Grice This

Speranza

MALFET is arguing, elsewhere, about this and that for and against a 'materialist' interpretation of stuff.

"Anything else would be an abstraction, an idealized system that can be useful descriptively but that cannot be said to exist in any material sense (much like, I would argue, Grice's maxims)."

The point has been discussed elsewhere by yours truly.

A trigger could be B. F. Loar in his "Mind and meaning". He argued that it's best to see those Griceian constraints (never mind 'maxims' -- he was just echoing Kant in a jocular way) as "empirical generalisations over functional STATES".

Of course Grice would disagree. But Loar knew what he was taking about.

If we trace Grice's 'philosophical psychology' back to its Aristotelian roots (rather than "Kantotelian") we do see an endorsement (as in the opening paragraphs of his "Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre") to FUNCTIONALISM (alla, albeit, D. K. Lewis).

In this respect, the literature is enormous. For one, we have Grice's EARLIER (and my favourite) version of the "Logic and Conversation" where he is free from the Kantotelian jargon and speaks of 'desideratum' and 'principle' (rather than 'maxim'). He is having in mind mottoes like, "Clarity is not enough" and speaks of a principle of conversational clarity, one of conversational candour, and a desideratum of conversational benevolence interacting with a desideratum of conversational self-interest. Anything that is said about "Grice's maxims" (so miscalled, :)) should apply to his less technical concoctions (or cfr. his 'principle' or 'feature of discourse' in "Causal theory of perception", -- be as strong as you can -- in what you say).

Another thing is to look for a JUSTIFICATION, which is what Grice is interested in. Not just to posit this or that 'ontological' status to the 'features of conversational discourse'. In this respect, Grice proposes three steps:

an empirical generalisation over functional states (alla Loar) is for Grice an 'empiricist but TOO DULL' an answer to satisfy the Kantotle in him.

Anything more 'rationalist' allows for a 'technical justification' of the "RATIONALity" of the principle and, beyond, a nontechnical, transcendental (which can be either weak -- as mine and Strawson was -- or STRONG as Grice's was) justification of the REASONABLEness" of the principle. The reading of Grice's "Aspects of reason" should at this point be morally mandatory! :).