Grice on 'causally efficacious' ("Reply to Richards", p. 81)

--- by JLS
---- for the GC.

GRICE WOULD WRITE and write. He would seldom revise or revisit. ("Life's too short to waste it in refining one's views"). He left the mimeo of "Aspects of Reason" in a folder, and while he died in 1988, the thing did get published in 2001. The mimeo dated from 1977, basically -- from the time when he crossed the bay to deliver the Kant lectures at Stanford (from Berkeley, where he was full professor of philo).

But the "Reply to Richards" was 'commissioned' by the festschrifters, and was written in 1984. So he can go back to 1977:

Grice writes:

"[Richard Grandy and Richard Warner] very properly
refer to my discussion of 'incomplete' reasoning
in my John Locke Lectures"

--- actually, identical with the Immanuel Kant lecturers. Trust Grice to deliver the same set of lectures to give a tribute to a rationalist AND an empiricist --. Where's the cake? Grice goes on:

"and discover there some suggestions which, whether
or not they supply NECESSARY conditions for the presence of
formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot
plausibly be considered as jointly providing
a SUFFICIENT condition."

"The suggested conditions are that the implicit
reasoner intends that there should be some valid
supplementation of the explicitly presented material
which would justify the 'conclusion' of the
incomplete reasoning,"

and here, he brings in the 'causal' remark:

"together perhaps with a further desire
or intention that

the first intention be causally efficacious
in the genreation of the reasoner's belief
in the aforementioned conclusion"


------ I learned about this after having fought with D. F. Pears and D. Davidson (figuratively, i.e trying to digest their mathematically precise views on subjective conditional probabilities for "I intend that..." as entailing a belief in the probability of the intended outcome being greater than .5, together with the causal role of the aforementioned belief on the willingness to bring about the intended outcome -- relying on Grice's earlier, "Intention and Uncertainty", British Academy, 1971).

Grice goes on to explain that he never meant his conditions to be sufficient, and that he hopes to remedy that "by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of [his] John Locke lectures is published". Alas he died of emphysema between the time of uttering and that 'the (one hopes?) not too distant time'. Life can be cruel. But as I say, if Darwin had died before publishing his attack on Wilberforce, SOMEONE else, trust, would have come up with the theory of evolution, or stuff!