perhaps because the suggestions that actions are distinguished by a connection with the will may be expected to lead at once to the idea that particular actions are distinguished by their connetion with acts of will; and the position that there are such things as acts of will is not merely false but disreputable." A second good quote comes on p. 24. It refers to the Aristotelian 'aitia' --. Since, as in the quote from Hardie by Doyle from Hardie "My own free will", we want 'free will' to stand against causation, or something like that. We want talk of causation to be relevant when it comes to the discourse on free will. This is Grice: "Events do not seem to me to be the _prime_ bearers of causal properties; that I think belongs to enduring, non-episodic things such as substances [but cfr. quantum mechanics?] To assign a cause is primarily to hold something accountable or responsible for something, and the primary account-holders are substances, not events, which are (rather) relevant items which appear in the accounts. I suspect that a great deal of the current myopia about causes has arisen from a very un-Aristotelian inattention to the place of Substance in the Conception of Cause" --- which perhaps with some further very odd un-Kantian inattentions should give 'un-Kantotelian in-attentions' the prize for the best of Griceian litotes. A third quote comes on p. 25, and is again then Grice trying to systematise the territory with some Latinate variants. We have the 'aitia', and the 'agere' (Latinate), from which we extract the 'agendum'. "When Davidson addresses the question of the nature of agency, he suggests that two ingredients are discernible; the first of these is the notion of _activity_; in action the agent is active, what comes about is something which is made by him to come about, of which he is the cause; the second ingredient is that of purpose [telos] or design or intention; what comes about comes about as he meant or intended it to come about. This seems to me to be substantially correct, though I am inclined to think that there is a somewhat more illuminating way of presenting it ... In the meantime, what these ingredients seem to me to indicate is an intimate connection between agency and the will." "I am, and what I do is, in paradigmatic cases, subject to my will. I impose my will on myself, and my actons are actings only insofar as they are the product of this imposition. This imposition may take variosu forms, and may relate to various aspects of or elements in the deliberation process. In many cases explicit exercise of the will is confined to the finding of
means to the fulfillment of some already selected end. Such cases are
relatively undramatic and arre also well-handled in the early chapters of Eth. Nic.
III. But sometimes what goes on is more dramatic, as when one needs to
SELECT AN END [emphasis mine. JLS] from one's established stock of ends, or
when the stock of ends itself has to be in some way altered, or (perhaps most
dramatically) when an agent is faced with the possibility of backsliding
and following the lure of inclination rather than the voice of reason or
principle." Here Grice starts a series of reflections which provide quotes for "Dialogues with myself". Grice writes: "Particularly in such ases as the last, what takes place in action (paradigmatically) is essentially part of a transaction between a person and a person." He goes on to consider Plato's tripartite division of the soul, and Aristotle. "As Aristotle distinguished" between this part of the soul, from this other 'executive' part, "one which is rational as having the capacity to give reasons and DETERMINE rational behaviour." But we do not want a divided self. We "counsel ourselves" and we "inpute responsibility to ourselves ... sometimes laudatorily, sometimes chidingly." "As when my Oxford tutor, called on the telephone by someone who was plainly a woman, said aloud, "Now keep your head, Meiggs"". These are self-addressed commands, and I wrote marginally: "Hobson's
choice?". Grice writes: "I lay down what is required of me, by requring it of myself; I am, so to speak, issuing edits to someone who in standard circumstances has no choice BUT TO OBEY" [emphasis mine]. In the earlier "Logic and Conversation" (Oxford 1966) lectures he indeed had managed to speak of benevolence and self-love, and those items reappear here, since alla Buber, he sees all this self-talk (which is by definition free of implicature or pleonasm!) as being modeled upon our ability with regard to "a background of situations in which I am in a position to direct OTHERS". (emphasis mine). "So self-love and self-concern would be indispensable foundations for self-directions; only the assumption of these elements will enable me to justify to myself the refusal to allow myself indulgences which, in my view, would be bad for me." ---- which is as genial as Grice can get -- and the best rewriting of Kantotle ever! Grice then goes on to quote Kant, direcetly using Abbott's tr. about the good will as a gem that shines. Grice seems to have loved that quote (Grunlegung, p. 11) and has a typical note to the effect that "no doubt mutatis mtandis something comparable could be said about the bad will" -- which may do with free-will concerns, since, after all, 'determinism' seems to be a back-formation from 'pre-determinism', which is the theologian's answer to the 'evil' introduced by acceptance of liberum arbitrium, etc. A good quote on 'agendum' comes on p. 30: "It will be agenda ["things to do"] which, in deliberation, we consider adopitng, and one or more which, when a decision [free choice] comes, we actually do adopt." On the next page p. 31 he provides an account for non-standard agenda, as it were: "Items which are action-surrogates no doubt owe their status to the fact that , or presumed fact, that should an agent encounter difficulties or complications a further reflection machinery [which presupposes free will] may e usually counted on to be called into operation; indeed [in a nod to Strawson] part of treating people as responsible persons consists in presuming this to be the case; and unless an agent is thought to be under special stress, or to be temporarily or permanently mentally infirm, a failure of this recall to occur tends to be treated as a case of unconscious bad
motivation." ---- by Socrates and Luther? On the same p. 31 he explores 'cause-to' vis a vis 'aitia', which as we see then becomes essential in discussion of 'free will', rather than a counterpart to it. "We need," says Grice, "to exercise care in the interpretation of the word 'cause'. We need to get away from the kind of employment of the word 'cause' which has become, these days, virtually _de rigueur_ in philosophy (viz., one exemplifying an event-relating, mechanistic, Hume-like conception) into a direction which might well have been congenial to Aristotle." "When someone has a preferential concern for some end [TELOS -- cfr. Aristotle on 'final cause'] which would be served by a given agendum, he has cause to perform, or realise, that agendum, and if the agendum is performed by him because he has [a] cause to perform it, then the action is something of which _he is the cause_, and is explained (though *non-predictively eplained*) by the fact that he had a cause to perform it." ---- my marginal note reads: Cfr. Pears -- on predictability of one's decisions. A very good quote, I find: "Hume-type causation is factive, having [a] cause to is non-factive, and being the cause of one's own action is factive, but factive in a special way which is *divorced from full predictability*" (emphasis mine). There are two references to 'automaton' on p. 32 and 33 which I should recheck with some etymological queries I may have. But Grice refers on p. 32 to"'automatic' bodily realisations' --- this may have to do with the problem (or charm?) of the two-stage model of free will with which Doyle initiated its reintroduction in Chora.Grice speaks of flexible and inflexible factivity."It is likely, I think that the items which we are here specially
concerned with, like actions and causes (to), though not inflexibly factive are
flexibly factive; actions with individual non-realisations are possible only
against a background of general realisation. If this were not so, the
'automatic' bodily realisations which typically supervene upon adopted agenda
might NOT BE FORTHCOMING, to the ruin of the concept of action."
---- as when I try to scratch my head (or your back) and circumstances
prevail me (from thus doing). The second instantiation concerns 'automatically' qua adverb, on p. 33,"[T]he sequene of movements involved in the realisations of vulgarly specified actions tend, on the vast majority of occasions ... to appear
'automatically' ... without attention to the geometric pattern of the movements
being made." ----- I think this should connect with Ancient controversy and general agreement that free will need not be involved in each 'act' of the 'will'.
On p. 33, and I may need an etymological search on this, Grice proposes a
fascinating analogy or figure: that of 'monitoring'. His scenario is a
gymnastic instructor who tells the squad, "Raise your right arm!" and then, oddily, asks them, How many of you actually raised your right arm, and for how many of you was it simply the case that your arm went up? this strikes us as _unGriceian: "The oddity of this question indicates that raising the right arm involves no distinguishing observable or instrospetible element ... What, then, is speical about raising one's arm or about making any bodily movement? The answer is, I think, that the movement is caused by the agent in the sense that its occurrence is MONITORED by him; he is aware of what takes place and should something go wrong or should some difficulty arise, he is ready to intervene in order to correct the situation." In one of his earlier commentary to my posts -- one in which I compared
Grice's account of 'free will' (and neurophysiological jargon attending it)
with his account of the 'causal theory of perception', Doyle wrote, "You
lose me there", or words to that effect, but I think this connects with
WoW:240. In a way, this complication that Grice saw regarding 'perceive' Grice
may be overlooking regarding 'doing'. Back in 1961 he wrote (WoW:240):
"I suggest that the best procedure for the Causal Theorist is to indicate the mode of causal connection by examples; t say that, for an object to be perceived by X, it is sufficient that it should be causally involved in the generation
of some sense-impression of X in the kind of way in which, for example, when I look at my hand in a good light, my hand is causally responsible for it looking to me as if there were a hand before me, or in which ... (and so on), _whatever that kind of way may be_; and to be enlightened one that question, one must have recourse to the specialist." ---- or physical therapist, as it were, if the gymnastic instructor has uttered his instruction and, one's monitoring notwithstanding, the wretched right arm stays low. "should something go wrong or should some difficulty arise" -- indeed. But ceteris paribus we trust it won't -- and causation and free will remain 'friends'. It is only THEN, on that second bit of p. 33 that Grice goes on to provide the four-stages which involve (as per stage 2 that of a 'free moving'
body, as per stage 3 the idea of 'free' in biology, and as per stage 4 the, as
it were, full Kantian-Hegelian freedom of spirit) and the concluding
remarks on that noumenal-phenomenal monumental conflict with which Grice found
himself coming, in a way, to good terms. He considers various topics and concludes that essay with a four-stage development of the idea of "free" Stage I -- the realm of Democritus, really -- and before him Leucippus. These authors did wrest to give man some freedom, but ironically they were the main proponents, even unwillingly, of Determinism. This first stage then, for Grice, involves whatever the kosmos or universe would look like if it were "free"-free. Stage II. This is an interesting stage in that it involves "cosmological" versus psychological "free". Here Grice refers to the "freely moving body". Stage III. This is the stage that Kant had referred to as "arbitrium brutum". Grice is more serious than Kant here, since with Aristotle, he considers that "soul" can only be understood in a "series". So this is the level where "free" applies to things which do NOT count as the "rational" soul.
Stage IV. This is human freedom per se. It corresponds to Kant´s "liberum arbitrium" proper, and Aristotle´s idea that things are up to us. We have seen in "Causal theory of perception" and "Intention and Uncertainty" that causality plays a crucial role in much of Grice's thinking (cfr. his analysis of 'know' in WoW:iii). For Grice it seems essential that it's the BELIEVING that causes the willing, and so on. Grice concludes his "Actions and Events" then with a note on 'freedom'. He writes: "Finally, it is essential [that I should give] proper attention to the place occupied by ... freedom in any satisfactory account of action." (p. 33). Features such as "agency", as it involves "activity and purpose (or intention) are ... "best viewed as elements in a step-by-step development" of freedom. Grice distinguishes then four stages: A first stage, of "transeunt" causation: in inanimate objects. Hume's realm -- the atomists's realm. This is "external or 'transeunt' casuation," "when an object is affected by processes in other objects." A second stage of 'internal' or "immanent" causation: where a process in an object is "the outcome of previous stages in that process, as in a 'freely moving' body." A third stage: where "Internal causation of living beings" (Huggins will like that -- also Lucy): "in which changes are generated in a creature by internal features of the creature which are NOT earlier stages of the same change ... but independent
items, the function (or finality) of which is ... to provide for THE GOOD of the creature in question." Finally, a fourth stage: "a culminating stage at which the conception of a certain mode by a human .... of something as being for that creature's good is SUFFICIENT to *initiate* the doing of that thing." Grice expands on this interesting last stage: "At this stage, it is ... the case that the creature is LIBERATED ... from all factive causes." Grice's shopping list: "Attention to ... freedom calls for formidably difficult ... undertakings" including the search for a justification for the adoption (or abandonment) of an (ultimate) end. The point is to secure that freedom does not 'dissolve into compulsion or chance' (p. 34). Grice proposes four items for the shopping list. The motivation: POINT I: "full action calls for 'strong' freedom". POINT II: The desire-belief characterisation of action has to accomodate for the fact that we need freedom which is strong. "Strong freedom ensures that some actions are represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are also FREELY ADOPTED or pursued by me." Speranza's marginal note: "Not in "Raise your arm!"" POINT III: "Any attempt to remedy this situation by resorting to the introduction of (a) CHANCE or (b) causal INDETERMINATION ---- will only infuriate the scientist" ---- not the ones D. Frederick knows who are all Heisenbergians -- "without aiding the moral philosopher" -- or even the immoral one, as I prefer! POINT IV: "The precise nature of 'strong' freedom ..." turns out to consist, we hope, in 'the idea of action as the outcome of a certain kind of 'strong' valuation'. This strong valuation "would include the rational selection [as per rational decision theory --] of ultimate ENDS." What Grice elsewhere calls outweighed or extrinsically weighed rationality. It's the end that is rational, not the means towards the end. There is a different line, which Grice also pursues: "Action (full human action) calls for the presence ... of reasons ... which require that the actions for which they account shoud be the outcome of strong rational valuation." Both lines, Grice notes, "suggest that action requires both strong freedom and strong valuation." How to adapt the desire-belief psychology to reach these goals: "In the case of ultimate ends," Grice writes (p. 35), "justification should be thought of as lying (directly, at least) in some outcome not of their FULFILMENT but rather of their PRESENCE-AS-ENDS." A second point involves: "My having such and such an end, E1, or such and such a combination of ends, would be justified by showing that my having thi send, ... will exhibit some desirable feature (... that the combo will be harmonious -- [for how can one combine one's desire to smoke with one's desire to lead a healthy life?]".
A third point: "the desire-belief psychology" is "back in business at a higher level". "The suggestions would involve an appeal, in the justification of ends, to HIGHER-ORDER ends which would be realised by having first-order ends, or lower-order ends of a certain sort. Such valuation of lower-order ends lie within reach of the desire-belief pscyhology." A caveat: "The higher-order ends involved in the defense would themselves stand in need of justification, and the regress ... might well turn out to be vicious". Talk of moral philosophers... Grice concludes: "So, attention to the idea of freedom" -- and Doyle's free-will scandal, "may lead us to the need to resolve OR DISSOLVE the most important unsolved problem of philosophy". "Namely: how we can be at the same time members" as Kant and Grouch Marx wanted us, "both of the phenomenal and the noumenal world". "Or, "to put the issue less cryptically, to settle the internal conflict between one part of our rational nature -- the SCIENTIFIC part which [pace Danny Frederick] calls or seems to call for the universal reign of deterministic law [cfr. D. Frederick's research with N. Cartwright] and the OTHER part which insists that not merely MORAL RESPONSIBILITY [Doyle's topic] but EVERY variety of rational belief demands exemption from just such a reign." On a funnier level, Albritton concluded his talk on free-will for the A. P. A. (presidential). "I will have to stop now. Thank you."

"Reply to Richards", 1986 . References to positive freedom in Kant´s usage of the term. Also formalisation of types of priority, prior-m, prior-m as it may apply to moral and legal aspects of free.

"Retrospective Epilogue" (1987).to "Studies in the Way of Words". Grice on paradigm-case arguments The sad thing is that 'rise' fares no much better. Russell criticised this by saying that English is wedded to a stone-age metaphysics. Grice corrected him. "Stone age physics, strictly". It may be some animism in talk of bridegrooms marrying for 'free' (will). Surely: while there may be no social pressures, there must be some sort of pressure. I mean, is this what Flew is suggesting (or implicating). He
seems to be objecting to _social_ pressures. But what about pressures that come
from the man needing to marry the girl for pressures other than social?
What if he is following some atavic 'animal' instinct (to 'own' the girl, as
it were). I'm pleased that B. Doyle found of interest Flew's brilliant reference to Hume in "Philosophy and Language". Grice discussed 'cause' extensively in
WoW, reprinting earlier essays. It may be that 'cause' is often misused, too -- as "on his own free will". After all, as Hume noted, 'to cause' may well derive its meaning from 'to will' but it would be otiose, says Grice, to think that Charles I's decapitation willed his own death. (* Grice: "Alternatively, the paradox-propounder might agree that an ordinary expression, of the kind which he is assailing (e.g. "Decapitation was the cause of Charles I's death" [or "He married the girl he loved of his own free will"] would be used to describe such a situation as that actually obtaining at Charles I's death (i.e. it would be used to describe an ACTUAL situation and not merely an _impossible_ situation); but then he might add that the user of such an expression ['cause', 'free will'] would not MERELY
be describing the situation but also committing himself to an ABSURD GLOSS
on the situation (e.g. that Charles's decapitation willed his death [since
'to cause' is to 'will' in animistic parlance]..." I think one example that Watkins challenged Flew was the point about 'witches' and 'miracles'. I am not too familiar with URMSON's own use (allegedly the first, simpliciter) of the argument. I know Grice/Stawson saw their use in "A defense of a dogma" as a
paradigm-case argument for 'analytic' (contra Quine) and that Grice saw Paul, "Is
there a problem about sense data" as PCA. Also Urmson. Grice: "In the Athenian dialectic, moreover, though both interpretations" ---- e.g. "That's up to me!" "are needed, the dominant one seems to be that in which what is being talked about is common opinions" ------- e..g that Democritean determinism is false, since some actions are 'up to us' "eph'hemin", par'hemas") Grice goes on: "not commonly sed locutions or modes of speech. In the OxonianDialectic, on the other hand" --- usually the right, of course. "precisely the reverse situation seems to obtain. Though some philosophers, most notably G. E. Moore, have maintained that certain commonly held beliefs"---- such as Galen Strawson's faith in the inexistence of free will -- just joking!"cannot but be correnct and though versions of such a thesis are discernible in certain Oxonian quarters, for example in Urmson's
treatment of Paradigm Case Arguments, no general characterisation
of the Method of "Linguistic Botanizing" carries with it any claim
about the truth-value of any of the specimens which might be
subjected to Linguistic Botanizing". Grice is suggesting that even if wrong, the belief, "He married the girl he loved on his own free will" should prove interesting enough. While Grice, knowing Russell (he said he didn't have a 'will' or could recongise it in him), would agree that the study of English would perhaps not be "a proper object for first-order devotion", "this fact would NOT prevent
something derivable or extractable from stone-age physics, perhaps some
very general characterisation of the nature of reality, from being a proper
target for serious research; for this extractable characterisation might the
the SAME as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies,
twentieth century physics." Cfr. Eddington on the 'free' electron, discussed by B. Doyle. Apply that alla paradigm-case argument with other uses of 'free'. How do you teach, "The electron is free"? --- Grice goes on: "Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ordinary language [as when we say, "He married the girl he loved on his own free will"] (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any belief about how the world goes wich such language reflects; it might, for example, be
derived somehow from the categorial structure of the language." Indeed, if this link to this Russian author who thinks 'eleutheric' should be preferred to 'free' in that 'free' fails to recognise a distinction made fairly evident (not to me) in the grammar of Russian. Grice goes on:"Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly _scientific_ enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in PHYSICAL science. A rationally organised and systematic study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise; so might some highly general theory informal semantics." (Reply to Richards, 1986, p. 53). Grice reminisced on this as he referred to the Austinian code of sacrosanctity of English, and stuff.

"Notes with Judy" (1985). (nondated) Chapman: Grice's notes from the
early 1980s show him applying *the familiar techniques of 'linguistic
botanising'* to the concept of freedom. He jotted down phrases such as "alcohol-free", "free for lunch", "free-wheeling" and lists many possible definitions, including "liberal", "acting without restriction" and "frank in conversation".

"Seminar on freedom". .

"Freedom and morality in Kant´s ´Foundations´" .

Conclusion. It is good to review Grice´s contributions to the freedom debate. Grice was as good a representative as you can get of a certain type of philosophising that characterised most of the twentieth-century. As neo-Griceians and post-Griceians keep debating about the nature of things, we feel comfortable enough in having provided this summary of Grice`s main mentor in the area -- the great Kantotle and why he should be still inspiring us. "If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead," Grice comments, and don´t we agree!

References

DOYLE, R. O. The free will scandal. I-Phi.

GRICE H. P. 1941. Personal Identity. Mind, repr. in Perry, Personal identity, 1975. Berkeley: University of California Press.
---. 1948. Meaning. repr. in Grice 1989.
---. 1949. Disposition and intention. The Grice Papers.
---. 1953. G. E. Moore's and Philosopher's Paradoxes. Repr. in Grice 1989.
---. 1961. The Causal theory of perception, repr. in Warnock, Oxford readings in philsophy, repr. in an abridged format (sans section II) in WoW.
---. 1963. Lectures on trying. Brandeis University
---. 1966. Logic and Conversation. The Oxford lectures.
---. 1966b. Descartes on clear and distinct perception, repr. in Grice 1989.
---. 1967. Logic and Conversation. The William James lectures, repr. in a revised form in Grice 1989.
---. 1971. Intention and uncertainty. Proceedings of the British Academy
---. 1971-1973. Probability, desirability, and mood operators.
---. 1975. Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre. Proceedings American Philosophical Association, repr. in Grice 1991.
---. 1977. The Kant Lectures on Aspects of reason. Published as Grice 2001.
---. 1977b. Davidson on intending.
---. 1979. Freedom and morality in Kant's Foundations. In the Grice Papers.
---. 1980. Seminar on Freedom. Notes in the Grice Papers.
---. 1985. Notes with Judy on Freedom.
---. 1986. Actions and Events. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.
---. 1986. Reply to Richards, in Grandy/Warner, Philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. Oxford: Clarendon.
---. 1987. Retrospective epilogue to Grice 1989.
---. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press.
---. 1991. The conception of value. Oxford: Clarendon
---. 2001. Aspects of reason. Oxford: Clarendon
---. With J. Baker. Davidson on weakness of the will. In Vermazen/Hintikka, 1985. Essays on Davidson's Actions and Events.
SPERANZA J. L. "Join the Grice Club!".