Grice Himself

Speranza

In a previous note, I was referring to this excursus by Popper in "Unended quest" against analysis.

I checked it out and see Popper sees things dialytically, not analytically. He is using a figure of speech used by Publio Rutilio Lupo and the term of art was appreciated by W. Bartley, III, enough to include "dialysis" in one of his essays -- if not in the index of terms for it!

But back to Eccles, I see he includes "memory" within not the "pure ego" (an expression which, Popper would have avoided using), and which forms the basis for *Grice*'s analysis (never dialysis) of "I".

Eccles says he is following this author, which is not that fair, seeing that he prefaced his essay. 

Eric P. Polten, Critique of the psycho-physical identity theory: A Refutation of Scientific Materialism and an Establishment of Mind-matter 
Dualism by Means of Philosophy and Scientific Method. With a preface by J. Eccles. The Hague.

A bit of a plug there.

For the record, then, Grice's analysis he himself presented, in "Personal Identity" of the ordinary English:

i. I hear a noise.

if and only if 

ii. a. A past hearing of a noise is an element in

a total temporary state which is a member 
of a series of total temporary states, such that
every member of the series EITHER
b. would, given certain conditions,
contain as an element  A MEMORY
OF SOME EXPERIENCE which is an element
in some previous member,
OR
c. contains, as an element, some experience
A MEMORY OF WHICH would,
given certain conditions, occur as an
element in some sub-sequent member;
d. there being no subject of members
which is independent from all the rest.

Grice is attempting to defend Locke’s conceptual analysis of "I" -- in the mandatory reading for Grice's BA Lit Hum, "An Essay Concerning Humane [sic] Understanding," by making some alterations to it. 

Grice introduces as part of the analysans the concept of a total temporary state, and formulated his reductive (never reductionist) conceptual analysis such that each 
temporary state is within a temporal series. 

Grice further claimed that each total temporary state contains within it, as an element, a MEMORY (to use Eccles's phrase) of some experience ("hearing a noise"), which will therefore be included as an element in all following members of this temporal  series. 

However, this reductive analysis would still fall victim to criticism by Reid, aka The Lone Ranger.

So Grice feels forced to insert an extra prong: only under certain conditions would a total temporary state contain an element that had been experienced in a preceding member of the 

series.

Grice obviously realises that so-called consciousness is complex and often memories are not  held onto.

Grice formulated his analysis such that every experience of one’s "identity" being remembered 
for the rest of that identity’s existence is a pretty absurd idea. 

Basically, Grice trusts that consciousness is what provides the necessary continuity to constitute an identity, but that consciousness is infallible -- if not as he read "Personal Identity" to Hardin, his tutor at Corpus ("What does he know anyway?").

Grice got a first.

Incidentally, Popper's dialysis, like Grice's analysis for that matter, has the proper (beloved by Oxonians) Graeco-Roman pedigree.