Grice on Central Meaning and "Central Speech Acts"

The terminology of 'central' that he introduces in WoW:V he takes up in WoW:VI, but now with a different 'milieu'.

While in WoW:V he is concerned with 'centrally' as an adverb:

---- By uttering "You are the cream in my coffee" U centrally meant that his addressee was the cream in his coffee.

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In WoW:VI he is interested in 'central' as it applies to 'speech acts'. While he never, in the course of the William James Lectures, cared to quote from Austin -- ("How to do things with words" -- published in 1962) -- Grice made use of Austinian notions (Schiffer expanded on this in his own DPhil Oxon).

Notably, Grice speaks of

U asserted that p.
U stated that p.
-- U ordered that p.

as being 'central' speech acts -- the first two being equipolent.

So he wants to say that

'state' and 'assert' are central speech acts. Recall that Grice must have been aware of the sad history of performative theory as practiced by Austin. Austin had started his 'American' career by stating that some verbs are 'performative', and concluding -- by the last of his William James lectures -- that ALL verbs are performative -- 'state' being the first!

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So Grice can clearly use 'central speech act' for a case like 'state'. "State" is NOT a performative verb (I don't think) but it is still a speech-act verb. Why would it not be?

Grice is perhaps a perlocutionary theorist, in that (vide Holdcroft, Problems in the theory of speech acts, Clarendon) he would define 'state' (an illocution) in terms of the perlocutionary effects (utterer intended his utterance to provoke in his addressee the belief that the utterer believed that p, and ...).

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So, when considering Grice's latter reflections (in the retrospective epilogue) about dictiveness being one criterion for centrality (and noting that unlike formality, dictiveness only applies to the first-floor level of CENTRAL speech acts) one should revise Grice WoW:VI

Indeed, Grice in WOW:VI mentions the same range of verbs:

"To state" would be central. "To contrast", "To add" would be peripheral or non-central.

E.g.

"John is rich"
"Mary is rich, too".

It may be argued that by adding, "too", the utterer is ADDING to the previous statement. Yet, by saying that 'adding' is NOT a central speech act, Grice is freeing 'adding' from any contribution to the truth-conditions.

"Mary is rich, too"

would be TRUE even if the utterance is never thought of as _adding_.

Grice is clearer respecting two other tricks of words (Blakemore studied this):

'but'

and

'therefore'

A: Mary is poor.
B: But honest.

Again, while B is contrasting poverty with honesty, that does NOT touch on the truth-conditions. And therefore, it does not touch on the dictiveness (or dictum). Contrasting is NOT a first-floor level thing.

'therefore'.

Mary is poor. Mary is honest.

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This does not state much. But if we add:

"Mary is poor. She is, therefore, honest."

Or consider the one-sentence variant favoured by Grice, using the ";":

"Mary is poor; she is, therefore, honest."

Here we have not moved at the 'stating' level. Nothing else has been stated.

We have introduced 'therefore' which is an indication of a speech act which is NOT central. It is not 'adding' (that is done by 'too') or 'contrasting' (that is done by 'but'). It is marking an inference. The conventional implicatum (and Grice is clear here that this does NOT belong in the dictum) is: "Mary's honesty follows from her poverty".

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Or something like that.

(Perhaps, "Mary is rich; she is, therefore, honest" -- would be more in line with the sexist artsong that Grice favoured, jocularly, "She was poor, but she was honest; and her parents were the same, till she met a city fellar, and she lost her honest name").

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"victim of a squire's whim" -- is the version I prefer, which also marks the distinction between nobility (squire) and commoners. Or something. Other men's flowers, a book by this Indian military officer, contains like 25 full stanzas to this Great War ditty.

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Or something.