GRICE'S THEORY OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE: THE LATITUDINAL AND LONGITUDINAL UNITIES

It might be argued that Oxford is an old uni -- "an unbroken tradition in teaching and learning since the 1400s". But Bologna is even older -- and it's not surprising that Umberto Eco emphasised the palæo-Griceians.

And I'm not referring just to ECO, but his disciples.

For surely the Greek lingo -- that Grice learned at Clifton -- and the Roman lingo had more of a philosophical pedigree than what people now refer to as OLP -- ordinary language philosophy -- meaning "Oxonian," and thus English ordinary language philosophy.

So the palæo-Griceians are those Griceians avant la lettre, who focused on phenomena like innuendo, and stuff -- suggestio falsi -- in charming ways.

We possibly find FULL THEORIES about stuff.

Grice,encountered with the phenomena, came with an answer.

The first recorded answer is in Strawson: "H. P. Grice," Strawson says in "Introduction to Logical Theory," comes up with "general features of discourse," that regulate, say, the use of the quantifiers.

In excursus on "Implication" in "The Causal Theory of Perception," that Grice read at Cambridge (and also Nottingham), we find a slightly different theory: in terms of 'strenght'. Make the stronger conversational move if you can.

(But he realises that "It seems to me that that pillar box is red" is hard to analyse as being _weaker_ than "That pillar box is red" -- "at least not in terms of material implication," Grice adds.)

A few years later, Grice -- still at Oxford -- came with a more elaborate theory.

I am referring to the "Impicature" lectures of 1966. First, he uses the ending -ure, as a joke -- for he is concerned with the verb, "to implicate": a variant not to be confused with, say, Nowell-Smith's "to imply".

And then he proposes

TWO DESIDERATA

-- the desideratum of conversational clarity

-- the desideratum of conversational candour

And more importantly, the focus on trust and the balance of interests in what he dubs the 

TWO PRINCIPLES

-- the principle of conversational self-love

-- the principle of conversational benevolence

He could have used 'egoism' and 'ultraism,' but trust him to be jocular ("this wanton disposition Nature gave me"). 

The next year, at Harvard, he was joking with KANT. We are not interested, like Kant was, on REASON, but on CONVERSATIONAL REASON. We are not interested, like Kantotle was, on CATEGORIES, but on CONVERSATIONAL CATEGORIES. And Kant had reduced Aristotle's ten categories to FOUR. Thus, Grice will have

-- THE CONVERSATIONAL CATEGORY OF QVALITAS

-- THE CONVERSATIONAL CATEGORY OF QVANTITAS

-- THE CONVERSATIONAL CATEGORY OF RELATIO

-- THE CONVERSATIONAL CATEGORY OF MODVS

All this to introduce the idea not of a "maxim," a mere Kantian common-or-garden maxim, that one has to universalize, if one can, but that of 

CONVERSATIONAL MAXIM

On top, he kept the idea of a higher principle, which would be like the CONVERSATIONAL IMPERATIVE -- which Grice, relying on his Oxford lectures of the previous year -- dubs 'co-operative'. Strictly, the principle is not coooperative. It's more like a principle of cooperation. In the earlier Oxford lectures, he had merely emphasised trust and helpfulness.

And stuff.

The whole point is that of a clash -- that will account for the implicatures that, if we trust Strawson -- why shouldn't we trust Sir Peter? -- had interested Grice since "Introduction to Logical Theory".

I.e. the UNDERLYING THEORY -- in its different guises -- as reported in Strawson, in the Causal Theory, in the Oxford lectures, and the Harvard lectures -- is to EXPLAIN the phenomenon of implicature. 

No more, no less!