Grice's B

buletic: Grice was never sure what adjective to use for the ‘desiderative.’ He uses ‘deriderative’ and a few more! Of course what he means is a sub-psychological modality, or rather a ‘soul.’ So he would apply it ‘primarily’ to the soul, as Plato and Aristotle does. The ‘psyche’, or ‘anima’ is what is ‘desiderativa.’ The Grecians are pretty confused about this (but ‘boulemaic’ and ‘buletic’ are used), and the Romans didn’t help. Grice is concerned with a rational-desiderative, that takes a “that”-clause (or oratio obliqua), and qua constructivist, he is also concerned with a pre-rational desiderative (he has an essay on “Needs and Wants,” and his detailed example in “Method” is a squarrel (sic) who needs a nut. On top, while Grice suggest s that it goes both ways: the doxastic can be given a reductive analaysis in terms of the buletic, and the buletic in terms of the doxastic, he only cares to provide the former. Basically, an agent judges that p, if his willing that p correlates to a state of affairs that satisfies his desires. Since he does not provide a reductive analysis for Prichard’s willing-that, one is left wondering. Grice’s position is that ‘willing that…’ attains its ‘sense’ via the specification, as a theoretical concept, in some law in the folk-science that agents use to explain their behaviour. Grice gets subtler when he deals with mode-markers for the desiderative: for these are either utterer-oriented, or addressee-oriented, and they may involve a buletic attitude itself, or a doxastic attitude. When utterer-addressed, utterer wills that utterer wills that p. There is no closure here, and indeed, a regressus ad infinitum is what Grice wants, since this regressus allows him to get univeersabilisability, in terms of conceptual, formal, and applicational kinds of generality. In this he is being Kantian, and Hareian. While Grice praises Kantotle, Aristotle here would stay unashamedly ‘teleological,’ and giving priority to a will that may not be universalisable, since it’s the communitarian ‘good’ that matters. what does Grice have to say about our conversational practice? L and S have “πρᾶξις,” from “πράσσω,” and which they render as ‘moral action,’ oποίησις, τέχνη;” “oποιότης,” “ἤθη καὶ πάθη καὶ π.,” “oοἱ πολιτικοὶ λόγοι;” “ἔργῳ καὶ πράξεσιν, οὐχὶ λόγοις” Id.6.3; ἐν ταῖς πράξεσι ὄντα τε καὶ πραττόμενα, “exhibited in actual life,” action in drama, “oλόγος; “μία π. ὅλη καὶ τελεία.” With practical Grice means buletic. Praxis involves acting, and surely Grice presupposes acting. By uttering, i. e. by the act of uttering, expression x, U m-intends that p. Grice occasionally refers to action and behaviour as the thing which an ascription of a psychological state explains. Grice prefers the idiom of soul. Theres the ratiocinative soul. Within the ratiocinative, theres the executive soul and the merely administrative soul. Cicero had to translate Aristotle into prudentia, every time Aristotle talked of phronesis. Grice was aware that the terminology by Kant can be confusing. Kant used ‘pure’ reason for reason in the doxastic realm. The critique by Kant of practical reason is hardly symmetrical to his critique of doxastic reason. Grice, with his æqui-vocality thesis of must (must crosses the buletic-boulomaic/doxastic divide), Grice is being more of a symmetricalist. The buletic, boulomaic, or volitive, is a part of the soul, as is the doxatic or judicative. And judicative is a trick because there is such a thing as a value judgement, or an evaluative judgement, which is hardly doxastic. Grice plays with two co-relative operators: desirability versus probability. Grice invokes the exhibitive/protreptic distinction he had introduced in the fifth James lecture, now applied to psychological attitudes themselves. This Grice’s attempt is to tackle the Kantian problem in the Grundlegung: how to derive the categorical imperative from a counsel of prudence. Under the assumption that the protasis is Let the agent be happy, Grice does not find it obtuse at all to construct a universalisable imperative out of a mere motive-based counsel of prudence. Grice has an earlier paper on pleasure which relates. The derivation involves seven steps. Grice proposes seven steps in the derivation. 1. It is a fundamental law of psychology that, ceteris paribus, for any creature R, for any P and Q, if R wills P Λ judges if P, P as a result of Q, R wills Q. 2. Place this law within the scope of a "willing" operator: R wills for any P Λ Q, if R wills P Λ judges that if P, P as a result of Q, R wills Q. 3. wills turns to should. If rational, R will have to block unsatisfactory (literally) attitudes. R should (qua rational) judge for any P Λ Q, if it is satisfactory to will that P Λ it is satisfactory to judge that if P, P as a result of Q, it is sastisfactory to will that Q. 4. Marking the mode: R should (qua rational) judge for any P Λ Q, if it is satisfactory that !P Λ that if it .P, .P only as a result of Q, it is satisfactory that !Q. 5. via (p & q -> r) -> (p -> (q -> r)): R should (qua rational) judge for any P Λ Q, if it is satisfactory that if .P, .P only because Q, i is satisfactory that, if let it be that P, let it be that Q. 6. R should (qua rational) judge for any P Λ Q, if P, P only because p yields if let it be that P, let it be that Q. 7. For any P Λ Q if P, P only because Q yields if let it be that P, let it be that Q. Grice was well aware that a philosopher, at Oxford, needs to be a philosophical psychologist. So, wanting and needing have to be related to willing. A plant needs water. A floor needs sweeping. So need is too broad. So is want, a non-Anglo-Saxon root for God knows what. With willing things get closer to the rational soul. There is willing in the animal soul. But when it comes to rational willing, there must be, to echo Pritchard, a conjecture, some doxastic element. You cannot will to fly, or will that the distant chair slides over the floor toward you. So not all wants and needs are rational willings, but then nobody said they would. Grice is interested in emotion in his power structure of the soul. A need and a want may count as an emotion. Grice was never too interested in needing and wanting because they do not take a that-clause. He congratulates Urmson for having introduced him to the brilliant willing that … by Prichard. Why is it, Grice wonders, that many ascriptions of buletic states take to-clause, rather than a that-clause? Even mean, as ‘intend.’ In this Grice is quite different from Austin, who avoids the that-clause. The explanation by Austin is very obscure, like those of all grammars on the that’-clause, the ‘that’ of ‘oratio obliqua’ is not in every way similar to the ‘that’-clause in an explicit performative formula. Here the utterer is not reporting his own ‘oratio’ in the first person singular present indicative active. Incidentally, of course, it is not in the least necessary that an explicit performative verb should be followed by a ‘that’-clause. In important classes of cases it is followed by ‘to . . .,’ or by or nothing, e. g. ‘I apologize for…,’ ‘I salute you.’ Now many of these verbs appear to be quite satisfactory pure performatives. Irritating though it is to have them as such, linked with clauses that look like statements, true or false, e. g., when I say ‘I prophesy that …,’ ‘I concede that …’,  ‘I postulate that …,’ the clause following normally looks just like a statement, but the verb itself seems to be  pure performatives. One may distinguish the performative opening part, ‘I state that …,’ which makes clear how the utterance is to be taken, that it is a statement, as distinct from a prediction, etc.), from the bit in the that-clause which is required to be true or false. However, there are many cases which, as language stands at present, we are not able to split into two parts in this way, even though the utterance seems to have a sort of explicit performative in it. Thus, ‘I liken x to y,’ or ‘I analyse x as y.’ Here we both do the likening and assert that there is a likeness by means of one compendious phrase of at least a quasi-performative character. Just to spur us on our way, we may also mention ‘I know that …’, ‘I believe that …’, etc. How complicated are these examples? We cannot assume that they are purely descriptive, which has Grice talking of the pseudo-descriptive. Want etymologically means absence; need should be preferred. The squarrel (squirrel) Toby needs intake of nuts, and youll soon see gobbling them! There is not much philosophical bibliography on these two psychological states Grice is analysing. Their logic is interesting. Smith wants to play cricket. Smith needs to play cricket.  Grice is concerned with the propositional content attached to the want and need predicate. Wants that sounds harsh; so does need that. Still, there are propositional attached to the pair above. Smith plays cricket. Grice took a very cavalier attitude to what linguists spend their lives analysing. He thought it was surely not the job of the philosopher, especially from a prestigious university such as Oxford, to deal with the arbitrariness of grammatical knots attached to this or that English verb. He rarely used English, but stuck with ordinary language. Surely, he saw himself in the tradition of Kantotle, and so, aiming at grand philosophical truths: not conventions of usage, even his own! 1. Squarrel Toby has a nut, N, in front of him. 2. Toby is short on squarrel food (observed or assumed), so, 3. Toby wills squarrel food (by postulate of Folk Pyschological Theory θ connecting willing with intake of N). 4. Toby prehends a nut as in front (from (1) by Postulate of Folk Psychological Theory θ, if it is assumed that nut and in front are familiar to Toby). 5. Toby joins squarrel food with gobbling, nut, and in front (i.e. Toby judges gobbling, on nut in front, for squarrel food (by Postulate of Folk Psychological Theory θ with the aid of prior observation. So, from 3, 4 and 5, 6. Tobby gobbles; and since a nut is in front of him, gobbles the nut in front of him. The system of values of the society to which the agent belongs forms the external standard for judging the relative importance of the commitments by the agent. There are three dimensions of value: universally human, cultural that vary with societies and times; and personal that vary with individuals. Each dimension has a standard for judging the adequacy of the relevant values. Human values are adequate if they satisfy basic needs; cultural values are adequate if they provide a system of values that sustains the allegiance of the inhabitants of a society; and personal values are adequate if the conceptions of well‐being formed out of them enable individuals to live satisfying lives. These values conflict and our well‐being requires some way of settling their conflicts, but there is no universal principle for settling the conflicts; it can only be done by attending to the concrete features of particular conflicts. These features vary with circumstances and values. Grice reads Porter.The idea of the value chain is based on the process view of organizations, the idea of seeing a manufacturing (or service) organization as a system, made up of subsystems each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Inputs, transformation processes, and outputs involve the acquisition and consumption of resources – money, labour, materials, equipment, buildings, land, administration and management. How value chain activities are carried out determines costs and affects profits.In his choice of value system and value sub-system, Grice is defending objectivity, since it is usually the axiological relativist who uses such a pretentious phrasing! More than a value may co-ordinate in a system. One such is eudæmonia (cf. system of ends). The problem for Kant is the reduction of the categorical imperative to the hypothetical or suppositional imperative. For Kant, a value tends towards the Subjectsive. Grice, rather, wants to offer a metaphysical defence of objective value. Grice called the manual of conversational maxims the Conversational Immanuel. The keyword to search the H. P. Grice is ‘will,’ and ‘volitional,’ even ‘ill-will,’ (“Metaphysics and ill-will,” s. V, c. 7-f. 28) and ‘benevolence’ (vide below under ‘conversational benevolence”). Also ‘desirability’: “Modality, desirability, and probability,” s. V, c. 8-ff. 14-15, and the conference lecture in a different series, “Probability, desirability, and mood operators,” s. II, c. 2-f.11).  Grice makes systematic use of ‘practical’ to contrast with the ‘alethic,’ too (“Practical reason,” s. V, c. 9-f.1), The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.