Grice's R

rationality: ‘Rationality’ is one of those words Austin forbids to use. Grice would venture with ‘reason,’ and better, ‘reasons’ to make it countable, and good for botanising. Only in the New World, and when he started to get input from non-philosophers, did Grice explore ‘rationality’ itself. Oxonians philosophers take it for granted, and do not have to philosophise about it. Especially those who belong to Grice’s play group of ‘ordinary-language’ philosophers! Oxonian philosophers will quote from the Locke version! Obviously, while each of the four lectures credits their own entry below, it may do to reflect on Grices overall aim. Grice structures the lectures in the form of a philosophical dialogue with his audience. The first lecture is intended to provide a bit of linguistic botanising for reasonable, and rational. In later lectures, Grice tackles reason qua noun. The remaining lectures are meant to explore what he calls the Aequi-vocality thesis: must has only one Fregeian that crosses what he calls the buletic-doxastic divide. He is especially concerned  ‒ this being the Kant lectures  ‒ with Kants attempt to reduce the categorical imperative to a counsel of prudence (Ratschlag der Klugheit), where Kants prudence is Klugheit, versus skill, as in rule of skill, and even if Kant defines Klugheit as a skill to attain what is good for oneself  ‒ itself divided into privatKlugheit and Weltklugheit. Kant re-introduces the Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia. While a further lecture on happiness as the pursuit of a system of ends is NOT strictly part of the either the Kant or the Locke lectures, it relates, since eudaemonia may be regarded as the goal involved in the relevant imperative.  “Aspects”, Clarendon, Stanford, The Kant memorial Lectures, “Aspects,” Clarendon, Some aspects of reason, Stanford; reason, reasoning, reasons. The lectures were also delivered as the Locke lectures. Grice is concerned with the reduction of the categorical imperative to the hypothetical or suppositional imperative. His main thesis he calls the æqui-vocality thesis: must has one unique or singular sense, that crosses the buletic-boulomaic/doxastic divide. “Aspects,” Clarendon, Grice, “Aspects, Clarendon, Locke lecture notes: reason. On “Aspects”. Including extensive language botany on rational, reasonable, and indeed reason (justificatory, explanatory, and mixed). At this point, Grice notes that linguistic botany is indispensable towards the construction of a more systematic explanatory theory. It is an exploration of a range of uses of reason that leads him to his Aequi-vocality thesis that must has only one sense; also ‘Aspects of reason and reasoning,’ in Grice, “Aspects,” Clarendon, the Locke lectures, the Kant lectures, Stanford, reason, happiness. While Locke hardly mentions reason, his friend Burthogge does, and profusely! It was slightly ironic that Grice had delivered these lectures as the Rationalist Kant lectures at Stanford. He was honoured to be invited to Oxford. Officially, to be a Locke lecture you have to be *visiting* Oxford. While Grice was a fellow of St. Johns, he was still most welcome to give his set of lectures on reasoning at the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. He quotes very many authors, including Locke! In his proemium, Grice notes that while he was rejected the Locke scholarship back in the day, he was extremely happy to be under Lockes ægis now! When preparing for his second lecture, he had occasion to revise some earlier drafts dated pretty early, on reasons, Grice, “Aspects,” Clarendon, reason, reasons. Linguistic analysis on justificatory, explanatory and mixed uses of reason. While Grice knows that the basic use of reason is qua verb (reasoner reasons from premise p to conclusion c), he spends some time in exploring reason as noun. Grice found it a bit of a roundabout way to approach rationality. However, his distinction between justificatory and explanatory reason is built upon his linguistic botany on the use of reason qua noun. Explanatory reason seems more basic for Grice than justificatory reason. Explanatory reason explains the behaviour of a rational agent. Grice is aware of Freud and his rationalizations. An agent may invoke some reason for his acting which is not legitimate. An agent may convince himself that he wants to move to Bournemouth because of the weather; when in fact, his reason to move to Bournemouth is to be closer to Cowes and join the yacht club there. Grice loved an enthymeme. Grices enthymeme. Grice, the implicit reasoner! As the title of the lecture implies, Grice takes the verb, to reason, as conceptually prior. A reasoner reasons, briefly, from a premise to a conclusion. There are types of reason: flat reason and gradual reason. He famously reports Shropshire, another tutee with Hardie, and his proof on the immortality of the human soul. Grice makes some remarks on akrasia as key, too. The first lecture is then dedicated to an elucidation, and indeed attempt at a conceptual analysis in terms of intentions and doxastic conditions reasoner R intends that premise P yields conclusion C and believes his intention will cause his entertaining of the conclusion from his entertaining the premise. One example of particular interest for a study of the use of conversational reason in Grice is that of the connection between implicatum and reasoning. Grice entitles the sub-section of the lecture as Too good to be reasoning, which is of course a joke. Cf. too much love will kill you, and Theres no such thing as too much of a good thing (Shakespeare, As you like it). Grice notes: I have so far been considering difficulties which may arise from the attempt to find, for all cases of actual reasoning, reconstructions of sequences of utterances or explicit thoughts which the reasoner might plausibly be supposed to think of as conforming to some set of canonical patterns of inference. Grice then turns to a different class of examples, with regard to which the problem is not that it is difficult to know how to connect them with canonical patterns, but rather that it is only too easy (or shall I say trivial) to make the connection. Like some children (not many), some cases of reasoning are too well behaved for their own good. Suppose someone says to Grice, and It is very interesting that Grice gives conversational examples. Jack has arrived, Grice replies, I conclude from that that Jack has arrived. Or he says Jack has arrived AND Jill has *also* arrived, And Grice replies, I conclude that Jill has arrived.(via Gentzens conjunction-elimination). Or he says, My wife is at home. And Grice replies, I reason from that that someone (viz. your wife) is at home. Is there not something very strange about the presence in my three replies of the verb conclude (in example I and II) and the verb reason (in the third example)? misleading, but doxastically fine, professor! It is true, of course, that if instead of my first reply I had said (vii) vii. So Jack has arrived, has he? the strangeness would have been removed. But here so serves not to indicate that an inference is being made, but rather as part of a not that otiose way of expressing surprise. One might just as well have said (viii). viii. Well, fancy that! Now, having spent a sizeable part of his life exploiting it, Grice is not unaware of the truly fine distinction between a statements being false (or axiologically satisfactory), and its being true (or axiologically satisfactory) but otherwise conversationally or pragmatically misleading or inappropriate or pointless, and, on that account and by such a fine distinction, a statement, or an utterance, or conversational move which it would be improper (in terms of the reasonable/rational principle of conversational helfpulness) in one way or another, to make. It is worth considering Grices reaction to his own distinction. Entailment is in sight! But Grice does not find himself lured by the idea of using that distinction here! Because Moores entailment, rather than Grices implicatum is entailed. Or because explicatu, rather than implicatum is involved. Suppose, again, that I were to break off the chapter at this point, and switch suddenly to this argument. ix. I have two hands (here is one hand and here is another). If had three more hands, I would have five. If I were to have double that number I would have ten, and if four of them were removed six would remain. So I would have four more hands than I have now. Is one happy to describe this performance as reasoning? Depends whos one and whats happy!? There is, however, little doubt that I have produced a canonically acceptable chain of statements. So surely that is reasoning, if only conversationally misleadingly called so. Or suppose that, instead of writing in my customary free and easy style, I had framed my remarks (or at least the argumentative portions of my remarks) as a verbal realization, so to speak, of sequences of steps in strict conformity with the rules of a natural-deduction system of first-order predicate logic. I give, that is to say, an updated analogue of a medieval disputation. Implicature. Gentzen is Ockham. Would those brave souls who continued to read be likely to think of my performance as the production of reasoning, or would they rather think of it as a crazy formalisation of reasoning conducted at some previous time? Depends on crazy or formalisation. One is reminded of Grice telling Strawson, If you cannot formalise, dont say it; Strawson: Oh, no! If I can formalise it, I shant say it! The points suggested by this stream of rhetorical questions may be summarized as follows. Whether the samples presented FAIL to achieve the title of reasoning, and thus be deemed reasoning, or whether the samples achieve the title, as we may figuratively put it, by the skin of their teeth, perhaps does not very greatly matter. For whichever way it is, the samples seem to offend against something (different things in different cases, Im sure) very central to our conception of reasoning. So central that Moore would call it entailment! A mechanical application of a ground rule of inference, or a concatenation thereof, is reluctantly (if at all) called reasoning. Such a mechanical application may perhaps legitimately enter into (i.e. form individual steps in) authentic reasonings, but they are not themselves reasonings, nor is a string of them. There is a demand that a reasoner should be, to a greater or lesser degree, the author of his reasonings. Parroted sequences are not reasonings when parroted, though the very same sequences might be reasoning if not parroted. Ped sequences are another matter. Some of the examples Grice gives are deficient because they are aimless or pointless. Reasoning is characteristically addressed to this or that problem: a small problem, a large problem, a problem within a problem, a clear problem, a hazy problem, a practical problem, an intellectual problem; but a problem! A mere flow of ideas minimally qualifies (or can be deemed) as reasoning, even if it happens to be logically respectable. But if it is directed, or even monitored (with intervention should it go astray, not only into fallacy or mistake, but also into such things as conversational irrelevance or otiosity!), that is another matter! Finicky over-elaboration of intervening steps is frowned upon, and in extreme cases runs the risk of forfeiting the title of reasoning. In conversation, such over-elaboration will offend against this or that conversational maxim, against (presumably) some suitably formulated maxim conjoining informativeness. As Grice noted with regard to ‘That pillar box seems red to me.’ That would be baffling if the addressee fails to detect the communication-point. An utterance is supposed to inform, and what is the above meant to inform its addressee? In thought, it will be branded as pedantry or neurotic caution. If a distinction between brooding and conversing is to be made! At first sight, perhaps, one would have been inclined to say that greater rather than lesser explicitnessness is a merit. Not that inexplicitness, or implicatum-status, as it were ‒ is bad, but that, other things being equal, the more explicitness the better. But now it looks as if proper explicitness (or explicatum-status) is an Aristotelian mean, or mesotes, and it would be good some time to enquire what determines where that mean lies. The burden of the foregoing observations seems to me to be that the provisional account of reasoning, which has been before us, leaves out something which is crucially important. What it leaves out is the conception of reasoning, as I like to see conversation, as a purposive activity, as something with goals and purposes. The account or picture leaves out, in short, the connection of reasoning with the will! Moreover, once we avail ourselves of the great family of additional ideas which the importation of this conception would give us, we shall be able to deal with the quandary which I laid before you a few minutes ago. For we could say e.g. that R reasons (informally) from p to c just in case R thinks that p and intends that, in thinking c, he should be thinking something which would be the conclusion of a formally valid argument the premisses of which are a supplementation of p. This will differ from merely thinking that there exists some formally valid supplementation of a transition from p to c, which I felt inclined NOT to count as (or deem) reasoning. I have some hopes that this appeal to the purposiveness or goal-oriented character of authentic reasoning or good reasoning might be sufficient to dispose of the quandary on which I have directed it. But I am by no means entirely confident that this is the case, and so I offer a second possible method of handling the quandary, one to which I shall return later when I shall attempt to place it in a larger context. We have available to us (let us suppose) what I might call a hard way of making inferential moves. We in fact employ this laborious, step-by-step procedure at least when we are in difficulties, when the course is not clear, when we have an awkward (or philosophical) audience, and so forth. An inferential judgement, however, is a normally desirable undertaking for us only because of its actual or hoped for destinations, and is therefore not desirable for its own sake (a respect in which, possibly, it may differ from an inferential capacity). Following the hard way consumes time and energy. These are in limited supply and it would, therefore, be desirable if occasions for employing the hard way were minimized. A substitute for the hard way, the quick way, which is made possible by habituation and intention, is available to us, and the capacity for it (which is sometimes called intelligence, and is known to be variable in degree) is a desirable quality. The possibility of making a good inferential step (there being one to be made), together with such items as a particular inferers reputation for inferential ability, may determine whether on a particular occasion we suppose a particular transition to be inferential (and so to be a case of reasoning) or not. On this account, it is not essential that there should be a single supplementation of an informal reasoning which is supposed to be what is overtly in the inferers mind, though quite often there may be special reasons for supposing this to be the case. So Botvinnik is properly credited with a case of reasoning, while Shropshire is not. Drawing from his recollections of an earlier linguistic botany on reason. Grice distinguishes between justificatory reason and explanatory reason. There is a special case of mixed reason, explanatory-cum-justificatory. The lecture can be seen as the way an exercise that Austin took as taxonomic can lead to explanatory adequacy, too! Bennett is an excellent correspondent. He holds a very interesting philosophical correspondence with Hare. This is just one f. with Grices correspondence with Bennett. Oxford don, Christchurh, NZ-born Bennett, of Magdalen, B. Phil. Oxon. Bennett has an essay on the interpretation of a formal system under Austin. It is interesting that Bennett was led to consider the interpretation of a formal system under Austins Play Group. Bennett attends Grices seminars. He is my favourite philosopher. Bennett quotes Grice in his Linguistic behaviour. In return, Grice quotes Bennett in the Preface toWOW. Bennett has an earlier essay on rationality, which evidences that the topic is key at Grices Oxford. Bennett has studied better than anyone the way Locke is Griceian. A word or expression does not just stand for idea, but for the intention of the utterer to stand for it! Grice also enjoyed construal by Bennett of Grice as a nominalist. Bennett makes a narrow use of the epithet. Since Grice does distinguish between an utterance-token (x) and an utterance-type, and considers that the attribution of meaning from token to type is metabolic, this makes Grice a nominalist. Bennett is one of the few to follow Kantotle and make him popular on the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, of all places. Refs.: The locus classicus is “Aspects,” Clarendon. But there are allusions on ‘reason’ and ‘rationality, in The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.