H. P. Grice, "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature"

P. F. STRAWON

"My best tutor."

I walked back to my college to pick up my mail, and was delighted to find a letter from John, who had an uncanny gift of never failing me.

He seemed to sense my questions before I could put them. Just as Oxford philosophy, in his words, "made a technique of being non-technical," John made a technique of helping his friends without apparent effort. It cheered me up to find out that his impatience with philosophy did not extend to his friend's researches. He said that I shouldn't miss seeing Strawson. "He not only is the best philosopher in the university but is also unrivalled as a teacher of it," John wrote. "He's discovering new stars in the philosophical firmament." Austin, he went on, had his equal in Strawson; indeed, at one meeting of the exclusive Aristotelian Society, creme de la crime of all philosophical societies, Strawson had roundly defeated Austin in a disputation about Truth — a truth that Austin had never acknowledged. Next day, I waited for P. F. Strawson, Fellow of Uni- versity College, Oxford, in his Senior Common Room. Strawson, who is considered by his tutor Mabbot to be the most high-powered and ereative philosopher in England, arrived just a little late and greeted me apologetically. He had blue eyes with what I took to be a permanently worried expression, and, at forty-one, looked like an elderly young man. At lunch, I asked him to tell me a little bit about himself, which he did, in a modest fashion that by now I had stopped associating with philosophers. He had been schooled in Finchley, a suburb of London, he said, and he had read for the PPE about the same time as Hare, Miss Murdoch, Miss Anscombe, Warnock. His career, like theirs, had been interrupted by the war, the close of which found him teaching in Wales. "I didn't know what provincialism was until I got there," he said. He had been delighted to get an appointment to Oxford, partly because Oxford had more philosophy in its curriculum than any other university. This, he explained, was the reason that a philosophy planted in Cambridge had flowered at Ox- ford. Cambridge now had only two eminent philosophers — John Wisdom and R. B. Braithwaite — while Oxford was swarming with them. Without the buzz-buzz, there would be no philosophy, he said; the university would be a hive minus the honey. After lunch, as I climbed up the steps to his room, I felt I was leaving the Oxford of lost causes behind me — the way he moved suggested subdued confidence. We sat by the window, and for some time, as we talked, I was aware of the acrobatic motions of Strawson's legs, which were now wrapped around one of the legs of a writing table and now slung over another chair. We talked about other philosophers as so many birds outside preying on the insects that Austin had dug up for them. I felt I'd reached the augur of philosophy. On the window sill were lying the proofs of an article called "Philosophy in England," which was stamped "Times Literary Supplement, Special Issue on the British Imagination." Strawson admitted that he was the author of the anonymous piece, and while he went to telephone for some coffee, I glanced, with his permission, at the first paragraph: An Australian philosopher, returning in i960 to the center of English philosophy after an absence of more than a decade, remarked on, and regretted, the change he found. He had left a revolutionary situation in which every new move was delightfully subversive and liberating. He returned to find that, though the subject appeared still to be confidently and energetically cultivated, the revolutionary ferment had quite subsided. Where there had been, it seemed to him, a general and triumphant movement in one direction, there were now a number of individuals and groups pursuing divergent interests and ends, often in a relatively traditional manner. When Strawson had returned to his chair, I asked him whether he agreed with the Australian philosopher. He said he did — that "the view of the Australian philosopher was essentially right." For a fuller statement of his own conclusions, he modestly directed me to the summary at the end of his article: Even in the heyday of the linguistic movement, it is doubtful whether it numbered among its adherents or semi-adherents more than a substantial minority of English philosophers. It was associated primarily with one place — Oxford — and there it centered around one man — Austin — its most explicit advocate and most acute and wholehearted practitioner. Its heyday was short. When a revolutionary movement begins to write its own history, something at least of its revolutionary impetus has been lost; and in the appearance of "The Revolution in Philosophy" [by A. J. Ayer, W. C. Kneale, G. A. Paul, D. F. Pears, P. F. Strawson, G. J. Warnock, and R. A. Wollheim, with an introduction by Ryle, 1956] . . . and of G. J. Warnock's "English Philosophy” there were signs that eyes were being lifted from the immediate task, indications of pause and change. Indeed, the pull of generality was felt by Austin himself, who, before he died, was beginning to work out a general classificatory theory of acts of linguistic communication. It is still too early to say what definite directions change will take. In spite of the work of Ayer, who never attached value to the linguistic idea, and who, in his most recent book, "The Problem of Knowledge" (1956), continued to uphold a traditional empiricism with unfailing elegance and skill, it seems unlikely that he or others will work much longer in the vein. There are portents, however, of a very different kind. One is the appearance of a persuasive study entitled "Hegel: A Re-examination" (1958), by J. N. Findlay. S. N. Hampshire's "Thought and Action,” with its linking of epistemology, philosophy of mind, and moral philosophy, is highly indicative of a trend from piecemeal studies towards bolder syntheses; it shows how the results of recent discussions can be utilized in a construction with both Hegelian and Spinozistic affinities. Strawson's "Individuals" (1959) suggests a scaled-down Kantiansm, pared of idealism on the one hand and a particular conception of physical science on the other. The philosophy of logic and language takes on a tauter line and a more formal tone in the work of logicians who derive their inspiration mainly from Frege. Finally, some of the most successful work of the period has been in the philosophy of mind; and it seems reasonable to suppose that further studies will follow upon Ryle's "Concept of Mind,” Wittgenstein's "Investigations,” and Miss Anscombe's "Intention"  and that, in them, Ryle's explicit and Wittgenstein's implicit suggestions of systematization will be refined and reassessed. The Australian philosopher had reason enough to claim that he found a changed situation. When knowledge of this fact of change finally filters through to those who habitually comment on the state of philosophy without any significant first-hand acquaintance with it, reactions of complacency may be expected. In the anticipated face of these it is worth reaffirming that the gains and advances made in the dozen years which followed the war were probably as great as any which have been made in an equivalent period in the history of the subject. A new level of refinement and accuracy in conceptual awareness has been reached, and an addition to philosophical method has been established which will, or should, be permanent. I wanted my augur to divine in more detail the flights of the philosophical birds, and asked him to tell me what was next. "Fifteen years ago," he began, with a nod to the past, "we were perhaps over-confident, and dismissed the problems of the great thinkers of the past as mere verbal confusions. It was right after the war, and we were mesmerized by Wittgenstein and Austin." Some were still under their spell, he continued, but within the last five years most had wandered out of the magic circle. "Was the Russell and Gellner charge of sterility in philosophy applicable, then, only to the first decade after the war?" I asked. He thought so, he said, adding, "They are thinking of things like Austin's Saturday mornings." He went on to tell me that these meetings admitted only Fellows, no professors or others senior to Austin. Austin and his pet colleagues – Grice was vice-president -- whiled away their Saturday mornings by distinguishing shades of meaning, implicatures, and the exact applications of words like "rules," "regulations," "principles," "maxims," "laws." "Even this method, sterile with everyone else, was fertile enough with Austin and his closest ‘soul,’ Grice" Strawson said, "though apparently not for Berlin and Hampshire. Berlin (who wasn’t Austin’s junior) didn't last very long, because the whole approach was uncongenial to him – he wasn’t English -- and in any case his genius lay in breathing life into the history of ideas. Most of the other brilliant philosophers, such as my tutor, Grice however, always turned up, and it was Grice’s St. John’s that Austin liked best" This was perhaps what gave Oxford  philosophy some sort of unity in the eyes of its critics, such as Gellner and Bergmann, Strawson thought, but they overlooked the fact that on weekdays Austin did encourage (with results) people to do research in the philosophy of perception — in philosophical psychology and philosophical physiology. "Even on his Saturday mornings he was coming around to more general sorts of questions," Strawson added, waggling his feet on the table. He then echoed a sentiment I'd heard again and again at Oxford: "Austin was one of the kindest men in the university." He went on, "As for the present, we are now rediscovering our way to the traditional way of doing philosophy. Ryle is composing a book on Plato and Aristotle, Warnock is reworking the problem of free will, and I'm writing a little volume on Kant." Thus, everything was now in ferment, and he imagined that the future might hold a philosophical synthesis chiselled and shaped with linguistic tools. Strawson's scout brought in some coffee, and both of us sipped it gratefully. I spent the remaining time piecing together Strawson's intellectual biography. He spent the early fifties writing "Introduction to Logical Theory," where he credits his tutor H. P. Grice, and in which he tried to explode Russell's theory that formal logic was the road to a perfect, unmessy language. Logic was simple and ordinary language was complex, Strawson maintained in this work, and therefore neither could supplant the other. But it was really his "Individuals," published in 1959, that contained his present views. He devoted the second half of the fifties to working out the distinctions presented in "Individuals." "In my 'Individuals,' " he said, "instead of analyzing the language, I ask, following a suggestion by Grice (with whom I gave seminars on Aristotle’s Categories) what the necessary conditions of language are. Like Kant, I reach the conclusion that objects exist in the category of space and the category of time, and that our language is derived from them, rather than the objects from the language. This enables me to state that the concept of a person precedes the idea of mind (Grice’s ‘self’) and body — that we think of a person, which includes mind and body, before we think of either mind (Grice’s self) or body. Through this concept of person I solve the old dualistic problem — how mind (Grice’s self) and body, if two separate entities, can interact on each other. I answer that I can think of myself as an objective person — which subsumes both mind and body — when I postulate the existence of another person, such as Grice. In my view, people's existence is objective in the same sense that, for example, this table is hard. It is hard because everyone agrees that it is hard, and it does not make any sense to say This is not so,' or to ask whether it is really hard. But if everyone had a different opinion about whether this table was hard or not, the fact of the table's hardness would, for that very reason, cease to be objective, and one would have to speak in some such terms as 1 have the peculiar sense of this table.' If people had peculiar senses of the table, it would deprive the table of existence. This argument holds for existence generally. For the existence of anything would be a private experience if people didn't agree about it. In my 'Individuals' I establish that agreement about the hard table is tantamount to saying that the table exists. But the sort of objectivity we ascribe to the hard table we cannot quite ascribe to pain, for example, because people do not agree about other people's pain, and people do not feel pain all at the same time. If they did, we should be able to talk about pain in the same way that we talk about the hard table. Nonetheless, I am able to establish that pain is objective." By now, his legs were completely entangled with those of the hard table, but it was quite clear to me that he was one thing and the hard table another, and that both of them (hard table more than he) were objective. It was also quite clear to me that if men were no longer just clockwork machines, or Pavlov's dogs with ivory-tower bells ringing for their intellectual food, then metaphysics ( or the mind ) — which until the publication of Straw- son's "Individuals" Oxford philosophers thought they had discarded forever — was now back in the picture. With the edifying thought that I had a mind in some sense as objective as my body, I took my leave of the scaled-down Kant. I returned to my college and found John in its buttery; he had come up to consult some classical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. Once beer was served, we settled down on a bench in a corner. "I don't really want to talk your subject," John said, smiling, "but my curiosity has got the better of me." "I've just come from Strawson," I said. "He explained to me his notions about mind and body, but I did find them difficult. What do you think about them?" "As I told you in London," he began, reluctantly but good-humoredly, "I only skimmed the second half of 'Individuals.' " "Yes, yes," I said. "Go on." "The ideas contained in Individuals' have a very long history," John said. "Without going into all of it, you know that in the thirties Wittgenstein talked a lot about the problem of mind and body. His pupils kept elaborate authorized notes, which were only recently published as 'The Blue and Brown Books.' It was during his lifetime that Ryle brought out his 'The Concept of Mind,' which galled Wittgenstein very much, since it contained many of his unpublished ideas. Ryle had reached most of his conclusions independently, but this did not assuage Wittgenstein, who had allowed himself to be beaten at the publishing game." John swallowed some beer and then fumbled in several pockets for tobacco, pipe cleaner, and matches. As he filled his pipe, he blew a question in my direction: "Would you like to know something about 'The Concept of Mind?" I said I would, especially since Ryle, for personal reasons, was unable to see me. "Well, it is a great work and has had enormous influence," John said. "In this book, Ryle talks about the question 'What is knowledge?' and also talks, more significantly, about what he calls, or, rather, what he caricatures as, 'die dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.'" The behaviorists, he went on to explain, had maintained that there was no mind but only a body — Pavlov's dogs — and that all statements supposedly about the mind were covertly about the body. For them, thinking came down to merely a movement of the larynx, for when you think you can feel your throat move, as if you were talking to yourself. Ryle became convinced that the behaviorists had not conquered the classic problem of the mind and the body, and went on to ask the classic question of how one gets from the mind to the body — how the two halves meet. When I feel a pain, how do I get, say, from the pinched nerve ends to sensing a pain; or when I am revolted by a bad smell, how does, say, the sulphur applied to my nostrils find its way to the inside of my mind? In "The Concept of Mind," Ryle, like the behaviorists, dismissed the com- monly held theory, formulated by Descartes, among others, that the human person consists of two halves, the mind and the body, the body being material, or visible, audible, tastable, touchable, and smellable, and the mind being spiritual, or invisible, inaudible, untastable, untouchable, and unsmellable. He caricatured this dualism as the Ghost in the Machine. The Ghost-in-the-Machine men thought that when one said "I feel a pain" or "I see a flash," one was referring to a private mental act; such acts, unlike the movements of the body, were not veri- fiable except by the person who performed them. "Ryle, agreeing with the behaviorists, said that in fact we know perfectly well whether other people want things and hate things and know things," John continued. "You tell whether someone knows something by his actions. If I say 'I know how to read,' this doesn't say anything about the private state of my mind, invisible, inaudible, and so on, but just means that if you put a book in front of me I can read it. That kind of thing. There's a whole series of potential statements that can thus be 'unpacked' — Ryle's expression — at will. Ryle reached the triumphant conclusion that there are not two parts to the person but, rather, one entity, which is — well, it's not just body. This conclusion is not quite behaviorism — which doesn't recognize any mind — but posits a machine with a plus. As always, though, various people were soon as dissatisfied with Ryle as he had been with the behaviorists, and as the behaviorists had been with Descartes' Ghost-in-the-Machine man. For my part, I've never been very clear what's supposed to be wrong with 'The Concept of Mind,' except that I myself do believe that there is a ghost in the machine and I do not see how you can get on without one. I realize that this attitude is disreputable. I mean absolutely disreputable, not just unprofessional, for today my belief would be considered full of logical lacunae." Because I wanted John to make a connection between Ryle and Strawson before I lost "The Concept" in the philosophical fog in my mind, I didn't pause to commiserate with him but pressed on. "How does Strawson improve on Ryle?" I asked. "Strawson is very good in this, because he tries to preserve something from Descartes, on the one hand, and behaviorism revised by Ryle, on the other," John said. "He says that you can't understand the meaning of the word 'thinking' unless you can understand both its mental and its physical aspects. Take pain, for example. Descartes would have said that pain was only a mental occurrence; the behaviorists, with modifications from Ryle, said that pain was mere physical behavior — hopping up and down and going 'Ow!' or something like that. But Strawson says that you can't understand the word 'pain' unless you understand both its aspects: (1) the hopping around and ( 2 ) the f eeling of pain; and that since both other people and I hop around when we are in pain, and since both also feel it, pain is checkable, is, in a way, objective. Thus, by including both these aspects in the concept of 'persons' (which in turn includes oneself and other people), he is able to add further pluses to the old machine. Strawson's on to something new, but all the philosophers here are niggling at one or two logical flaws in his chapter on persons, because most of them still tend to cling to behaviorism. There's one chap, Malcolm, who carries behaviorism to such an extreme that he says that even to dream is merely to acquire a disposition to tell stories in the morning." John rose to go. "I must get to the Bodleian before it closes," he said. "One or two minutes more, John," I begged, and he accepted another half pint. John told me a few things about Ryle. He came from a family of clerical dignitaries, and this probably explained his anticlericalism. He was educated in a "marginal public school" and at Queen's. He read P.P.E.!  The Senior Common Room atmosphere — any Common Room would do — fitted him like a glove. He essentially liked drinking beer with his fellow-men. He pretended to dislike intellectual matters and publicized his distaste for reading, but he had been known to reveal encyclopedic knowledge of Fielding and Jane Austen. He loves gardening, and he also loved going to philosophical con- ventions, where his charm overwhelms everyone. Philosophers swarmed round him and he is too kind to them. He was a perfect Victorian gentleman; he would have been a sitting duck for Matthew Arnold's criticism of Philistinism, just as he actually was for Gellner's attack on idle philosophy. "Once, Ryle saw Berlin coming from a performance of Bach's B-Minor Mass in the Sheldonian," John said. "Berlin was totally absorbed by the moving experience he had just undergone. Ryle shouted to him across the Broad, ‘Isaiah, have you been listening to some tunes again?' " John put down his mug and stood up. "I really must go," he said. "I hope you won't assume from my hasty picture of Ryle that I don't like him. Actually, he's a very lovable man, and a highly intelligent one. I simply don't share his distrust of imagination. You know, Hume devoted very little space in all his works to the imagina-tion. He said that it was only a peculiar faculty of mind that could combine primary experiences, enabling one to picture centaurs and mermaids. Well, Ryle has very much te same conception. His own images are mundane, like so many gateposts, firm in the ground." John waved and departed.