Grice, Dummett and Magee

Roger Bishop Jones

I am always interested in critiques of one man's analytic philosophy in the terms of another's.
And also in the dispossessed or marginalised, those who might possibly have become academic philosophers had not their philosophical inclinations been too far removed from the prevailing orthodoxy of their day or whose philosophy was conducted in some more liberal context sheltered from the critical gaze of the principle centers of analytic orthodoxy.
In that category I count Gellner, Berlin, and Magee, possibly Murdoch and in all of these cases the orthodoxy of their youth was probably "linguistic philosophy".

Why not Popper, Lakatos, ...? In these terms perhaps LSE is a haven for philosophical unorthodoxy.  Well I don't feel that Popper and Lakatos were marginalised.  Perhaps its just an Oxford thing I am groping at, since Gellner, Berlin, Magee and Murdoch were all in some way dissenting Oxonians.

It had not occurred to me that Dummett should be thought outside the fold of linguistic philosophy until Speranza's recent postings about his critical attitude towards Austin.

I suppose to make sense of this we must distinguish between "linguistic philosophy" and "ordinary language philosophy", and say that Dummett may not have been an "ordinary language philosopher" but he was certainly a linguistic philosopher.  He was a linguistic philosopher because he gave primacy to philosophy of language, and because he seems to have subscribed to a point of view which Magee singled out for especially thorough refutation in his "confessions of a philosopher".
If we take this view (which I will explain shortly) then we can see Grice's philosophy as moderating not only the extremes of Austinian ordinary language philosophy, but also the extreme of linguistic philosophy which Dummett inhabited.

The doctrine which Magee singled out for special obloquy is the argument for the primacy of linguistic philosophy on the grounds that thought is essentially linguistic.  When we sit silently chewing the cud, the argument goes, our thinking is a stream of bits of language which we just happen to refrain from articulating.
Since all thought consists of propositions expressed or repressed, the philosophy of language has prime place, and a study of language is an essential part of any philosophical enterprise.
This is a doctrine which Dummett does explicitly subscribe to, somewhere, perhaps in his "Is analytic philosophy systematic and should it be?".
Dummett also at least some of the time, and particularly in his attempt to provide a philosophical justification for intuitionistic logic,

The analogous caricature of Austinian ordinary language philosophy would be that philosophy is just the study of ordinary language, and the advancement of our understanding of this instrument through a detailed analysis of its use.
This nominally as a prelude to the resolution of extra-linguistic philosophical problems.  This seems to be the line in Austin's "A Plea for Excuses", which is his most explicit metaphilosophical pronouncement.
The Austin of "Sense and Sensibilia" is using observations about ordinary language in a critique of a philosophical argument concerning a problem which is not itself purely linguistic.
But the Austin of "Doing things with words" seems to have moved on from criticising a philosophical position to practicing a new kind of philosophy consisting primarily or exclusively in the study of language through its non philosophical manifestations.


My impression is that Grice doesn't himself fit in with either of these extremes.
His essay on philosophical method and ordinary language in WOW suggests:

Firstly that philosophical analysis is a kind of conceptual analysis (which surprises me a little, I would not have thought that consistent with the whole of his philosophical output),


Secondly the assertion of an "unswerving association" of philosophy with the study not just of language but of "ordinary language".

But an association is not an identification, so there is some softening there.

Grice associates the opposition to this point of view (thinking of Russell and Quine) with "scientism".
This critique is probably even more applicable to Rudolf Carnap, who, because of his dedication to the formalisation of science and his conception of science as encompassing all systematic study of empirical or synthetic truth, does at least regard the study of ordinary language as empirical science (and the kind of philosophy which he practiced as a deductive/demonstrative science insofar as it establishes new truths rather than proposing new languages and methods).

Sorry, I think I must have lost my thread.
I am trying to get a better handle quite generally on the kinds of philosophical analysis which have been proposed or practiced and their relationships, which seems like an enterprise of unending complexity, since it is in the nature of philosophy not only that no two philosophers share a common philosophy, but probably also that no two share the same conception of what philosophy is or how it should be done.
Making an illuminating story out of this (which is what I am trying to do) is a bit of a challenge, and I am interested especially in how my own limited conception of 20th Century philosophy looks wrong to others (particularly in how it exposes my extensive ignorance!).

RBJ