"palaeo-Griceian" -- from Grice's Dictionary

palæo-Griceian: H. P. Grice was the first member of the play group to come up with a system of ‘pragmatic rules.’ Or perhaps he wasn’t. In any case, palaeo-Griceian refers to any attempt by someone who is an Oxonian English philosopher who suggested something like H. P. Grice later did! There are palaeo-Griceian suggestions in Bradley – “Logic” --, Bosanquet, J. C. Wilson (“Statement and inference”) and a few others. Within those who interacted with Grice to provoke him into the ‘pragmatic rule’ account were two members of the play group. One was not English, but a Scot: G. A. Paul. Paul had been to ‘the other place,’ and was at Oxford trying to spread Witters’s doctrine. The bafflement one gets from “I certainly don’t wish to cast any doubt on the matter, but that pillar box seems red to me; and the reason why it is does, it’s because it is red, and its redness causes in my sense of vision the sense-datum that the thing is red.” Grice admits that he first came out with the idea when confronted with this example. Mainly Grice’s motivation is to hold that such a ‘statement’ (if statement, it is, -- vide Bar-Hillel) is true. The other member was English: P. F. Strawson. And Grice notes that it was Strawson’s Introduction to logical theory that motivated him to apply a technique which had proved successful in the area of the philosophy of perception to this idea by Strawson that Whitehead and Russell are ‘incorrect.’ Again, Grice’s treatment concerns holding a ‘statement’ to be ‘true.’

Besides these two primary cases, there are others. First, is the list of theses in “Causal Theory.” None of them are assigned to a particular philosopher, so the research may be conducted towards the identification of these. The theses are, besides the one he is himself dealing, the sense-datum ‘doubt or denial’ implicatum: One, What is actual is not also possible. Two, What is known to be the case is not also believed to be the case. Three, Moore was guilty of misusing the lexeme ‘know.’ Four, To say that someone is responsible is to say that he is accountable for something condemnable. Six, A horse cannot look like a horse. Now, in “Prolegomena” he add further cases. Again, since this are palaeo-Griceian, it may be a matter of tracing the earliest occurrences. In “Prolegomena,” Grice divides the examples in Three Groups. The last is an easy one to identity: the ‘performatory’ approach: for which he gives the example by Strawson on ‘true,’ and mentions two other cases: a performatory use of ‘I know’ for I guarantee; and the performatory use of ‘good’ for ‘I approve’ (Ogden). The second group is easy to identify since it’s a central concern and it is exactly Strawson’s attack on Whitehead and Russell. But Grice is clear here. It is mainly with regard to ‘if’ that he wants to discuss Strawson, and for which he quotes him at large. Before talking about ‘if’, he mentions the co-ordinating connectives ‘and’ and ‘or’, without giving a source. So, here there is a lot to research about the thesis as held by other philosophers even at Oxford (where, however, ‘logic’ was never considered a part of philosophy proper). The first group is the most varied, and easier to generalise, because it refers to any ‘sub-expression’ held to occur in a full expression which is held to be ‘inappropriate.’ Those who judge the utterance to be inappropriate are sometimes named. Grice starts with Ryle and The Concept of Mind – palaeo-Griceian, in that it surely belongs to Grice’s previous generation. It concerns the use of the adverb ‘voluntary’ and Grice is careful to cite Ryle’s description of the case, using words like ‘incorrect,’ and that a ‘sense’ claimed by philosophers is an absurd one. Then there is a third member of the playgroup – other than G. A. Paul and P. F. Strawson – the Master Who Wobbles, J. L. Austin. Grice likes the way Austin offers himself as a good target – Austin was dead by then, and Grice would otherwise not have even tried – Austin uses variables: notably Mly, and a general thesis, ‘no modification without aberration.’ But basically, Grice agrees that it’s all about the ‘philosophy of action.’ So in describing an agent’s action, the addition of an adverb makes the whole thing inappropriate. This may relate to at least one example in “Causal” involving ‘responsible.’ While Grice there used the noun and adjective, surely it can be turned into an adverb. The fourth member of the playgroup comes next: H. L. A. Hart. Grice laughs at Hart’s idea that to add ‘carefully’ in the description of an action the utterer is committed to the idea that the agent THINKS the steps taken for the performance are reasonable. There is a thesis he mentions then which alla “Causal Theory,” gets uncredited – about ‘trying.’ But he does suggest Witters. And then there is his own ‘doubt or denial’ re: G. A. Paul, and another one in the field of the philosophy of perception that he had already mentioned vaguely in “Causal”: a horse cannot look like a horse. Here he quotes Witters in extenso, re: ‘seeing as.’ While Grice mentions ‘philosophy of action,’ there is at least one example involving ‘philosophical psychology’: B. S. Benjamin on C. D. Broad on the factiveness of ‘remember.’ When one thinks of all the applications that the ‘conversational model’ has endured, one realizes that unless your background is philosophical, you are bound not to realise the centrality of Grice’s thesis for philosophical methodology.