Why Grice Loved Skinner

Speranza

Because Chomsky hated him!

In "Reflections on language," Chomsky mistreats Grice as a common-or-garden behaviourist alla Skinner -- and as Paul Suppes noted, this is offensive!

Philosophers like Grice often purport to ‘borrow’ or ‘refute’ claims made by past philosophers. 

Especially great ones -- Grice classified philosophers into 'great' (like Locke) and 'minor' (like Witters, Bosanquet, and Wollaston). Platts found this 'provocative,' but Platts's provocation did not provoke Grice!

In doing so these philosophers contravene a contextualist methodological prohibition once defended by Quentin Skinner (not to be confused with the Skinner that Grice loved) in his seminal paper “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”. 

The phrase "history of ideas," or ideology, Skinner borrowed (but never returned) from the Oxonian colleague of Grice, Isaiah Berlin. 

Skinner's methodology has been much debated by theorists of textual meaning and interpretation.

And yet the precise nature of the logical path from Skinner's premises to his prohibitory conclusion remains elusive. 

We should seek to refute two of the most promising variants of an argument for his methodological prohibition on ‘refutation’, one of which draws on his appeal to Witters's conception of ‘meaning as use’, and the other of which draws on his appeal to speech act theory, alla Searle.

Grice would be delighted to refute both!