"No": Was: Grice on Dummett

Speranza

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Jones asks:

"[1] What does "overage" mean?"
"[2] Did the play group have an age limit?"
"I seem to recall you mentioning that it was the younger philosophers."

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Indeed. This is in the context of these notes, now in the Grice Collection, entitled, "Oxford philosophy" and aimed at a meeting with the American Philosophical Association.

The context includes:

--- obituary of Ryle by Owen, Aristotelian Society.
--- Quine.

Indeed, rumour had it (as Owen expressed) that Austin (born 1911) would allow for nobody OLDER than he was. He _led_ the Play Group. In Grice's list, we can see that the listing is 'in strict order of seniority': Austin (b. 1911), followed by Grice (b. 1913), followed by Hampshire (born 1915), followed by Strawson, b. 1919, followed by Warnock, b. 1923.

The 'no' included two females, then: Murdoch and Anscombe, and our Dummett.

The 'overage' list includes: "Ryle, Hardie, ...". They indeed could not possibly belong to Austin's club since they were senior to Austin.

Austin did not seem to have considered the minor fact that perhaps Ryle and Hardie (as I'm sure they didn't) never WANTED to belong to that club that would have excluded 'ex professo'.

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So 'overage' means indeed 'older than Austin'.

Dummett was Warnock's age, so he could have joined, but he didn't. There are other references to Dummett in an obituary for Flew that I could doublecheck.

Dummett was a PPE, like Strawson. Grice belonged to the older school of "lit. hum.", like Austin, and indeed Ayer, as I recall.

That meant that Grice, Austin, etc. spent most of their undergraduate days doing the 'classics', notably Aristotle in Greek.

True, Dummett came from Winchester, so we can assume he had done the 'classics' (if not the PHILOSOPHICAL classics) in the vernacular.

None of the obituaries mention who Dummett's tutor at Christ Church was. Somebody should need to find that out. Etc.

Also a complete list of publications. The Stanford encyclopedia entry mentions some work, but notably book-form, rather than article-form.

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Dummett's Oxford career (early one) was sort of uninteresting: the best college, in terms of prestige, Christ Church, and then All Souls, the mecca for the graduate as the obituarist for the Guardian (Moore) put it, I think. For a few decades.

I studied Dummett's influence on 'not' elsewhere. He became Wykeham professor of Logic, which was influential enough. And indeed, he influenced Peacocke, and a few others (incl. Williamson, also Wykeham).

Interestingly, Dummett's main concern with "not" allows for a pragmatic explanation alla Grice:

"not" "not" (p) --- reduces, implicaturally, to "p".

But the way Dummett expressed all this helped clarify the patterns of 'natural deduction', etc. Recall that for Grice, implicature accounts for any divergence between the intro and elimination of 'not' in informal discourse.

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Given that Dummett was PPE at Christ Church and then straight to 'postgraduate' at All Souls, and only later Wykeham, if may do to trace his actual influence via seminars, etc. in vintage Oxford.

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Cheers.