The Grice Point

Speranza

I was nicely surprised to read that Peter Winch, the revered London philosopher (hisself a reverer of Witters) quotes Grice -- in a Royal Philosophical Society thing.

Winch makes a distinction, which he credits to Grice between

the _meaning_ of a remark

and the

_point_ of the remark.

It is TOO easy to go the whole hog and identify this _point_ with the relevance, but we know that Grice minimised relevance, which he only saw as one of the four categories in his amusing attempt to echo Kant: qualitas, quantitas, relatio, modus.

Consider,

"It looks to me as a red pillar box".

The _meaning_ may be something like:

_That pillar box seems red to me_.

compared to:

That pillar box is red to me.

The _point_ of the remark is what Grice calls the D-or-D implicature: "the red pillar box is NOT red, or I doubt it is."

And so on.

Grice will go on to apply the

meaning/point

distinction when, years later,

he considers:

"He likes it because he likes it."

In symbols:

p
---
therefore, p.

Grice wants to argue that that is a piece of reasoning. "Trivial, if you mustn't".

In

"He reasoned from p to p", again, we seem to have a clear meaning, since

p
---
therefore p

is valid in ALL logical accounts.

Yet, the _point_ of such a triviality is more difficult to grasp. But other than Winch, who cares?