Griceana

Speranza

[This commentary was meant for the thread recently contributed to by R. B. J.]

And while we're at it, further commentary. It's a lovely obituary.

Indeed, by:

Neale, S., B. Stroud, B. Vermazen, and B. A. O. Williams.

[For citation records -- one day we'll consider the implicatures -- pretty bad ones -- noted by R. M. Harnich, "Russell wrote Principia" - when "Russell and Whitehead wrote Principia". "It is not true that Russell wrote Principia". "It is not appropriate to say that Russell wrote Principia". "It is conversationally misleading to utter, 'Russell wrote Principia'". Further more delicate implicatures:

"Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia."
"Russell and Whitehead wrote Principia".

Note that the original citation, as per cover of the book is:

"Whitehead and Russell -- rather than Russell and Whitehead -- wrote Principia", and so on!

-------------- NOW FOR THE THING!

"H[erbert] Paul Grice was born March [26] 1913 in [Harborne, Staffordshire] England, earned two firsts at Corpus Christi (1935 and 1936) and, after a year as Assistant Master at Rossall School [teaching, of all things, Greek] in Lancashire, began a period as Lecturer, Tutor, Fellow, and finally University Lecturer at St John's, Oxford [the richest college in Oxford, if you need to know]. His Oxford career, during which his reputation as a philosopher's philosopher spread through the English speaking portion of the world

[and part of France! Soon enough Recanati, who, in spite of his name, is French, founded GRICE, the Group par la Recherche de la Comprehension Elementaire -- at the same time Georg Meggle and Andreas Kemmerling were translating Grice's "mean" as "meinen" and failing, vide "German Grice"]

, was interrupted

[Churchill will NOT agree]

by nearly five years' service in the Royal Navy, at first in the Atlantic theatre and later in Admiralty intelligence [which was closer to Covent Garden, which helped]. After the war [called 'phoney', stupidly, by some! I know people for whom "the war" is all-ways the Great War -- in which Herbert Grice SENIOR was active, even], he was a visiting lectureer at Harvard, Brandeis, Stanford, and Cornell, and was elected to the British Academy in 1966. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1967, where he taught until 1986, well past his 1979 retirement, serving briefly as department chairman in 1971."

Oddly, he would recollect implicatures of this in "Studies"; one of his examples of silly implicature there is:

"The chair is wrong, usually." (or something). --- "Retrospective Epilogue".

"He was one of very few philosophers invited to give both the William James Lectures at Harvard (1967, on Logic and Conversation), and the John Locke Lectures at Oxford (on Aspects of Reason and Reasoning)."

At separate times. His claim to fame, for Americans, came indeed with the William James. These were bi-annual lectures (in philosophy and psychology), delivered at the Eliot Hall, in what many regard as the best uni in the USA: Harvard. The chair then was Albritton which perhaps helped. Grice cites Albritton in a footnote to "Studies" -- re a pre-William James lecture talk on "Some remarks about the senses". Grice shared with Albritton a love for ordinary English:

"It looks to me as if he is tough."

"He is tough-looking."

Albritton would qualify: "He _seems_ tough-looking, but he ain't". Grice granted that Albritton was right.

"Although health problems greatly diminished his physical vigour in later years, he remained philosophically very active, leading discussion groups in his hime [up in the Berkeley Hills, quite a difference with his otherwise lovely thing off Banbury road, not far from his St. John's college, back in Oxford. Grice had become fascinated with this Berkeley mansion when he saw it. It had (and has) a majestic view overlooking the Bay. In comparison, the flat that the college gave him back in Oxford, while enjoying a lovely garden well tended by Mrs. Grice -- 'lacked a view'], giving papers at professional meetings, and competing the manuscript for his first book, _Studies in the Way of Words (Harvad University Press), very near his death."

This triggers the wrong implicatures:

"Grice wrote "Studies in the way of words" in 1989", some may say (wrongly).

But Grice was dead by Aug. 1988.

So,

Grice, "Studies in the way of words", 1989.

-- has to be taken with a pinch of salt. At the Grice Club, we tend to use the official dating of manuscripts. Nothing, by Grice-Club standards can post-date Grice's death.

So we have Grice 1938, Grice 1941, Grice 1967 (his William James lectures), Grice 1979 (his John Locke lectures), etc. The numbering of lectures for the William James lectures is even a trick, as T. Wharton may well be aware of. There'

Grice 1967 1
Grice 1967 2
Grice 1967 3
Grice 1967 4
Grice 1967 5
Grice 1967 6
Grice 1967 7

-- and no more than that (cfr. Neale, "Ling. and Phil.", cited by Wharton). Cfr. also the entry by S. N. for Sosa and Martinich, or Martinich and Sosa, if you must, which we may have discussed elsewhere. Also S. N.'s influential book on "Definite descriptions" and his joint seminars with former Griceian, S. R. Schiffer.

"A second book, _The Conception of Value_ based on his Paul Carus Memorial Lectures was published in 1991 edited by J. Baker, by Oxford University Press."

As well as _Aspects of Reason_, the John Locke Lectures, edited by R. Warner, in 2001. We could edit at least 76 more books out of his Grice Papers, now at the Bancroft.

"His contribution to the department of philosophy at Berkeley was unique. Grice taught only graduate courses, although advance undergraduates were encouraged to attend, and he was regarded by many as a sort of spiritual head of a new movement in philosophy at Berkeley. His seminars were well attended by his colleagues, graduates students, and advanced undergraduates, always with a scattering of visitors from other campuses."

CAMPUSES, CAMPUSES, CAMPUSES.

And from visitors from colleagues from the same campus, but not the Philo depart. It is telling that when Grice died, a volume was published by the Berkeley Linguistics Society: "Legacy of Grice": Grandy collaborated, but most contributions are by linguists. There are good contributions by Gumperz, and other members associated with departments other than the philosophy one at Berkeley.

When it comes to other campuses, the top must be Stanford, -- another uni, rather -- and San Francisco. As part of the "University of California" system, Grice-in-Berkeley collaborated with things related to other campuses like Irvine, and Los Angeles.

"The presentation wsa, for most of the audience, more than a little difficult to follow, as Grice laid out his newest ideas slowly, in great detail, with much hesitation and occasionla backtracking, shading each thesis with qualifications he rightly considered necessary to shield it from the objections it very clearly invivted. The spirited and often heated discussions that ensued led to clarifications, consolidations, and yet further refinements. Particularly memorable were Grice's carefully crafted and very often elaborate extemporaneous refutations of views counter to his own, deployed stepwise, like so many chess moves, until the piece was captured, the whole process accompanied by contained but unconcealed, rising, and somewhat mischievous glee."

"counter to his own" requires a slight qualification. Counter to his own- Grice-n. Where 'n' is a sub-index. Grice was obsessed with his philosophical development.

Most of his views are counter to his own. One famous example is his having changed his view on intention (in his British Academy lecture) just because he felt that Hampshire and Hart had maintained a similar view. So, Grice spends most of the time criticising his earlier view as deployed in "Intention and disposition".

Similarly, it is difficult (but not impossible) to trace who started criticising his views on meaning. In Studies he credits Urmson. Urmson had proposed a counterexample to Grice's early 1948 "Meaning" -- a 'bribery' case discussed by Grice in "Studies". While Grice would credit his opponents -- Urmson, Stampe, Strawson, Searle, Schiffer, etc. -- he would similarly credit his own views as they diverged from the ones he would be currently defending.

-----

"Philosophy in Grice's hands was a cooperative enterprise in search of truth, despite its outward spparance of combat."

If we are right and we see Grice as basically conversing with his-self (as it were), this has a further implicature. He kept all the mimeos from his early lectures, including a type-written version of "Negation and privation", complete with the Harbone address on top!

"And it was an enterprise he loved deeply. Grice did imortant work on philosophical subjects as diverse as Aristotle's metaphysics, the foundations of psychology, and ethics. His strongest influence lies in the philosophy of language, where his thought continues to shape the way philsoophers, linguistis and cognitive scientists think about meaning, communication, and the relationship between language and the mind."

Indeed, there are at least 5 books with "Grice" in the title:

Avramides's must be the first. "Mind and meaning". Earlier, Loar's "Meaning and mind" lacked the Grice subtitle, but it was telling enough. Then comes Davis, "A refutation of Grice", and the biopic by Chapman, and a few others. There are anthologies, like "Meaning and analysis", featuring Grice in the subtitle, and the proceedings of a charming conference at San Marino, "Heritage of Grice", plus Hall's Berkeley "Legacy of Grice".

At the Grice Club we sometimes favour the spelling -- which we draw from Dennett and Fodor, "Griceian"; but any search in a philosophy data bank should provide ZILLION hits for this, the most Oxonian philosopher from Harborne.

"He stressed the importance of separating what a _sentence_ means from, onthe one hand, what a speaker _said_ in uttering it, and on the other hand, what the speaker _meant_ by uttering it. He provided systematic attempts to say precisely what meaning is by providing a series of ever more refined analyses of the utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and what is said. He produced an account of how it is possible for what a spaker says and what a speaker means to diverge. By characterising a philosophically important distinction between the "genuinely senmantic" and "merely pragmatic" implications of a statement, Grice clarified the relationship between classical logic and the semantics of natural language."

He also clarified what I mean by palaeo-Griceian. Today, the tag, "neo-Griceian", is meant to indicate those followers of Grice who followed him willing to tread on a path "where an elephant might fear to tread", or something. So, we distinguish between:

* palaeo-Griceian

-- views on the semantics/pragmatics interface. The Grice Club has identified the oldest source here: Sidonius, who wrote, "I hate your implicatures" (implicaturis, in Latin -- Loeb Classical Library). An implicature being an entanglement

* neo-Griceian.

-- those who follow the truth-conditional account of semantics, no pragmatic intrusion, and so on.

Grice was a palaeo-Griceian and he was always ready to qualify the subtle lines between semantics and pragmatics. The fact that he never spoke (seriously) of 'pragmatic' does not help.

"He provided some much needed philosophical ventilation by deploying his notion of "implicature" to devastating effects against certain over-zealous strains of "ordinary language philosophy", without himself abandoning the view that philosophy must pay attention to the nuances of ordinary talk."

Austin featured large; but Grice wanted to oppose Malcolm AND WITTERS most of all. Grice found that Witters had no ear for ordinary language.

"That looks like a horse."

Witters would say. Witters wants to say that it is FALSE to say that _of a horse_. Grice elaborates on this. It was Witters's outdated philosophy of perception (his misuses of 'looks like', and 'seems') that got Grice devising the idea of an implcature. The fact that Sir Peter Strawson was soon enough applying this notion of 'implicature' to his campaign against formal logic did not help.

Now Grice had ANOTHER 'enemy': he soon directed his efforts to prove Strawson wrong. "Surely "Russell wrote Principia" is TRUE, even if it is more informative to say, "Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia". And surely "Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia" and "Russell and Whitehead wrote Principia" say the same thing. -- cfr. "She married and had three children"; "She had three children and married", "She had TWO children, she married, and she had one child", etc.

"And the undercut some of the most influential arguments for a philosophical significant notion of "presupposition"."

Grice was particulary annoyed by Strawson's manoeuvre, and if he wanted one concoction to disappear from his metaphysical map was that of the 'truth-value gap'! (coinage Quine's!)

"Grice's conviviality is legendary among philosophers. The flavour of his wit survives in his writings, as does a suggestion of the way he could draw his listeners into his perspectives on a topic and treat philosophical discussion as a very high form of entertainment."

This must be a British trait. Cfr. The British Music-Hall Society. I tend to see Grice and Strawson as a double act, with Strawson as the straight man, of course.

Grice loved his own irreverence, actually laughted at it, and WITH it!

"It is a great pity that we can't in the same way preserve his love of laughter and the expressiveness of his ice-blue eyes."

There are tapes that capture his laughter (and coughs, alas). Also the audience's laughter. Photos are many [some colour]. One graces the Philosophy Room at Merton, Oxford.

"A bench has been placed in front of Moses Hall to commemorate Paul Grice, providing a place to continue indefinitely the philosophical conversation
he encouraged, enjoyed, and, to a great extent, lived for."

There are various nice photos of this. This was a specially warm bench-warming ceremony, with Hans Sluga bringing in some remarks on how Oxonian was Grice's approach to cricket.

----- Etc.