"nowell-smithianism" -- from THESAVRVS GRICEIANVM

Nowell-smithianism. “The Nowell is redundant,” Grice would say. P. H. Nowell-Smith adopted the “Nowell” after his father’s first name. In “Ethics,” he elaborates on what he calls ‘contextual implication.’ The essay was widely read, and has a freshness that other ‘meta-ethicist’ at Oxford seldom display. His ‘contextual implication’ compares of course to Grice’s ‘conversational implicature.’ Indeed, by using ‘conversational implicature,’ Grice is following an Oxonian tradition started with C. K. Grant and his ‘pragmatic implication,’ and P. H. Nowell-Smith and his ‘contextual implication.’ At Oxford, they were obsessed with these types of ‘implicata,’ because it was the type of thing that a less subtle philosopher would ignore. Grice’s cancellability priority for his type of implicata hardly applies to Nowell-Smith. Nowell-Smith never displays the ‘rationalist’ bent that Grice wants to endow to his principle of conversational co-operation. Nowell-Smith, rather, calls his ‘principles’ “rules of conversational etiquette.” If you revise the literature, you will see that things like “avoid ambiguity,” “don’t play unnecessary with words,” are listed indeed in what is called a ‘conversational manual,’ of ‘conversational etiquette,’ that is. In his rationalist bent, Grice narrows down the use of ‘conversational’ to apply to ‘conversational maxim,’ which is only a UNIVERSALISABLE one, towards the overarching goal of rational co-operation. In this regard, many of the rules of ‘conversational etiquette’ (Grice even mentions ‘moral rules,’ and a rule like ‘be polite’) to fall outside the principle of conversational helpfulness, and thus, not exactly generating a ‘conversational implicatum.’ While Grice gives room to allow such non-conversational non-conventional implicata to be ‘calculable,’ that is, ‘rationalizable, by ‘argument,’ he never showed any interest in giving one example – for the simple reason that none of those ‘maxims’ generated the type of ‘mistake’ on the part of this or that philosopher, as he was interested in rectifying.