How many angels?

Grice, Anglo philosophy, and 'mean'
---- by JLS
------- for the GC

---- HAVING JUST POSTED ON ALL that verbal pyrotechnic that the Latin language allows ('implicatum', 'implicans', 'implicanda', 'implicatio', etc.) one wonders. I don't!

But allow me a few points:

(1) Had it not been by the fact (it is a fact) that English philosophy is what it is, Grice would not have been what he has been. I.e. all the distinctions he tried to make: 'natural, non-natural meaning', 'implicature', etc. make little sense in languages with a stronger 'continental' tradition.

(2) Grice's point is partly sophistic or scholastic -- he does quote "How many angels...?". He was not interested in 'conversation' (let alone in 'implicature') per se, but only as manoeuvres to deal with some trends in the philosophy of his day (the polemic 'meaning' versus 'use', for example).

(3) His was an 'applied' philosophy of language. One reads linguists' reading of Grice and you might think that, hey, this philosopher (if philosopher you think he was -- the OED does not: 'British linguist' he gets defined as) was onto language. But he was not. He was, properly, onto philosophy. His philosophy of language is schematic and meant to provide some background to his philosophical distinctions of a more abstract, theoretical nature (in 'ontology', and properly, 'theory of perception').

(4) Etc.