Grice on "seem"

by JLS
for the GC

We were discussing some features of "seem" and "appear" as they appeared to Quinton in "The problem of perception". Consider,

"You seem to like it".

---- WHO seems?

Quinton is right. That sentence hardly represents an experience of sensation. It just means that YOU like it, I think. Recall that for Quinton things are VERY complicated.

I was thinking that since Grice distinguishes, elsewhere, between:

objective certainty ("it is certain that p")
subjective certainty ("I am certain that p")

the same may hold for "seem", with a vengeance. Oddly, Grice seems to have focused his attention on the D-or-D (as he called it, "doubt or denial") "implicature" of "seem", with a big caveat!

In 1961, he is wanting to say that the contrast between ii and i

--- The foetus does not seem to suffer from any pain prior to the 24 weeks (report in today´s daily).

--- The foetus does not suffer from any pain prior to the 24 weeks.

derives from ii being a STRONGer thing to say. He has not yet formulated the "pragmatic pressures", but something like that is already cited by Strawson as being credited to Grice in "Introduction to logical theory".

Now, in 1961, Grice has this caveat: Yes, we should make the stronger commitment, but -- how to define it? Entailment, alas, seems out of order, for a "seems" statement does NOT entail an "is" statement, or vice versa.

It is possibly due to this inadequacy of a criterion of STRENGTH that had him play with four categories, rather than just "strenght" (which would become "informativeness" or "quantity"). In this connection, the mid-lectures, on "Logic and Conversation", 1965, are an important thing to consider. In those lectures, Grice plays with two desiderata and two principles, between "self-love" and "benevolence", and between "candour" and "clarity". Genius!

To think that he was also leading the British Council in letting the world to know about the brilliancy of the Oxford philosophy of his day is a task!