Herbert Paul Grice and Peter Thomas Geach

Speranza

With gratitude to J. Haldane.

Geach was well-known for many essays and books on topics in philosophy of language and philosophical psychology (including what is now known as the Frege-Geach probject for ethical non-cognitivism), as well as for work in the genre now known as "analytical Thomism." 

Geach spent most of his teaching career at Birmingham andLeeds, where he was emeritus.  

Pyke's photo of the Geachcombes is in the National Portrait Gallery. 

The death of Geach marks the passing of one of Anglophone philosophy's most distinctive and gifted figures.

Geach published widely over seven decades in the areas of logic, language, mind, religion and ethics.

His first article was "Designation and Truth".

It appeared in "Analysis" in 1948.

His last essay was published in the same journal in 2006.

Entitled "The Labels" it begins:

"Once upon a time in China there was a wicked king. His hobby was logic"

The essay concerns the King's intellectual battles with and eventual defeat of a "very clever logician Lo-sou".

Numbering fewer than 300 words, it is an illustrated example of a problem posed by Anscombe.

"Lo-sou" is the Chinese counterpart of Bertrand Russell.

In the previous issue of Analysis Geach published "The Tractatus is not all rubbish", a 200 word response to a critic of Wittgenstein's propositional logic, relying on Frege.

Among  analytical philosophers Geach, who was born in Lower Chelsea, London, was without peer as a literary stylist.

One may disagree with Geach's judgements and conclusions and take exception to the terms in which they were sometimes expressed.

Yet Geach's writing is a model of clear and precise English, devoid of pseudo-subtlety but animated by a learned literary spirit.

In this it compares with Grice's. Even if Grice loved subtleties, pseudo- and ohter.

Like Dr. Johnson and G. K. Chesterton, (both of whom he admired -- and the latter of whom, especially, since he was, like Geach, a Catholic) Geach is a pleasure to read.

Unlike them, Grice commanded both plain prose and the technical languages of Graeco-Roman and medieval philosophy, as well being a master of logic and a powerful dialectician.

Grice made light of any claim to be a CREATIVE logician -- whatever that may mean -- or a philosopher of logic, as Grice claimed to be.

Yet Grice's contributions to the philosophy of logic are rightly admired, and his deployment of logical insights in the course of non-technical argumentation combines lightness with efficacy.

Four examples of the latter deserve mention on account of their insight and influence:

*****

EXAMPLE I:

In "Frege's Grundlagen" (published in "The Philosophical Review") Geach observes that the development of arithmetic may proceed validly within the Fregean system from Hume's principle without reliance on the extension operator.

The same point was later developed by Charles Parsons and Crispin Wright, among others.

EXAMPLE II:

In "Good and Evil" (published in "Analysis") Geach notes that in its most common and natural uses "good" is an ATTRIBUTIVE adjective, the criteria for its application being provided by the substantive which is qualifies - as in 'good knife'.

This was subsequently deployed by Philippa Foot and many others.

EXAMPLE III:
In "Ascriptivism" (published in "Philosophical Review", and reprinted in his collection, "Logic matters") Geach points out that for inferences to be valid, expressions occurring in both asserted and unasserted uses have to have the same "meaning" (whatever the conversational implicatures they might projected to this or that addressee), and that this poses problems for attitudinal accounts of 'voluntary', 'intentional' and 'good' and 'bad'.

It is worth noting that while the 'Frege-Geach' problem is more or less universally introduced n discussions of meta-ethical expressivism, Geach's first presentation of it was mainly concerned with philosophy of action. But then this is hardly surprising with the Geachcombes.

EXAMPLE IV:

In "On Worshipping the Right God" (c. 1960, published in God and the Soul, 1969) Geach distinguishes between 'personal' and 'impersonal' uses of 'to refer' and gives examples where a speaker refers though the definite description he uses is false, and others where the description is satisfied by someone other than the person to whom the speaker uniquely refers.

This has a Griceian undertone and relates to Geach's discussion of quasi-names like "Arthur" in "King Arthur": Smith believes that the hill fort was built by Arthur. It would be otiose that "Arthur", qua what Grice calls a 'vacuous name' is a quasi-name.

Geach, unlike Grice, was obsessed, in a good way, with names. Another of his examples:

The major of Cambridge is an honest man.
--- Therefore Cambridge has an honest man

"The Duke of Cambridge" (pub) sells good beer.
--- Therefore Cambridge has a duke that sells good beer.


Later in 1960s and in the decade following, such distinctions and examples became standard in the formulation of 'direct reference' theories - though unlike many who turned in that direction he also argued that the use of proper names logically implies the existence of associated kind concepts.
Geach also makes important early contributions to logic in the areas of plural quantification -- of pleonetetic --, the sortal-dependency of identity, entailment, and intentional identity.

Not to mention the fabulous editorial work on writings by Witters, Frege, and PRIOR!

Some of Geach's ideas have resulted in the entry of expressions into the philosophical lexicon including 'Cambridge Change', 'predicable', 'pronoun of laziness', 'relative identity', 'Shakespearean context', and 'donkey pronoun'.

 To the extent that Geach draws inspiration from other philosophers it tends to be from figures of the past (Kantotle, especially?) though he had a high regard for Kripke, Prior, and Quine which in each case was fully reciprocated.

Grice and Geach met in Oxford. Or they didn't.

Grice attended Corpus Christi, and came from the Midlands, although directly from Clifton.

Geach attended Balliol, and came, too, directly from Clifton.

Grice was older, born in 1913.

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Both Grice and Geach were obsessed, in a good way, with P. F. Strawson, whose "Introduction to Philosophical Logic" is a gem. Strawson quotes Grice in that book, and the book was criticised by Geach.

Geach, with his Oxonian background (BA and MA Oxon) was VERY interested in Oxford ordinary language philosophy and one could make a list (or could not) of Oxonian philosophers he quotes.

R. M. Hare Geach liked to quote, and was familiar with the neustic/phrastic distinction, practical reasoning being one of his pet topics.

A. J. P. Kenny and his account of practical inference was also discussed by Geach.

One should complile a Grice-Geach cross-referential indx. Or should not.