H. P. Grice

By the 1970s, Grice, then in California, had come to think differently. He said to me, when we met again in Michigan in 1974, that he now thought that in philosophy, ‘if you can’t put it into symbols, it isn’t worth saying’. A few days later, back in Oxford, I told Strawson of Grice’s remark. He smiled wryly, and said, ‘Oh no! If you can put it into symbols, then it isn’t worth saying.’ Grice later issued a partial recantation, resulting from ‘a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by technology; to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism’ (‘Reply to Richards’, p. 61).