H. P. Grice, "Oxonian dialectic *is* Athenian dialectic"

Athenian and Oxonian dialectic.

As Grice puts it, "Socrates, like us, was really trying to solve linguistic puzzles."

This is especially true in the longer dialogues of Plato — the 'Republic' and the Laws'— where we learn quite a lot about Socrates' method and philosophy, filtered, of course, through his devoted pupil's mind.

Some of the Pre-Socratics, who provide Plato and his master with many of their problems, were in difficulties about how one thing could be two things at once — say, a white horse. 

How could you say 'This is a horse and this is white' without saying 'This one thing is two things'? 

Socrates and Plato together solved this puzzle by saying that what was meant by saying 

'The horse is white' 

is that the horse partakes of the eternal, and perfect, Form horseness, which was invisible but really more horselike than any worldly Dobbin; and ditto about the Form whiteness: it was whiter than any earthly white. 

The theory of Form covers our whole world of ships and shoes and humpty-dumptys, which, taken all in all, are shadows — approximations of those invisible, perfect Forms. 

Using the sharp tools in our new linguistic chest, we can whittle Plato down to size and say that he invented his metaphysical world of Forms to solve the problem of different kinds of 'is'es -- what Grice calls the 'izz' proper and the 'izz' improper ('strictly, a 'hazz').

You see how Grice, an Oxford counterpart of Plato, uses a very simple grammatical tool in solving problems like this. 

Instead of conjuring up an imaginary edifice of Forms, he simply says there are two different types of 'is'es — one of predication and one of identity -- 'the izz' and the 'hazz not.' 

The first, the 'izz' (which is really a 'hazz' -- it is a 'hizz' for Socrates being 'rational') asserts a quality: this is white.' 

The second 'hazz' points to the object named: 'This is a horse.' 

By this simple grammatical analysis we clear away the rubble of what were Plato's Forms. 

That's why an Oxford philosopher loves Aristotle -- and his Athenian dialectic -- (Plato worked in suburbia, The Academy) -- who often, when defining a thing — for example, 'virtue' — asked himself, 'Does the definition square with the ordinary views (ta legomena) of men?' 

But while Grice does have this or that antecedent, he is surely an innovator in concentrating MOST (if not all) of his attention on what he calls 'the conversational implicature.'


Grice has little patience with past philosophers.

Why bother listening to men whose problems arose from bad grammar? (He excludes Ariskant here).