Grice, "Some remarks about the senses" in WoW

--- By JLS
------ for the Grice Club.

---- I THANK LARRY J. KRAMER FOR KEEPING ME UPDATE ON THIS. WE WERE RECENTLY discussing sense-discrimination. And there's this new essay, 'discriminating senses'. When I read the title of this, I thought -- Occam's razor! i.e. I was thinking of senses alla Frege! But no, it's senses as in common sense.

Kramer and I were recently discussing this, and I thank him for updating me re this essay by M. Nudd in the Philosopher's Magazine at

Nudd on Grice 1966

-- the unactivated link, for easy reference being: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=98 -- (* Kramer will say this is not efficient: the whole point of activating a link is sparing the addressee of ugly long addresses, but what if someone is copying and pasting, or if this turns onto pdf? I suppose to have a non-activated plain text link may help -- I shall find ways to avoid clumsiness of this -- e.g. by calling the 'link', say, just "Nudd" and having the plain-text thing in full, or something).

compleat (can someone explain if this is just stupidly facetious? to spell 'complete' like 'compleat'? I feel terribly towards that spelling but wonder) with an excellent ref. that Kramer pointed out to me (in his note when forewarding the message) on the specific paragraph. That's what I love! Focused references and all.

Before I comment on Nudd, who teaches at Edinburgh, I would like to appreciate the work of J. O. Urmson who had the cheek (or moxie) to lecture at the British Academy, and before Grice at that, on "The Objects of the Five Senses"! I love that essay, which is nicely printed out by Clarendon for the Academy.

The Grice piece is an earlier thing and I see that Nudd quotes from the WoW reprint -- it was indeed 1966 ed Butler, "Analytic Philosophy". -- It did create a sort of secondary literature, notably Coady (an Australian) on "The senses of the Martians", and I like to think of Grice as an originator of this sort of Martian examples. Avant Putnam, say. The Gedanken Experimenten that philosophers started to being so prone to.

--- In the case of Grice, the Martians have this pair of 'extra eyes', so that their seeing-that-p discriminates into x-ing that p (with the lower pair of eyes) and y-ing that p (with their higher pair), with them having say in English, "Oh, it makes ALL The difference in the world whether we are x-ing that the pillar box is red or y-ing that the pillar box is red."

Nudd starts his essay with the appropriate mention of Aristotle, out of whom the idea of 'koine aisthesis' (sensus communis) originates.

Nudd quotes Grice with respect to this 'experiential' qualia that need to be accounted for in a philosophy (rather than science of perception). He writes:

"As Paul Grice says in Studies in the Way of Words,

------ “such experiences as ... seeing and feeling
------ seem to be, as it were, diaphanous: if we were
------ asked to pay close attention, on a given occasion,
------ to our seeing and feeling as distinct from
------ what was being seen or felt, we should not know
------ how to proceed; and the attempt to describe the
------ differences between seeing and feeling seems to
------ dissolve into a description of what we see and feel.”

The full meaning of this is pretty complex, but what strikes me as fascinating is:

* * * * * * * G. J. Warnock.

Warnock died of cancer to the throat in 1998, ten years after Grice, but neither of them ever got to publish their joint work. At least we know that the things ARE deposited in the Grice Collection at Bancroft, Berkeley. I had of course heard of their joint endeavours but it was only recently that I was able to get hold of archival material (as cited by Chapman, _Grice_, for Palgrave). What Grice and Warnock did discuss for decades -- as they gave joint 'seminars' in the philosophy of perception as "university lecturers" was --

the visum of a cow

--- I cannot see why Chapman focuses on this being a neologism, or on Warnock and Grice -- or Grice and Warnock, since Warnock was Grice's junior by 11 years -- thinking they had discovered a gap in English. Eventually they declared the neologism -- Latin 'visum' indeed, nothing new about it -- to be a grand otiosity: While I can hear the mooing of a cow, to the the sight seen of a cow (rather than just seeing _her_) is something that a repels the Maxim of Quantity (do not be more informative than is required). An unefficient move to make, to abide by Kramer's Principle of Efficiency. Of course, we ARE provided with the 'syntax of illusion': that Magalasyan ruminant looks like a cow but it's not a bovis bovis. It's a bovis speranzae, say -- a 'cow' by a stretch. Actually the natives don't use the word 'cow' to describe it. And 'kuw' is an old widespread Indo-European notion -- vide Horn on 'cow' -- so they should know.

Nudd keeps on quoting from Grice --. Note that the diaphanous, a beautiful Greek word used by Grice is ambiguous. We are led to believe that if we say,

"I see my mother"

--- my mother has to be there to be seen. To see is diaphanous. (Oddly, I will be singing tomorrow Mother Machree for St. Patrick's day -- and I'll have to go over the refrain, "I kiss the dear fingers so torn worn for me" -- so if I feel my mother's fingers, there should, as Grice says above -- comprising 'see' and 'feel' -- there to be felt -- never mind kissed. (But I'm not sure 'feel' works like this. Grice had problems with 'feel' -- Austin suggested: Look it up in the dictionary. Grice went as far as the By- and finding that 'feeling Byzantine' made a lot of sense, he gave up going through the dictionary, and well he did too.

What 'see' does not share with 'feel', at leat in the philosophy literature, is the 'causal' link. I recall how fascinated I was when finding in the local library kept by the British Council a copy of Vesey, Symposium on Perception, held at Lancaster with contributions not just by Warnock but by a student of Grice's -- and mate of R. Hal -- Roxbee Cox, who I corresponded with. Warnock's essay, "On what is seen" IS repr. in another gem of a compilation of Oxonian philosophy: his Blackwell volume "Language and Morality" -- title misleading since it includes things on perception, philosophy of language, and history of philosophy.

Re the latter, I always treasured Warnock reporting Grice, "How clever language is!" vis a vis the unneed, as it were, to have visa all over the place.

But back to Nudd. He writes:

Grice’s own solution is to suppose that experiences have a special introspectible character

“which resists both inspection and description”;

when we describe our visual experiences we do so, he says,

“In terms of the way things look to us, and such a description obviously involves the use of property words.["]

Again, this is complex. By property word, I can think of phi -- the Greek term.

The pillar box LOOKS (phi) red to me.

-- But 'look' is a redherring, I would think. It's like the words for rain J. Kennedy was talking about, this blog -- It seems offensive to have just ONE word for 'rain' when things (precipitation in watery terms from the sky) seem to vary so. As my mother often recalls me -- she enjoys high literature, of sorts --, 'the way to list all the words under the 'look' spectrum is a passionate thing: 'to stare', 'to look', 'to see', 'to gaze'". Why choose 'look'? One of the most otiose of words:

In "Remarks about the senses" Grice quotes from three philosophers: Molyneux (a genius), Wood (another genius) and Albritton (a third genius -- I use 'another' to mean 'a second'). Albritton remarked to him things like:

"That man at the end of the alley DID LOOK very rough-looking, but I can tell you that he looks rather gentle-looking in a more appropriate light". This is NOT a totally otiose thing to say. So "look" does not eliminate the 'phi' property word:

"That pillar box looks red-looking".

I prefer 'seem' and let the 'sense-objectual' channel be understood.

Surely I cannot see with my ears or smell with my eyes.

Nudd continues to quote from Grice:


[...]Grice’s suggestion seems
to be that we should simply suppose
that there are [emphasis mine. JLS]
properties of experience sufficient to explain
[the difference of senses]. ... Suppose that
our experiences did have the properties
that determined the generic resemblance that
Grice describes. What purpose would
distinguishing the senses on that basis serve?

One wonders -- but a detailed study of Grice will I hope suggest that his opinion about the 'resemblance' of this generic type is just ONE out of very many (six as I recall) criteria he uses. We cannot FEEL with our eyes. We can only SEE with our eyes. This seems 'analytic' -- I would think. Recall that Grice/Strawson were fighting to make sense of analytic and synthetic a priori. I would NOT think that

"We see with our eyes"

is synthetic a priori.

The Martians need to have 'pairs' of eyes ("or something resembling our eyes", as I think Grice has it) to claim that they do see.

Philosophers may live on ivory towers -- and there are a few in Oxford, but stone- and my favourite is St.Michael's Church -- but they need not be totally disrespectful of what every schoolboy knows. The eyes are 'for to see', as they say in the dialect. In fact, I find 'eye' an otiose word. I would hope the lingo (Indo-European) never had the need for that, and speak of the 'seer' (After all, tooth, comes from Indo-European, odontos, i.e. the eater, so I cannot imagine how eating, a vulgar habit, can have more of a lexicalisation than Plato's idea).

For Plato, to see was to Fid-, where F was the digamma, wid-, idein. Also theoria, as in the listserv. Kramer moderates. Theoria was vision. The Greeks were very much into this august of sense. Take 'diaphanous', the word Grice mentions. We seem to relate that to 'see' as well. The sky is diaphanous. But Grice is right that in THIS particular case, it could just as well be 'feel'. (Or perhaps one IS indulging in some Molyneaux synaesthesia).

"Dia-phanous" derives from 'dia', thorough, and 'phanous', which gives 'phainomenon'. This is passive (cfr. 'eromenos', the beloved), in FORM only. It was a deponent or middle voice in Greek, best understood as to 'shine', to 'appear'. While 'shine' seems to relate to the 'eyes' only (shining shoes) it does not originally. Carnap calls 'pseudo-problems', 'schein'-, i.e. appearing only. Ad-pear is possibly more related to 'similitude'. "It appears that ..." should not refer just to sight ("It appears too strong to me, this tea").

Anyway, Grice produced enough output in the philosophy of perception to merit a whole PhD dissertation on this -- I hate it when a scholar says, "Someone should write a PhD dissertation on this -- but hey. Along with his "Causal Theory of Perception", and Strand 2 in his "Valedictory Essay" plus all the notes for the Grice/Warnock Retrospective that awaits a good editor at the Bancroft, we can only thank Nudd for bringing these things to the philosophical forum's consideration and especially to my friend Larry J. Kramer for doing ditto re: this club's one.