The Phases of Grice´s Philosophy

by JLS
for the GC

IF ONE EXAMINES the broadth of Grice´s production, as deposited in the Grice Collection -- I call it collection, rather than papers, as it includes, tapes, etc. -- one wonders. Rather, one is wondered.

He started early enough, in his 20s, with an essay, on "Privation and negation", about Bradley, and the idea, by Plato in "The Sophist" that, "x is not F" is a vacuous thing to say. Negation is privation.

Already in 1941 he had his "Personal identity" published for "Mind", where he proposes that "I was watering the plants" can be reduced to a statement about the _mental_, rather than corporal, states of the utterer. He relies heavily on Broad, thinks of his thing as a logical construction, but manages to quote from some Oxonian authors such as Ian Gallie.

In post-war Oxford, he would elaborate on "Meaning" and "Disposition and intention".

The 1950s saw him lecturing on "Postwar Oxford philosophy", which is NOT what Long was lecturing about when lecturing about Stoic Philosophy. Grice was lecturing on what HE was doing. In a seminar with Strawon on "In defense of a dogma" he managed to prove Quine wrong.

The 1960s saw him in a more organised frame of mind. His "Causal theory of perception" systematised his approach to the rational nature of discourse (that Strawson was referring to, as he credited Grice, in the early "Introduction to logical theory"). Along with the TWO sets of "Logic and conversation" (Oxford, 1966; Harvard, 1967) he managed to contribute to a volume on "Analytic Philosophy", by Butler, and to a festschrift for Quine (on "Vacuous Names"), plus lecturing on Descartes, for good measure.

Already settled in the USA, the 1970s saw him delivering the Annual Philosophical lecture to the British Academy, on "Intention and uncertainty" and the presidential address to the American Philosophical Association on "Method in philosophical psychology". He had time to give the Kant lectures for 1977 at Stanford, and the Locke lectures for 1979 at Oxford.

Linguists were getting busy swallowing his views, which were being reprinted in Cole/Morgan, and Cole.

During his last decade, he could deliver the Carus lectures for 1983, and reply to the editors of his festschrift, "Life and opinions of Paul Grice", and submit an essay for the "Pacific Philosophical Quarterly" on "Actions and events". He could not see his first book out of the press, though, since he died in 1988, and Studies in the way of words came out in 1989.

The posthumous Grice was pretty prolific. What, with Conception of Value, out in 1991, and Aspects of reason in 2001. But it is by browsing the Grice Collection that one sees what is left out in most accounts of his philosophy. Or not!

There was a unity that displayed a continuity. His main interlocutor was himself (or his self, as he preferred), and he kept good track of all his ideas, not only on this, but also, on the other hand, on that.

And so on.