The Pilgrim and the City of Eternal Truth

By J. L. Speranza

for the Grice Club, &c.



We do have then, this twelvefold antypathy, as Grice calls it towards this set of betes noires.

There are "menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well advertized journey. The items named in this catalogue are not to be identified with one another".

Even if the SCARES they provoke are Leibnizian in nature (vide N. Salmon for an exemplary treatment of the identity of indescirnable fears).

Grice's caveats here echo his own regarding the quartette of maxims (QUAN, QUAL, RELA and MODU)

"It is not easy,"

for example

"how anyone"

-- "except perhaps myself", he adds in brackets

"can couple support against phenomenalism
with support against physicalism"

--- Grice suggests that the Mother of them all is Minimalism. And she is to blame for the hardening of Grice's heart.

For he (This Minimalism is male) should be jailed by The Philosophical Trade Commision.

The Philosophical Trade Commission protects

not so much the philosopher's bread and butter, as Grice calls them, but the philosophical READER's bread-and-butter, metaphorical.

The philosophical reader likes to read a philosophical book. A philosophical book is supposed to provide a philosophical explanation.

But Miminalism is committing a crime -- a crime against our freedom for free trade.

Minimalism -- and his twelve odious critters are -- limiting "the range and resources", Grice writes, of, simpliciter, "philosophical explanation".

For each of the betes noires, then, there is a commodity,

e.g. "absolute value"

"knowledge"

"abstract entities"

-- for Naturalism, Scepticism and Nominalism respectively -- such that trade is regimented. Liberal Grice wants to license.