Revisionary vs. Descriptive Philosophical Psychology

Speranza

R. B. Jones was referring to, inter alia, the Ryle-Grice interface, and how it might fit with Turing (and Carnap).

I perhaps forgot to say that it seems it was almost a written law within the Play Group to which Grice belonged that nobody could be older than Austin, the leader. Therefore, there was bound to be some divergence or difference between a Rylean approach to philosophical psychology and a Griceian one, if only generational.

The distinction between revisionary and descriptive, as Jones notes, best applies to metaphysics, and is credited to Grice's student at St. John's: Sir (as he then wasn't) Peter F. Strawson ("my most brilliant student," he later said -- Oddly, the same sentiment is echoed by Mabbott in his "Oxford Memories" -- both Mabbott and Grice had Strawson as a student at St. John's).

When we speak of philosophical psychology (Grice's preferred version for 'philosophy of mind', since he rather speaks of the 'soul' anyday) surely we can approach it from a descriptive or a revionary perspective.

Surely Grice would prefer to start descriptively, via linguistic botany: what are the idioms that refer to psychological predicates, and so on.

When we _revise_ what we have described linguistically, we may then arrive at some sort of 'functionalism', as Grice does in "Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre".