"Echoing Kant"

Speranza

Jones was suggesting that we take a look at Neale, in "Ling. and Phil." We are. I find that Grice's locution,

'echoing Kant'

-- a charming one -- may be a good reminder, when Neale writes:


"Subsumed under this general principle [Be helpful in conversation], Grice distinguishes four categories of more specific maxims and submaxims enjoining truthfulness, informativeness, relevance, and clarity (pp. 26–27): Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative
than is required. Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. Specifically: (1) Do not say what you believe to be false; (2) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Relation: Be relevant. Manner: ..."

I would NEVER think that Grice would care to provide these four categories UNLESS he were citing or echoing, jocularly, Kant!

---- Or Kantotle, even.

Aristotle talks of categories, ontologically:

substance of course does not count. It's qualitas, and quantitas that start Aristotle being serious about categories. And there's relatio, and modus.

Kant took this up and thought he was doing transcendental work! (He was!)

So, Grice, already in the twentieth-century, wants to speak of

CONVERSATIONAL categories, alla Kantotle.

So, it's the 'echoing Kant', that he thought would amuse the Harvard audience. No such figure of speech in the earlier Oxonian, "Logic and conversation" lectures, where he speaks rather of a principle of conversational candour and a correlative principle of conversational benevolence.

Cheers.