Grice's Beautiful Handwriting -- As Testified By His Beautifully Handwritten Note of 1961

Speranza

If Grice had a THEORY for his famous 'beautiful handwriting' example in the 'Excursus' to 1961:

A: How is Smith doing at Collections?
B: He has beautiful handwriting (+> He is hopeless at philosophy)

it means that by 1961 he was allowing MANY different versions of his pragmatic approach (and not one formulated in terms of the maxims, as he takes in 1967) to be valid.

We can go even further and earlier. When Strawson in his 1952 Introduction To Logical Theory mentions "Mr. H. P. Grice" and the 'regulations' of discourse, it is obvious that Grice has taught Strawson a way to deal with certain logical inferences concerning the quantifiers in pragmatic terms -- and no need to appeal to a SPECIFIC format of this framework.

So we may have

1952. Grice's approach in terms of 'practices' of discourse.
1961. The excursus of "Causal Theory of Perception": the examples of the 'beautiful handwriting' and 'She is in the kitchen or in the garden'.
1965. The Logic and Conversation lectures at Oxford -- now at BANC MSS 90/135c -- in terms of two principles -- the principle of conversational self-interest, and the principle of conversational benevolence -- and two desiderata -- the desideratum of conversational candour, and the desideratum of conversational clarity).

And stuff.