H. P. Grice, "Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice"

H. P. Grice,

“Prejudices and predilections;

which become,

the life and opinions of H. P. Grice.”

Grice:

CHILDHOOD AT HARBORNE.
Dinners with a non-conformist father. 

THE START OF A DISSENTING (indeed, conservative and irreverent) RATIONALISM. 

“As I look back upon my former self, it seems to me that, when I began the serious study of philosophy at Corpus, on a scholarship from Clifton, the temperament with which I approached the enterprise was one of what I might call dissenting rationalism.”

“(As I read what I find myself to have written, I also find myself ready to expand this description to read ‘irreverent, conservative, dissenting rationalism’).”

“The 'rationalism' part is probably just the natural interest in looking for reasons which is found in any intelligent person who undertakes a philosophical study, even if at Oxford it was so classics-oriented!”

"The tendency towards dissent, though, may, however, have been derived from, or, if not, at least to have been intensified by, of all people, my father back at Harborne."

“My father, a gentle person, a fine musician, and a dreadful businessman, in fact exercises little personal influence over me, but quite a good deal of cultural influence.”

“Herbert Grice was an obdurate nineteenth-century, liberal, non-conformist.”

"I witness, almost daily, and without involvement, I hasten to add, the spectacle of my father’s religious (or is it theological?) non-conformism coming under attack from the women in the household: my mother, who was heading for High Anglicanism, and, especially, a resident aunt, a Catholic convert!"

“But whatever its origin in my case, I do not regard either 'dissenting' or 'rationalism' -- as perhaps I do 'irreverent' and 'conservative' -- as at all remarkable!"

"I mention the 'dissenting' and the 'rationalism' more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance back in Harborne."

“It seems to me that dissenting rationalism has persisted, and indeed may have significantly expanded, over my philosophical life!"

"And I have added 'conservative and irreverent' into the bargain!"

“This I am inclined to regard as a much less usual phenomenon.”

OXFORD: CORPUS.

"Back to Oxford, then."

“I count myself wonderfully fortunate to have begun my studies, fresh from Clifton, and on a classics scholarship, as tutee of W. F. R. Hardie, president of my alma mater, Corpus -- the place for a Midlands scholarship boy -- the author of an essay on Plato which both is and is recognised as a master-piece, whose explorations on the Nicomachean Ethics, in one of their earlier incarnations, as a set of lecture notes, sees me through terms of teaching Aristotle's moral theory.”

“It seems to me that I learnt from W. F. R. Hardie just about all the things which a philosophy tutee can be taught by his philosophy tutor, as distinct from the things which the tutee has to teach himself.”

“More specifically, my initial dissenting (if not yet conservative and irreverent) rationalism is developed, or grows, at W. F. R. Hardie’s tutorials, into a belief that any philosophical question is to be settled by a reason, that is to say, by an argument.”

"I learn also from W. F. R. Hardie how to argue philosophically."

“In learning how to argue philosophically, I coe to learn that the ability to argue philosophically is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than the ability or insight to see a logical, deductive, connection (though this ability or insight is, by no means, to be despised).”

“From W. F. R. Hardie, I come also to see two further things."

"The first is that, though philosophical ‘progress’ is pretty difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after an agonising labour, it is worth achieving."

"The second is that the difficulty involved in achieving philosophical ‘progress’ offers no kind of an excuse for a lowering of the standards, or for substituting or replacing for the goals of ‘philosophical truth’ some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like rabble-rousing.”

“W. F. R. Hardie’s methods, I grant, are too austere for some, and not just Midlands scholarship boys!

“In particular, W. F. R. Hardie’s famous long silences at tutorials are found somewhat distressing by some of his tutees -- though as the terms went by, the tempo did speed up.”

“There is one story, which I am not sure that I believe, that, at one point in one of W. F. R. Hardie’s tutorials, a particularly longer (than usual) silence developed, when it is W. F. R. Hardie’s turn to make his conversational move, which is, at long last, broken by W. F. R. Hardie with: 

‘And what did you mean by ‘of’?’”

"The fact that his tutee was confusing the objective with the subjective genitive helps."

“Another story, which I think I do believe, has a tutee of Hardie’s deciding that, the next time a long silence develops in one of Hardie’s tutorials, the tutee is not going to be the one to break it.”

“In the next tutorial, however, after the tutee finished reading his essay on the reality of the external world to W. F. R. Hardie, there follows an awfully long silence which lasts a full twenty-five minutes, at which point the tutee can stand it no longer (he had a cricket match to follow), and does say something.”

"So the tutee broke his promise, as forced by W. F. R. Hardie."

“W. F. R. Hardie’s tutorial rigours never bother me, though, then!"

“If philosophising is a difficult operation, as it plainly is, sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a fruitful move, as chess-players are only too well aware.”

“The idea that a philosopher either has already answered every philosophical question, or is equipped to answer any philosophical question immediately, at the drop of a hat, as we may say, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpov ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess.”

“I like the slow pace of philosophical discussion with W. F. R. Hardie.”

“I like the breath-laden ‘Ooohhh!’ which W. F. R. Hardie sometimes emits when he catches his tutee in, or even pushes him into, a patently untenable position (though I prefer it when this ejaculation is directed at someone other than myself).”

“I also like W. F. R. Hardie’s resourcefulness in the defence of what may be a difficult position, a characteristic illustrated by the following incident which W. F. R. Hardie himself tells me about himself.”

“W. F. R. Hardie parks his car at 2 p.m. and goes to the cinema.”

“Unfortunately, Hardie parks his car on top of one of those strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights are, at the time, controlled by the passing traffic.”

“As a result, the lights are jammed, and it requires four policemen to lift W. F. R. Hardie’s car off the afore-mentioned strip.”

“The police decides to prosecute.”

“I indicate to W. F. R. Hardie: 'That does not surprise me at all. How did you fare?'”

“‘Oh,’ W. F. R. Hardie says, ‘I did get off.’”

"I ask W. F. R. Hardie: 'How on earth did you manage that?'"

“‘Quite simply,’ F. W. R. Hardie answers."

"'I just invoked Mill’s method of difference.’”

“‘The police charged me with causing an obstruction at 4 p.m.’”

“‘I tell the police that, since I parked my car at 2 p.m., it could not have been my car which causes the obstruction two long hours later.’”

“W. F. R. Hardie never discloses his views to his tutees, no doubt wishing them to think their own thoughts, however flawed, rather than his.”

“When a tutee did succeed, usually with considerable difficulty, in eliciting from W. F. R. Hardie an expression of his own philosophical position, what the tutee gets is liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly conservative in tone.”

“Not surprisingly, it would hardly contain much in the way of a battle-cry or campaign-material.”

“An aspiring knight-errant requires more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic.”

“An aspiring knight-errant requires a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of damsels in distress.”

AYER, ENFANT TERRIBLE, STILL PRE-WAR.

“Oxford is rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by A. J. Ayer, or Sir Freddie, as he then wasn't, the enfant terrible of Oxford philosophy.”

“Many philosophers, including myself, are greatly interested by the 'Viennese' methods, theses, and problems which are on display, and some are, at least momentarily, inspired by what they see and hear.” 

"The methods, theses, and problems, combined two very English strands: 'logical' and 'empiricism'!"

“For my part, however, my reservations are never laid to rest.”

"Recall my conservative, irreverent, dissenting, rationalism!"

“The crudities and dogmatisms from Vienna seem too pervasive.”

“And then everything was more or less brought to a halt by the war.”

"But I did manage to explore this or that philosophical subject, notably 'negation and privation,' along more or less 'verificationist,' or logical empiricist lines, if atenuated by Hardie's qualifications."

POST-WAR OXFORD

“After the long war, the picture at Oxford, the dreaming spires, is pretty different, as a result of various causes."

"First, the dramatic rise in the influence of J. L. Austin, who had led epoch-making Thursday evening meetings of his play group of seven, at All Souls -- a play group to whose meeeting I, having been born on the wrong side of the tracks, as we may say, was never invited."

"A second cause is the rapid growth of Oxford as a pretty world-scale centre of philosophy, due largely to both the efforts of Gilbert Ryle, and of the extraordinarily high quality of the very many philosophers who at that time appear on the scene.”

“My own philosophical life in this immediate post-war period involves two especially important aspects.”

ROBBING PETER TO PAY PAUL.

“The first aspect is my prolonged collaboration with my P. P. E. tutee at St. John’s, P. F. Strawson.”

“Strawson’s and my efforts are partly directed towards the giving of joint seminars as University Lecturers.”

“Strawson and I stage a number of such joint seminars on topics related to the notions of 'meaning,' or 'category,' or 'logical form.'”

"We were buying the Viennese attitude that it's all about language!"

“But my association with P. F. Strawson is much more than an alliance for the purpose of teaching joint seminars as university lecturers."

“Strawson and I consume vast quantities of time in various systematic and unsystematic philosophical exploration.”

“From these discussions springs not just our joint published essay, 'In defense of a dogma' -- a reply to Quine's 'Two dogmas of empiricism' and his attack on the 'analytic'-'synthetic' distinction as 'dogmatic' and thus hardly having a role in the programme of empiricism -- but also investigations on 'predication' and 'category, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's own “Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics.””

“Strawson’s and my method of composition is laborious in the extreme.”

“An investigation is constructed together sentence by sentence, nothing being recorded until agreement is reached, which often takes quite a time.”

“The rigours of this procedure eventually lead, alas, to its demise.”

“During this period of collaboration, Strawson and I, of course, developed a considerable corpus of common opinions, and a considerable corpus of UNcommon opinions -- 'robbing Peter to pay Paul.'"

“But, to my mind, a more important aspect of it is the extra-ordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which Strawson and I develop.”

“Other Oxonian philosophers sometimes complain that Strawson and my mutual exchanges are liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to any third party.”

"Although we did collaborate, and in print, too, with such third party for a Third programme of the BBC on the nature of metaphysics."

"Vide: H. P. Grice, P. F. Strawson, and D. F. Pears, "Metaphysics," in D. F. Pears, "The nature of metaphysics. London: Macmillan."

“The potentialities of such joint endeavours, two- or three-part, continues to lure me.”

 “My collaboration with Strawson is followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, including with D. F. Pears, indeed, on the philosophy of action, with J. F. Thomson on the same area, with J. L. Austin on Aristotle's Categoriae 
and De Interpretatione, with G. J. Warnock on perception, with F. G. Staal on philosophical-linguistic questions, with George Myro on metaphysics, and with J. Baker on ethics.”

"In the later case, in print form too."

"Vide: H. P. Grice and J. Baker, "Akrasia," in Vermazen and Hintikka, Oxford."

SATURDAY MORNINGS.

"The other prominent feature of this period in my philosophical life is participation in the discussions which take place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which are conducted by a number of Oxford philosophers under the leadership of, of all people, J. L. Austin.”

"A second life to his pre-war play group that met on Thursday evenings at All Souls, and to which I failed to belong."

"This Saturday morning group which continues to meet up to, and indeed led by me for some years after, Austin's death is christened by me ‘The Play Group,' and it is often so referred to, though, so far as I know, never by, or in the presence of, Austin himself, if you got to know him!"

“I have little doubt that Austin's Play Group is often thought of, outside Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps, even worse, even inside Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what becomes known as ‘“Ordinary-Language” Philosophy,’ or, even, ‘The Oxford School of “Ordinary-Language” Philosophy.’”

"I use capitals and quotes since I don't think such things exist!"

“As such core, Austin's Play Group no doubt absorbs its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon the whole ‘Oxford School of "Ordinary-Language" Philosophy’ by so many people, including, from London, Ernest Gellner in his exceedingly polemic, in tone, Words and Things” (and the tirade of letters supporting him in “The Times”) and Gustav Bergmann, who not actually coined ‘the linguistic turn,’ but the sobriquets ‘ordinary-language’ philosophy, as opposed to ‘ideal-language’ philosophy’ and who, it is said, when asked whether, one a visit, he is going to hear a talk delivered by an eminent British philosopher, replies, with characteristic charm, 'Thanks, but no thanks. I do not exactly propose to waste my valuable time on what an English Futilitarian feels he has to say.'"

“Yet, as I look back on the activities of Austin's Play Group, I find it difficult to discern any feature in them which merits this kind of opprobrium by Gellner or Bergmann, to mention a few. Mundle was another! Lewis yet another one!"

“To begin with, there is more than *one* philosophical group, or ill-defined association, of Oxford philosophers who are concerned, in one way or another, with ‘ordinary’ linguistic usage.”

"Let me be more specific."

“Besides those philosophers who, like me, initially at least, gravitate towards J. L. Austin, there are those who draw special illumination from Gilbert Ryle: W. C. Kneale, O. P. Wood, G. E. L. Owen, J. D. Mabbott, to name a few."

"Pears, since we mentioned him, belonged to both groups!"

“Also there are other philosophers, better disciplined, perhaps, who look to Wittgenstein, or Witters, as Austin called him.”

"Actually, Pears belonged occasionally to this group, too! And so did G. A. Paul."

“Now, the philosophical gait of philosophers belonging to any of these three groups is, characteristically, if you except Pears or Paul, markedly different from that of the philosophers belonging to another.”

“But even within *Austin*’s Play Group, great diversity is visible, as one would expect of an association containing philosophers with the ability and independence of mind of its leader, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, S. N. Hampshire, G. A. Paul, D. F. Pears, G. J. Warnock, R. M. Hare, P. H. Nowell-Smith, P. L. Gardiner, A. D. Woozley, to name a few.”

"Plus, there is no 'School.'"

“There is no dogma which unites the members of Austin’s Play Group, in the way, for example, that an unflinching, or almost unflinching, opposition to an abstract entity such as a proposition, unifies and inspires what I may call the School of Latter-Day Nominalists, or that an unrelenting, or almost unrelenting, determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable unites the School of Logical Positivism, led at Oxford by Sir Freddie.”

“It has, I think, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which unites Austin’s Play Group is that of the need to restrict our philosophical attention to ‘ordinary’ language, in a way which disqualifies the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of any technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which seems to put a strangle-hold on any philosophical theory-construction.”

"Witness my implicature!"

“It is true that many, even all, of the members of Austin’s Play Group would have objected, and rightly objected, to the introduction of a technical apparatus before the ground is properly laid.”

"I tried to lay the ground for 'implicature' in a long 'excursus' in my otherwise pretty conservative 'The Causal Theory of Perception.'"

“The sorry story of deontic logic shows what happens when a technologist, such as D. S. Scott, at Oxford? -- just kidding -- rushes in where a well-conducted elephant fears to tread.”

“Austin’s Play Group also (as some of us still may do from time to time) objects to the covert introduction of philosophical jargon, that is, the use of a seemingly innocent expression, such as 'volition,' or 'sensation,' whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay, as perhaps occurs with items of the philosopher’s lexicon other than ‘sensation’ or ‘volition.’”

“But one glance at J. L. Austin’s “How to talk: Some Simple Ways,” or at “How to Do Things with Words” should be enough to dispel the idea that there is a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if some philosophers at times may have strayed in that direction.”

“Another dogma to which some may have supposed Austin’s Play Group to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacro-sanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgement, or world-picture, may be identified as underlying ‘ordinary’ discourse.”

“Such a dogma is, I imagine, some kind of counter-part to G. E. Moore's ‘Defence of Common Sense.’”

“It is true that Austin has a high respect for G. E. Moore.”

“‘Some like Witters, but G. E. Moore’s my man,’ Austin would say.”

“And it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of his Play Group, thought that some sort of metaphysic is embedded in ‘ordinary’ language.”

“But, to regard such a ‘natural metaphysic’ as present, and as being worthy of examination, stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or rationally acceptable.”

“Any such further step needs justification by argument.”

“In fact, the only position which, to my mind, commands universal assent at The Play Group is that a careful, detailed, examination of this or that feature of ‘ordinary’ discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking.”

“And, even here, the enthusiasm of the assent varies from philosopher to philosopher, as does the precise view taken, if any is taken, about the relationship between some nuance or minutia of usage and a specific philosophical thesis.”

“It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive, careful, detailed examination of the minutiae and nuances of usage is not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct, or natural approach to philosophy, unless we think Socrates and the Athenian dialectic he led."

“Austin’s expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involves some irony) is that we ‘philosophical hacks’ spend the week making, for the benefit of our tutees, direct attacks on this or that philosophical issue, and that we need to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen ‘para-philosophy’ in which some non-philosophical concept or conception is to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency.”

“It is in this spirit that in early days Austin’s Play Group investigates rules of games (with an eye towards a question about meaning).”

“Only later do we turn, if we do, our micro-scopic eyes more directly upon this or that philosophical question.”

“It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called ‘“ordinary language” philosophy’ comes from philosophers like Gellner who see the ‘movement’ as a sinister attempt, on the part of the intellectual Establishment -- an Establishment whose home lies within the ancient walls of Oxbridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose up-bringing is founded on a classical education - such as the one I received at Clifton and my Lit. Hum. at Oxford -- to  preserve control of, now, philosophy, by 'fastidiously' gearing philosophical practice to the 'fastidious' deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the Establishment, viz., a highly developed, 'fastidious' sensitivity to the richness, nuances, and minutiae, of linguistic usage.”

“It is, I think, certain that, among the enemies of this philosophical style, are to be found the defender of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality -- think Mundle or Lewis -- not with the character of language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality.”

“Such a philosopher does, to my mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply.”

“Either the conclusion which the ‘“ordinary-language” philosopher’ draws from the nuances of usage is merely linguistic, but not necessarily 'conceptual,' in character, in which case the content of philosophy is pretty trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusion is not linguistic in character, but rather 'conceptual' in character -- and we were obsessed with "the logic or grammar of x" -- in which case the nature of the step from a merely 'linguistic' premisse to a non-linguistic (but conceptual, rather) conclusion is mysterious.”

“The traditionalist philosopher, however, seems to have no stronger reason for objecting to ‘“ordinary-language” philosophy’ than to other forms of language-based or linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ‘ordinary’ language per se,  such as that espoused by logical positivists like Freddie Ayer.”

"His essay was after all entitled, "Language, truth, and logic"!"

“But, to my mind, much the most significant opposition comes from those philosophers who, like Russell, feel that ‘ “ordinary-language” philosophy’ is an affront to science and to intellectual progress, in general, and who regard its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, calls ‘stone-age metaphysics.’”

""The Times" loved that!"

“Now, ‘stone-age metaphysics’ would be the best, these science-oriented philosophers would have it, that could be dredged up from a ‘philosophical’ study of ‘ordinary’ language.”

"Vide Russell on "Mr. Strawson on referring" in "Mind.""

“Among such assailants are to be found those who, in effect, are ready to go along with the old, time-honoured, traditional scholastic adage, of philosophia, regina scientiarum."

"But only under a re-interpretation of this adage.”

“regina must be understood to mean not ‘regina superana’ like, say, Victoria, or Elizabeth II, but ‘regina consors,’ like Alexandra, or Elizabeth, the Queen Mother!"

“And the 'sovereign' of which ‘philosophia’ is the ‘regina consors’ might turn out to be either science in general, or just physical science.”

"The devil of scientism at his worst!"

“The primary service which would be expected of ‘philosophia’ as a ‘regina consors’ would be to provide the sovereign, the scientist now, with an ideal, pure, or purified language, for him to use on a formal occasion (should there be such an occasion).”

"Funnily, I characterised this 'formalist' group at the opening of my second William James lecture -- I later called the group the modernists."

“Some philosophers, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of ‘“ordinary-language” philosophy’ is in any case doomed, since it presupposes, pace Strawson's and my 'defence of a dogma,' the admissibility of something like Carnap’s ‘analytic’/‘synthetic’ distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.”

“The issue raised in this attack concerning the analytic-synthetic distinction is both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space.”

“I have but a few comments.”

“The use made of Russell’s occasional, and no doubt caustic, phrase ‘stone-age metaphysics’ has more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.”

“Certainly ‘stone-age’ physics, if by that we mean a ‘primitive’ set of hypotheses (not hypostases) about how the world goes which might conceivably be embedded somehow or other in an ‘ordinary’ language such as Oxonian usage, does not seem to be a proper object for first-order devotion.”

“But this fact should not prevent something valuable derivable or extractable from ‘stone-age’ physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper and indeed valuable target or aim or goal for serious research.”

“For this extractable characterisation might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, twentieth-century sub-atomic quantum mechanical physics!"

“Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ‘ordinary’ language, should there be such a metaphysic, may not have to be derived from any belief about how the world goes which ‘ordinary’ language reflects.”

“Such a metaphysic might, for example, be derived somehow from the very categorial and sub-categorial structure of ‘ordinary’ language.”

"The field of 'philosophical eschatology," as I call it."

“Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic may thus turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, if not, of course, an enterprise in physical science.”

“A rationally organised and systematised study of reality might perhaps be such a scientific enterprise.”

“So might some highly general theory in formal semantics might be such a scientific enterprise, though it might, of course, be a serious question whether these two candidates -- a rationally organised and systematised study of reality and a highly general theory in formal semantics -- are identical.”

“To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of ‘“ordinary-language” philosophy’ might have to press into service the argument which I represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct.”

“The opponent of ‘“ordinary-language” philosophy’ might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general semantic theory based squarely on data provided by ‘ordinary’ discourse by arguing, or asserting, that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of something like Carnap’s ‘analytic’/‘synthetic’ distinction, as I defended it with Strawson in "In defence of a dogma.""

“With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-à-vis Science or some particular favoured science, such as physical science, I should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner is such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions; and I should start with a lively expectation that this would not be the case.”

“But even if this negative expectation is disappointed, I should, next, enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist.”

“If those standards are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so not dictated by scientists, there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy might be to discover, or devise,  a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary’ language.'"

“And even if the requisite kind of purity of language is to consist in what I may term such logico-methodological virtues as consistency and systematicity, which are also those looked for in a scientific theory, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ‘ordinary’ language?”

‘Ordinary’ language is clever.

“In which case, the “ordinary-language” philosopher would be back in business.”

"So far as I can see, once again the enemy of ‘ordinary-language’ philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ‘ordinary’ language would have to presuppose the viability of something like Carnap’s analytic/synthetic distinction, as I and Strawson defended it in "In defence of a dogma.""

“With regard to Carnap’s analytic/synthetic distinction itself, let me first remark that it is my present view that neither party, Quine, and Strawson and I, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory.”

“For example, Morton White’s earlier argument in “Analyticity,” and W. V. O. Quine’s later argument in “Two dogmas of empiricism” that any attempt to define ‘analytic’ ends up in a hopelessly viciously circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to my mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not, after all, be the right procedure to follow.”

“On the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Strawson and myself to defend the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of the 'paradigm-case argument' (as my tutee at St. John’s A. G. N. Flew calls it), I grant, fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such a 'paradigm-case argument,' viz. that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of Oxonians offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny.”

"Talk of Russell's talk of the silly things silly people say!"

“To my mind, the mistake made by both parties, White and Quine, and Strawson and I, has been to try to support, or to discredit, Carnap’s analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of natural or 'ordinary' language.”

“It would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the ‘family (allegedly vicious, but not virtuous) circle’ of concepts pointed to by Quine, and to regard the 'analytic'/'synthetic' distinction not as a supposedly detectable element in natural or 'ordinary' language, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable and reasonable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of natural or 'ordinary' language.”

“The viability of the analytic-synthetic distinction, then, would be a pragmatically-oriented theoretical question which, so far as I can see, remains to be decided.”

“And the decision about the viability of the analytic-synthetic distinction is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of the 'analytic'-'synthetic' distinction, should it find a home.”

“A few further comments seem to me relevant and important.”

“A common, though perhaps not universally adopted, practice among ‘“ordinary-language” philosophers’ is to treat as acceptable the forms of ‘ordinary’ language or discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it.”

“A common alternative proposed by enemies of ‘“ordinary-language” philosophy’ has been that of a rational or ‘ideal’ or purified reconstruction of ‘ordinary’ language.”

“In the words of Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with 'the vulgar' (the ‘ordinary’) but still continue to think with 'the learned' (the ‘ideal’).”

“In such things we ought to think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar.”

“Berkeley's response here, that we should think with 'the learned' but speak with 'the vulgar,' advises us to continue to say that fire heats, that the heart pumps blood, etc.”

“But why should our vulgar speech be retained?”

“Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with 'the learned'?”

“After all, if my house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that I need a new one, it is not essential that I construct the new one within the outer shell of the old one, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper or aesthetically preferable.”

“An attachment to the forms of ‘ordinary’ discourse, even when the substance is discarded, suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for or credit to ‘ordinary’ discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies.”

“Second, whether or not a viable analytic/synthetic distinction exists, I am not happy with the claim that ‘“ordinary-language” philosophy’ pre-supposes, almost alla Strawson,  if not Collingwood, the existence of such a distinction.”

“It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ‘ordinary’ usage incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which may be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable.”

"But, in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfies the standards which a theory is supposed to satisfy, it would appear that Carnap’s analytic/synthetic distinction would be vindicated, or shown to be acceptable, as a fortiori conclusion, not pre-supposed!"

“For the analytic-synthetic distinction to be, indeed, entailed by the execution of a programme is surely and plainly not the same as is to be pre-supposed by that programme.”

"For if it is to be presupposed (as Collingwood might have it) by the programme of ‘“ordinary-language” philosophy,’ it would, I imagine, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction."

"And how this allegation could be made out, even by Collingwood, whom I admire, I cannot for the life of me discover."

FUN WITH AUSTIN.

“I turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) sub-sequently, seem to me to be particularly appealing, or funny."

“First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of a philosophical revolution (at least a minor one, of the ones we like at Oxford.”

“I am once dining with P. F. Strawson at Magdalen’s when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, as it happens, reveals himself as having, when he was a tutee, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, the author of Statement and Inference, and whom he just revered.”

“Strawson asked the former tuttee of Cook Wilson's what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher.”

"After a good deal of fumbling, the Air Marshal reveals the answer."

"It is Cook Wilson's delivery of a particular message or adage."

"'What we know we know.'"

“The Air Marshal's answer provokes in me, then, some genteel silent mirth, directed to Strawson.”

“But, a long time later, I now realise that that mirth, however genteel and silent, is quite inappropriate.”

“Indeed, Cook Wilson’s message or adage is a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages or adages.”

“For the best philosophical messages or adages exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best ‘lip service,’ as it were.”

“J. L. Austin’s message is yet another philosophical platitude.”

“J. L. Austin’s message or adage, or mission-statement, in effect, says that, if in accordance with prevailing Oxonian fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really only about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what so-called linguistic usage is and, if possible, in my case, of what lies behind it.”

"As it happens, rationality lies behind it!"

“This sophisticated if remorseless literalism is typical of Austin.”

“When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting logician from The New World, Austin says: ‘They say that logic is a game; well then, let us play it as a game'; with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week’s improved version of a game called, by Austin, ‘Symbolo,’ a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of ‘Wffn’Proof.’”

“Another appealing element is the fact that J. L. Austin has, and at times communicates, a prevalent vision of ‘ordinary language’ as a wonderfully intricate instrument.”

“By this I do not mean merely that Austin sees, or hopes one day to be able to see, our 'ordinary' language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules.”

“Austin may have such a Leibnizian picture of language, and may indeed hope that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which Austin greatly admires, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seems to reside in an intellectual Holy of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive, ideally exhaustive, if not exhausting, discipline of preliminary linguistic studies -- 'language botany,' as he called it."

“What I am imputing to Austin is a belief in our every-day 'ordinary' language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose."

"As when we ask, "What's the point of saying that?"

"A belief in it as something whose intricacies, nuances, minutiae, and distinctions are hardly idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in rational communication.”

“It is not surprising, therefore, that the Play Group discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the [utterer’s?] ‘purpose’ or [utterer’s?] ‘point’ of some feature of ordinary discourse.”

"And apparently, that became my claim to fame." 

"Vide, Peter Winch on Grice, Royal Institute of Philosophy."

(Cfr. "Aspects of reason," Lecture I -- 'the point' versus 'the truth.')

“When put to work, this conception of ‘ordinary’ language as being 'clever,' and making distinctions that have a 'point,' seems to offer a fresh and manageable approach to this or that philosophical idea or this or that philosophical problem, the appeal of which approach, in my eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between this approach on the one hand and, on the other, the practice of Aristotle with his "Athenian dialectic," in relation to ‘ta legomena,’ "what is said" "by the many," if not "the wise.""

“When properly regulated, directed and conducted, ‘linguistic botanising’ seems, to me, to provide a valuable -- or is it INvaluable? -- initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts.”

“Indeed, I will go further, and proclaim it as my belief that linguistic botanising is indispensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned.”

“That is not to say that I have ever subscribed to the full Austinian prescription for linguistic botanising, namely (as one might put it) to go through The Little Oxford Dictionary and to believe everything The Little Oxford Dictionary has to tell you.”

“Indeed, I once remarked to Austin in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent): 'I, personally, do not care a hoot what The Little Oxford Dictionary says!', only to draw the intransigent rebuke by the master: 'And that is precisely where you make your big mistake, Grice.'"

“Of course, not all these explorations or exercises or adventures in linguistic botany are successful in Oxfordshire!"

“The Play Group once spends five weeks, if I recall correctly, in an effort to explain why, sometimes, ‘very’ allows, with little or almost no change of meaning in 'what is said,' the substitution of ‘highly’ (as in ‘very unusual’) but sometimes does not (as in ‘very depressed’ or ‘very wicked’)."

"The Play Group reaches no conclusion.”

“This episode was ridiculed by some philosophers such as Quine as the ultimate embodiment of fruitless philosophical frivolity.”

“But Quine's response is as out of place, as a similar response to the allegedly authentic medieval question, ‘How many angels can dance on a needle’s point?’”

“A needless point?”

"Don't think so!"

“For much as this allegedly authentic medieval question is supposedly raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance such as an 'angel,' so The Play Group discussion about 'very' vs. 'highly' is directed, in response to a worry from me, as it happens, towards an examination, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which is generally agreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which has no philosophical importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a, er, conceptual distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries.”

“Unfortunately, the desired results were, unsurprisingly, not forthcoming.”

"Perhaps it is authoritarian to settle in advance what is philosophical important, and I'm reminded of the King of Hearts in "Alice in Wonderland": "important, unimportant, important."

AUSTIN'S CONVERSATIONAL MOVES: DELIGHTFUL

“J. L. Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding, often in philosophical conversation, to, the finer points, nuances, or minutiae, of linguistic usage, provides a splendid and instructive example to he who is concerned to include linguistic botanising in his philosophical armoury.”

“I shall recount a few authentic anecdotes in support of this claim.”

ANECDOTE I: WARNOCK ON 'proper' versus 'correct.'

"G. J. Warnock is being dined at New College, Austin's college, with a view to election to a fellowship."

"Warnock is much disconcerted, even though he is already faintly acquainted with Austin, when Austin's first dinner-table remark to him is, surely out of the blue: 'What would be the difference between my saying to you, 'Smith is not playing golf correctly' and my saying to you 'Smith is not playing golf properly.'?’”

ANECDOTE II: "Thanks, but no thanks."

“On a certain occasion, The Play Group is discussing the notion of a ‘principle,’ and (in this connection) any condition for 'appropriate' use or application of the phrase ‘on principle.’”

“P. H. Nowell Smith recalls that a tutee of P. L. Gardiner’s, who is Greek (the tutee) wanting permission for an over-night visit to London, comes to Gardiner and offers him some money, saying: 'I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach.'"

“At this point, Nowell Smith suggests, Gardiner might well have replied: 'I do not take bribes on principle.'"

“Austin responds by saying, ‘I should not say that.’”

“‘I should just say “Thanks, but, no, thanks.”’

ANECDOTE III: NOWELL-SMITH RECITES DONNE. 

“On another occasion, P. H. Nowell Smith, again cast in the role of straight man, offers as an example of non-understandable lingo an extract from a sonnet of Donne’s.”

“From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.”

"Or something like that! I usually get that line wrong!"

“Austin says: ‘It is perfectly clear what that means.’”

"And indeed what Donne does!"

“‘It means, or Donne means: “Angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I am would call the four corners of the earth.”’

"I might even put it in symbols."

"Or Symbolo?"

“These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why I should have turned away from this style of philosophy.”

“Well, as l have already indicated, in some way, I never have turned away, in that I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the nuances and minutiae of usage, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing.”

"I can think of an exploration of 'reason,' or 'freedom,' or 'cause.'"

“For just how much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer.”

LINGUISTIC NATURE'S ANSWERS

“That information provided by an examination of the nuances and minutiae of usage should not be just a quantity of collector’s items, but should on occasion at least, provide Linguistic Nature’s answers to questions which we put to her."

"Such questioning is impossible without some hypothesis set in an at least embryonic theory, is a proposition which would, I suspect, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent.”

“The trouble begins when the 'ordinary-language' philosopher asks, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory this underlying theory should be.”

"A theory of conversational rationality?"

"The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which I have already mentioned; by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ‘ordinary’ discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not – which may be ‘linguistic’ in character, say, or ‘scientific’ in character."

“It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to a question such as this would be couched in terms of a special type of generality which attaches to the philosophical but not to the non-philosophical question.”

“But whether this special type of generality is simply a matter of degree, or whether it has to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of a ‘category,’ remains to be determined.”

“At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by me.”

“If it is necessary to invoke the notion of a ‘category,’ am I to suppose this ‘category’ to be a linguistic category -- a category of expression, as it were -- or a metaphysical or ontological category -- a category of things --, a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ‘ordinary’ discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent, semantic theory, or a metaphysical theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these two possibilities are distinct.”

“Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory, or theories, behind ‘ordinary’ language or discourse do not seem too bright.”

“In my own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory underlying ‘ordinary’ language, or discourse comes from my exploration, originally in the area of the philosophy of perception ("That pillar box seems red to me") but later extended to other Oxonian specimens, on the idea of a conversational implicatum, an idea which emphasises the radical importance of distinguishing (to speak very loosely) what an expression E, or an utterance x, says or implies from what the utterer U, in uttering the expression E, implies, or implicates -- a distinction seemingly denied by Wittgenstein, and all too frequently ignored by Austin.”

“My own efforts to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of conversational phenomena of the kind with which at Oxford I had been concerned derives much guidance from the work of W. V. O. Quine on logic and of A. N. Chomsky on syntax.”

“Quine helps to throw light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and also, by his example, exhibits the virtues of a strong methodology.”

“Chomsky shows vividly the kind of way in which a region for long found theoretically intractable by scholars, such as Otto Jespersen, of the highest intelligence may, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought more or less under control.”

“I shall add that Quine's influence on me is that of a model.”

“I am never drawn towards the acceptance either of Quine’s actual methodology or of his specific philosophical positions.”

“I have to confess, incidentally, that I find it a little sad that two of my chief theoretical mentors (the other was Hardie, as I said; another is my father) never agree, or even make visible contact, on the question of the theoretical treatment of natural or 'ordinary' language.”

“It seems a pity that two men such as Quine and Chomsky, who are about as far removed from dumbness as any that I have ever encountered, should not be equally far removed from deafness.”

“During this time, my philosophising tends to reveal a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress.”

"Indeed, the need for greater contact with experts in logic than is then available at Oxford is one of my main reasons for leaving Oxford, if I did leave Oxford, which I doubt."

“Explorations in this more ‘formal’ style is directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, that grammar (the grammar of ‘ordinary’ language or discourse) may be regarded as, in Russell’s words, “a pretty good guide to logical form,” or, in less colourful language, to a suitable representation of logical form.”

“This undertaking involves the construction, for a language, System G_HP­, which was a close relative of a central portion of a natural or 'ordinary' language (including quantification), of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-semantics which makes minimal use of Chomskyan transformations.”

“This project is not fully finished and is not been published, though its material is presented in lectures and seminars both in and outside Berkeley, my new home base, including a memorable summer colloquium at Irvine.”

“An interest in a ‘formalistic’ style of philosophising seems to me to have more than one source.”

“It may arise from a desire to ensure that a philosophical idea which the philosopher deploys is capable of full and coherent development.”

“Not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system.”

"I have never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate logic together with set theory, and in any case this kind of formalistic enterprise would over-tax my meagre technical equipment, if I were not to count with the help of philosophers such as Myro or Mates."

“An interest in a ‘formalistic’ style of philosophy may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of a notational device, together with a few sketchy indications of the laws or principles to be looked for in a system, such as System G_HP, incorporating this or that notational device; the object of the exercise being to seek out a hitherto unrecognized analogy and to attain a new level of generality.”

“This latter kind of interest is the one which engages me, and will, I think, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.”

“It is nevertheless true that my disposition to resort to formalism has markedly diminished.”

“This retreat may well have been accelerated when, of all people, Hilary Putnam remarked to me that I was too formal.”

“But its main source lay in the fact that I begin to devote the bulk of my attention to areas of philosophy other than semantics, the study of the implicatum, or conversation as rational co-operation, or philosophy of language generally: mainly to philosophical 'rational' psychology, seen as an offshoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics; to ethics, in which my pre-existing interest was much enlivened by J. Baker's capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples, and to the history of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes."

“Such areas of philosophy as philosophical psychology seem much less amenable to a formalistic treatment.”

"But we did our best with A. D. Code to turn Aristotle into a logician."

“I have little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style, from a formalistic to a non-formalistic one, is also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by technology.”

“To borrow words from F. P. Ramsey, that the apparatus which begins life as a system of devices to combat ‘woolliness’ becomes scholastic.”

“The chief danger of our philosophy, apart from laziness and wooliness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating that which is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category.”

“But the development of this variation on a theme by Ramsey will best be at present deferred.”

FROM THE LIFE TO THE OPINIONS, if that's a passage.

“The opinions which I voice are all general in character.”

“The opinions relate to such things as what I might call, for want of a better term, style or tone in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology.”

“I shall reserve for another occasion anything I might have to say about my views on specific philosophical topics, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.”

“I shall first proclaim it as my belief that doing philosophy ought to be entertaining and fun.”

“I would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny.”

“One should of course be serious about philosophy; but being serious does not require one to be solemn.”

“Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philosophy.”

“There have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church.”

“The prime source of the belief that philosophy ought to be fun is no doubt the wanton disposition which Nature gave me.”

“But the belief is reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious (!), yet fun, and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party: Strawson, Pears, Thomson, Staal, Austin, Woozley, Baker, Myro, Warnock, to  name a few."

“Each of my associations has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit and stimulated the intellect.”

"Or my spirit and my intellect."

“To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy is, at best, very much like getting together with others to make music.”

“Lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth.”

“And if, as sometimes happens, philosophical harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, so much the better.”

“But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in the philosophical world.”

“It was said of H. W. B. Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of mid-wifery.”

“H. W. B. Joseph seeks to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.”

“Though the comment referred to his proper severity at tutorials, H. W. B. Joseph is in fact, in concert with the much more formidable H. A. Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with his tutees.”

“Productivity in publication among his junior contemporaries at Oxford was low, and one philosopher even managed to complete a life-time without publishing one word.”

“Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the students of his college once crucify him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.”

“The tradition did not die with H. W. B. Joseph.”

“To take just one example, I have never been very happy about J. L. Austin’s “Sense and Sensibilia,” partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality.”

"But more because its tone is, frequently, rather unpleasant, if I may say so."

“And similar incidents have been reported not so long ago from The New World.”

“So far as I know, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes.”

“There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.”

“Though it is no doubt plain that I am not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, I have to confess that I am not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus.”

“The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending.”

“Indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher, is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims.”

“To my stomach, it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person or a philosophical creed.”

“Zealotry and band-wagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship, unless it’s that unjusttly neglected philosopher, Kantotle.”

“Rational and dis-passionate commendation and criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline of philosophy, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth.”

“But passion directed towards either philosophers or philosophies is out of place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured.”

“What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.”

“I have little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement.”

“But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution.”

DIAGOGIC AND EPAGOGIC

“One of these factors is, I suspect, a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.”

“It is, I am inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or raises a certain question.”

“At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis or answers would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it.”

“And the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis or answer is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rival answers, characteristically by the detection of an alleged counter-example.”

“A philosophical thesis or answer to a philosophical question is supported by elimination of alternative theses or answers.”

“It is, however, my hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, a thesis or an answer can be established by direct evidence in its favour, not just by elimination of its rival.”

“I shall refer to this issue again later when I come to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument.”

“The kind of metaphysical argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a ‘dia-gogic’ as opposed to ‘epa-gogic’ or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation.”

“Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of the rival, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people.”

“And perhaps a greater emphasis on a ‘dia-gogic’ procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.”

“A second possible source of atmospheric amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry.”

“An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (however difficult the realization of this index might be to determine).”

“Of course one must try to be right, but even so I doubt whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of ‘for the right reasons.’”

“An eminent topologist whom I knew was regarded with something approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake.”

“Though this eminent topologist was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.”

“The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar.”

“Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.”

PHILOSOPHY: LATITUDINAL UNITY, LONGITUDINAL UNITY. 

“The cause which I have just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy.”

“There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which I also believe.”

“These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline.”

“The first I shall call the ‘latitudinal unity’ of philosophy, and the second, its ‘longitudinal unity.’”

“With regard to philosophy’s ‘latitudinal unity,’ it is my firm conviction that, despite its real or apparent division into departments or branches or areas, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline.”

“By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemological classification of ‘a priori’ knowledge.”

“I mean (or hope I mean) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high-level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the others; to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and (as occasionally happens) I am introduced to, ‘Mr. Puddle, our man in political philosophy,’ or in ‘nineteenth-century continental philosophy,’ or 'aesthetics,’ as the case may be, I am immediately confident that either Mr. Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr. Puddle is not really good at his stuff.”

“Philosophy is, like virtue, entire.”

“Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them.”

“At this point, however, I must admit a double embarrassment.”

“I do not know exactly what the thesis is which I want to maintain, and I do not know how to prove it, though I am fairly sure that my thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarassments may not be independent of one another.”

“So the best I can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.”

LATITUDINAL UNITY: RATIONALITY.

“It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter of of a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry.”

“On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S.”

“There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines.”

“Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline.”

“For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics.”

“Some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking.”

“Some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology; and so on.”

“All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.”

“It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature.”

“But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments.”

“Each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.”

“There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline.”

“There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual.”

“This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain.”

“This suggestion may well be close to the second suggestion.”

PHILOSOPHY: LONGITUDINAL UNITY: 
FROM KANTOTLE TO GRICE AND BACK

“In speaking of the 'longitudinal unity of philosophy,’ I am referring to the unity of Philosophy through time.”

“Any Oxford philosophy don who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his tutees, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and essays from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries.”

“And it is only a little less obvious that often substantially similar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates.”

“Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another, for example between Western European and Indian, or in general, Eastern, philosophy.”

“If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of out-standing philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead.”

“And when I say ‘proper consideration,’ I am not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame.”

“I mean, rather, that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now.”

“And, further, that in order to do this we should do our best to ‘introject’ ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking.”

“Indeed to re-think their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers.”

“And then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves.”

“I might add at this point that it seems to me that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection or introjection lies in the region of methodology.”

“By and large, the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists.”

“Indeed, I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers.”

“So, whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.”

“Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such ‘introjection’ may be neither possible nor worthwhile.”

“But with Aristotle and Kant, or Kantotle, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding.”

“But such an ‘introjection’ is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from person to person.”

“And in this enterprise of ‘introjection’ transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.”

“This reflection leads me to one of my favourite fantasies.”

“Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that, though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved.”

“As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else.”

“My fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark.”

“In fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times.”

“That it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems.”

“The solutions are inscribed in the records and annals of our subject.”

“But what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright.”

“Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact.”

“But to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.”

A PILGRIM'S PROGRESS TOWARDS THE CITY OF ETERNAL TRUTH

“As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positivism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physicalism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey.”

“The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.”

“There are many persons, for example, who view Naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting Nominalism.”

“And it is not easy to see how anyone could couple support for Phenomenalism with support for Physicalism.”

“After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age, I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.”

“But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?”

“The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelve-fold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies.”

“To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which seeks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertised philosophical commodity, such as abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth.”

“In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character; in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.”

“In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of ‘desert landscapes.’”

“But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate.”

“We are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape.”

“We are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer.”

“To change the image somewhat, what bothers me about what I am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.”

“I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these betes noires seem to possess.”

“Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission.”

“They limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.”

“They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation.”

“Some prima-facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away.”

“And they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs.”

“My own instincts operate in a reverse direction from this.”

“I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.”

“I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.”

“This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic.”

“But all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack.”

“I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism.’”

“The best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which I should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject.”

“My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that 'Because it is red' is no more informative as an answer to the question 'Why is a pillar-box called ‘red’?' than would be 'Because he is Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called "Grice"?', and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory.”

“The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs.”

“As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system.”

“Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject.”

“On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist view-point, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set.”

“But if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be.”

“This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.”

“I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks.”

“The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas.”

“In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particulars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived.”

“Somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve a vacuous predicate or a general term from the embarrassing consequence of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms.”

“Start with two vacuous predicates, say ‘is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope’ and ‘is a climber on hands and knees of a 29,000 foot mountain.’ If these two predicates are vacuous, the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set: ‘is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope', and ‘is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29,000 foot mountain.’”

“Provided 'R 1' and 'R 2 ' are suitably interpreted, the two predicates may be treated as co-extensive respectively with the following revised predicates 'stands in R1' to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and 'stands in R2 to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees.’”

“We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates, respectively, the following sequences derived from -y 1 and -y2 : the sequence composed of the relation R1 (taken in extension), the set ‘married to,’ the set ‘daughters,’ the set ‘English queens,’ and the set ‘popes;’ and (o 2) the sequence composed of the relation R 2 , the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees.”

“These sequences are certainly distinct, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates.”

“My chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposing in advance a limitation on the character of explanations.”

“For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using a vacuous predicate in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being co-related with a sequence of non-empty sets.”

“This is a condition which, I suspect, might not be met by every vacuous predicate.”

“But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of would-be explanatory terms.”

“The second suggested way of avoiding the un-wanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first.”

“It certainly seems simpler.”

“The admissibility of a vacuous predicate in an explanation of a possible but non-actual phenomenon (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition.”

“And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, would certainly be trivial.”

“Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifics whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of non-vacuous predicates.”

“The explanatory opportunities for vacuous predicates depend on their embodiment in a system.”

“My doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.”

“I conjecture, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which physical science provides.”

“But now a problem arises.”

“The preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability seems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact.”

“It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense.”

“But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom I know or know of have not seemed anxious to confer.”

“But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege?”

“If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embellishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it in to a necessity.”

“I have, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted.”

“I have been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed.”

“I should be less than honest if I pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained.”

“I should, however, also be less than honest if I concealed the fact that, should I be left without an argument, it is very likely that I should not be very greatly disturbed.”

“For my antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experience in a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimalists to be mistaken.”

“But at this point some people, I think, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way.”

“For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with me, for whatever reasons, in opposition to extensionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with me.”

“Now I certainly do wish to affirm, under some interpretation, ‘the objectivity of value,’ and I also wish to maintain, again under some interpretation, ‘the presence of finality in nature.’”

“But perhaps I had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.”

“I believe (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of rational beings, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.”

“I also believe that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.”

“I believe that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a simply ‘realist’ approach to value.”

“Only if value is in a suitable sense ‘instituted’ by me can it exhibit the aforesaid combination.”

“The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in Nature, the admissibility of final causes.”

“The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive or alethic and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere.”

“The adoption of a constructivist approach makes possible, perhaps even demands, the adoption of a strong rather than merely a weak version of rationalism.”

“That is to say, I can regard myself, qua rational being, as called upon not merely to have reasons for a belief of mine (ratio cognoscendi) and also for other psychological states attitudes, like a desire or an intention, but to allow, and to search for, a reason for a thing to be the case, at least in that area of reality which is constructed).”

“Such a reason will be a ratio essendi.”

“It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure.”

“Any elucidation of the terminology of strong rationalism, and any defence of the claims involved which I shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait.”

“I shall need to invoke specific theses within particular departments of philosophy.”

“I hope to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.”

CONVERSATIONAL RATIONALITY.

“The editors of P. G. R. I. C. E. devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to topics which they feel to be specially prominent in my work: questions about meaning, to questions in and about philosophical psychology, rationality – which I first played with in my account of “That pillar-box seems red to me” -- and metaphysics, and finally to questions about value, including ethical or moral questions.”

 “I shall first comment on what the editors have to say about meaning, to turn later the remaining topics.”

“In the course of a penetrating treatment of the development of my views on meaning, the editors list, in connection with what they see as a third stage of this development three problems or objections to which the reductionist psychological approach might be thought to give rise.”

“I shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order.”

“I shall also add a fourth problem which I know some people have regarded as acute, and I shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in my thinking, which the editors  have presented and which may not be generally familiar.”

“As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, I may remark that the treatment of the topic by the editors seems to offer strong support to my thesis about the latitudinal unity of my philosophy.”

“The problems which emerge about ‘utterer’s meaning’ are plainly problems in philosophical ‘rational psychology’ and in metaphysics, and I hope that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value, in its ‘optimality’ guise.”

“The first difficulty relates to the allegedly dubious admissibility of a ‘proposition’ as an entity.”

Grice quotes from Grandy and Warner:

“In the explication of utterance-type meaning, what does the variable “p” take as values?”

“The values of ‘p’ are the objects or contents of meaning – what is meant --, intention – what is intended -- and belief – what is believed --: a ‘proposition,’ to call it by its traditional name.”

“But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory of meaning to give an account of what a propositions is?”

“Much of the recent history of philosophy of language consists of attacks on or defences of various conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the relation of thought or the utterer’s psychological state, and language to reality.”

“How can Grice offer an explication of utterance-type meaning that simply takes the notion of a proposition more or less for granted?”

Grice: 

“A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that, in any definition of utterer’s meaning which I would be willing to countenance, ‘p,’ or ‘q,’ etc., operate simply as a ‘gap sign.’’”

“If a ‘gap sign,’ such as ‘p,’ appears in a definiendum or analysandum (“Utterer believes that p”), it will re-appear in the corresponding definiens or analysans, “By uttering x, thereby meaning that p.”

“If a philosopher were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to feel F (e. g., byzantine) is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is or might be F (i. e., byzantine), it would surely be ridiculous to criticise the philosopher on the grounds that he had saddled himself with a general ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling.”

“If a quantifier is covertly involved at all, it will only be a universal quantifier, “(Ax),” which can in such a case as this be adequately handled by a SUBSTITUIONAL account of quantification.”

“My situation vis-a-vis a ‘proposition’ is in no way different.”

“Moreover, if this last part of the cited objection is to be understood as suggesting that philosophers have been most concerned with the characterization of the concept of a ‘proposition’ with a view to using the concept, in this or that way, as a key to the relationships between language, thought, and reality, I rather doubt whether this claim is true.”

“And if it is true, I would regard any attempt to use a ‘proposition’ in such a manner a mistake which never made.”

“The concept of a proposition should not, I think, be viewed as a tool, a gimmick, or a bit of apparatus designed to pull off the ultimately metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality.”

“The furthest I would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a ‘proposition,’ and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of a proposition would undermine the enterprise within which they made an appearance.”

“It is, however, not apparent to me that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over my head.”

“In my most explorations on meaning, I do in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for between language, thought, and reality.”

“I offer three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, a rational enterprise may be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences between the members of any pair selected from the trio of language, thought, and reality.”

“Without a correspondence or co-relation between a thought and an item of reality, individual members of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, or function of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another.”

"Surely a believer wants to believe what is true."

“Without a correspondence or co-relation between an utterance and a psychological state on the part of the utterer, conversation, and so the concerted rational conduct of life, would be eliminated.”

“Without a direct correspondence or co-relation between language and reality, over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for beliefs to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us.”

“So far as I can see, the foregoing justification of this acceptance of these three correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the reality of a ‘proposition.’”

“And should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way -- perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption --, the very surreptitiousness of this ‘ontological’ commitment would indicate to me the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.”

“Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to a proposition in no way frightens me or repels me.”

“And if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what a propositions is, I think this obligation can be discharged.”

“It may, indeed, be possible to discharge the obligation in more than one way.”

IT'S THE PROPOSITIONAL COMPLEX, STUPID. 

“One way to discharge the obligation to give an account of a proposition is would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of ‘simple’ statements, the formulation of which would involve no connective or quantifier, and treating each of these as ‘expressing’ a ‘propositional complex,’ which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be, first, a general item (a set or an attribute, according to preference) and, second, an ordered sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item.”

“The propositional complex associated with the sentence, ‘Grice is wise,’ might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first ('general') member would be the set of wise persons, or (alternatively) the attribute wisdom, and whose second ('instantial' or 'particular') member would be Grice or the singleton of Grice; and the sentence, 'Stawson loves Grice', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is love (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of Strawson and Grice, in that order.”

“We can define a property of ‘factivity’ or ‘alethic satisfactoriness’ which will be closely allied to the notion of truth.”

“A (simple) propositional complex will be factive or alethically satisfactory just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate predication relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.”

“A proposition may now, alla Chomsky, be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes.”

“The conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context.”

“The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise begin with the problems of handling a connective or truth-functor and of handling quantification.”

“In the present truncated context I shall leave the problem of the truth-functor on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification.”

THE ALTOGETHER GRICE, THE ONE-AT-A-TIME-GRICE

“A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object.”

“To the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as ‘the altogether grasshopper’ [boy, girl] and ‘the one-at-a-time grasshopper’ [boy, girl].”

“We shall now stipulate that an 'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate.”

“So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green.”

“We can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respectively) the statements, ‘Every grasshopper is green,’ and ‘Some grasshopper is green.’

“The apparatus which I have just sketched is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification.”

“It will not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification.”

“It will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement ‘Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant.”

“To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for semantic purposes, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl; and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems not to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its semantic function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value.”

“But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus; it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quantifiers.”

“The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects which it invokes as metaphysically disreputable.”

“Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, I think that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available.”

“The one which I have immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme.”

“The new proposal, like its predecessor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a subject-item and a predicate-item, and will, therefore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification. Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow individual objects, like grasshoppers, girls, and boys, to appear as elements in propositional complexes; such elements will always be sets or attributes. Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, I think, available, I shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.”

“According to the set-theoretic version, we associate with the subject-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order. If the subject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name.”

“The treatment of singular terms which are not names will be parallel, but is here omitted. If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the predicate to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper. If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached; thus the correlate of the phrase 'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.”

“Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions. It now remains to specify the predication-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be [active. A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element.”

“So if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase 'every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), then the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence 'every grasshopper is green') will be factive.”

“A dozen years or so ago, I devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and I convinced myself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of ‘mixed’ quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which I shall not here discuss.”

“Before moving on, however, I might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal.”

“First, employing a strategy which might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements.”

“Second, individual names are in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic.”

“Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions; as I envisage them, propositions will be regarded as families of propositional complexes.”

“Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinct from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Not every grasshopper is not witty'; indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex. The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine propositional identity remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose. It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched.”

We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of propositions used to be that propositions are needed to give us something for logic to be about; sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of language.”

“Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards propositions if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.”

“If our thought proceeds along these lines, a proposition might be needed not just as a peg (so to speak) for a logical law to hang from, but as a thing whose nature determines the content of the logical system.”

“It might even be possible to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of propositions.”

“Perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display a proposition as the bearer of logical properties and another to display it in its role as a content, or object, of a psychological state or attitude.”

“How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear; but whatever might be the difficulties of implementation, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, 'What are propositions?', not by identificatory dissection but rather by pointing to the work that propositions of their very nature do.”

“I have little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on some fundamental issues in metaphysical methodology.”

“What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respectability?”

“What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing?”

“What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output?”

“Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?”

GRICE'S PROCEDURE ON 'PROCEDURE'

“Further objections cited by the editors may be presented together in reverse order, since they both relate to my treatment of the idea of linguistic 'procedures'.”

“One of these objections disputes my right, as a philosopher, to trespass out of the province of philosophy, interpreted as conceptual analysis, onto the province of empirical science by attempting to deliver judgement, either in a specific case, or even generally, on the existence of what I call a ‘basic procedure’ underlying non-basic procedures which are, supposedly, derivative from them.”

“The other objection starts from the observation that my account of conversation involves the attribution to each conversant of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning the procedure possessed and utilized by his conversational partner, notes that these steps and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness, and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit or tacit rather than explicit.”

“The editors suggest that answers to these objections can be found in my work.”

“Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to me with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reasoning, which the editors illustrate by drawing on my John Locke lectures on aspects of reason and reasoning, ‘is involved in meaning, is something which can be made plausible by Grice’s philosophical method -- by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we converse.’

“Now, I certainly hope that my philosophical method can be effective in the suggested direction, in which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered.”

“But I think that I would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines.”

“Certainly, the specification of any ‘procedure’ as allegedly governing conversation may not be a matter of philosophical concern, except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principles.”

“But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do, and indeed must, operate in conversation simpliciter.”

“Now one might argue for the existence of such a body of principles on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible linguistic performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of primitive procedures in accordance with the general principles in question.”

“One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in these general principles, is guaranteed by metaphysical considerations, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between linguistic categories on the one hand and metaphysical, or real categories on the other.”

“I will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.”

“
As regards the second objection, I must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply Grandy and Warner envisage me as wishing to make, but I will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of the editors’s view.”

“The editors first very properly refer to my discussion of ‘incomplete,’ implicit, implicated, or truncated reasoning in my John Locke Lectures, and discover some a suggestion which, whether or not it supplies necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition.”

“The suggested condition is two-pronged: that the reasoner intends-1 that there should be some valid explicitable supplementation of the explicitly presented material which would justify or warrant the ‘conclusion’ of the incomplete reasoning, together with a further intention, i2, on the part of the reasoner that the first intention is causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner’s belief in the afore-mentioned conclusion.”

“The editors are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for reasoning has been provided.”

“Indeed, I never supposed that I had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of my John Locke Lectures is published.”

“The editors then bring to bear some further material from my writings, and sketch, on my behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern.”

“That I am equipped to form, and to recognize in my conversational partner, a communicative intention is something which could be given a genitorial, or transcendental, justification.”

“If the genitor were constructing human beings (or a ‘pirot’) with an eye to the pirot’s own good, the institution in a pirot of a capacity to deploy a communicative intention would be regarded by the Genitor with favour.”

“We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, communicative intentions.”

“The attribution of a communicative intention to others at least sometimes has explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum.”

“The exercise of rationality takes place primarily, or predominantly in the confirmation, or revision, of previously established beliefs or practices.”

“So, it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal, or optimal, to be standard procedure in a rational being.”

“We have, in the repertoire of procedures available to us in the rational conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal, or optimum,, as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal, or optimum, in question.”

“It is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have 
ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way.”

“We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the ‘primitive’ step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the ‘approximators’ as implicit rather than explicit.”

“Now whether or not it was something of this sort which Grandy and Warner had it in mind to attribute to me, the argument as I have sketched it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration.”

“It brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of mine, and exerts upon me at least, some degree of seductive appeal.”

“But whether I would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, I am not sure.”

“There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought.”

“Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to others to judge how closely what I say when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of the editors.”

“I would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.”

“There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the case that, typically, one first learns what it is to be a F and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good F from a F which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good F, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good F will qualify an item as a F; if the gap between some item x and good Fs is sufficently horrendous, x is debarred from counting as a F at all, even as a bad F.”

“In the John Locke Lectures, I called a concept which exhibits this feature as a ‘value-paradeigmatic’ concept.”

"One example of a value-paradeigmatic concept is the concept of reasoning; another, I now suggest, is that of sentence."

"It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts (¢b ¢ 2 . • • . ¢n) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts ( ¢~, ¢~ . . . . ¢~), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept ¢ 2 if and only if x satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept ¢'."

"We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another."

"If ¢ is a value-oriented concept, a potentiality for making or producing ¢s is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ¢s, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity – reason as a faculty, for example, as Kant wanted.”

“It may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives, like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess.”

THE PRINCIPLE OF ECONOMY OF RATIONAL EFFORT.

“I am strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called The Principle of Economy of Rational Effort or Expenditure, or The Principle of Minimisation of Rational Expenditure, or the Principle of Minimisation of Rational Cost.”

“The Principle of Economy of Rational Expenditure states that, where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcome, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, involves an expenditure of time and energy, if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcome as the ratiocinative procedure, provided the stakes are not too high, it is rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination.”

“I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise.”

“On the assumption that it is characteristic of Reason to operate on pre-rational psychological states which Reason confirms, revises, or even (sometimes) eradicates, such opportunity will arise, provided a rational creatures or pirot can, as we can, be ‘trained’ to modify the relevant pre-rational psychological states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creature can be more or less reliably led by that pre-rational psychological states to the thoughts or actions which Reason would endorse were it invoked.”

“With the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, ‘the voice of Reason’ being heard.”

“Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence or virtue.”

“The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician.”

(This may not apply to philosophical reasoning at Collections!).

“A similar consideration applies to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory.”

“In both cases the excellence which I exhibit is a form of judgement.”

“I am a good judge of logical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.”

“That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form.”

“It requires, at most that our propensity or propension to produce such a transition is dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly.”

“Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a ‘sub-terranean’ ratiocination to acccount for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a rule-governed language.”

“There are two kinds of magic travel.”

“In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles.”

“In the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go.”

“The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first; but may also be routeless like the second.”

“But problems still remain.”

“A deductive system concocted by a logicians may vary a good deal as regards its intuitiveness; but with respect to some deductive systems (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case may be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors the procedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases.”

“But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances.”

“They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences, together with acceptable interpretations of each (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the production of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.”

“That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select, and criticize linguistic performances; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.”

GRICE'S OPTIMUM

“There is one further objection, not mentioned by Grandy and Warner, which seems to me to be one to which I must respond.”

“It may be stated thus.”

“One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances.”

“There are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning, based on Peirce, was designed to allow for the possibility that a non-linguistic and indeed a non-conventional 'utterance', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do.”

“To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending, should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language.”

“Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending.”

“Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day.”

“But unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough.”

“For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of counterexamples started by Strawson with his example of the ‘rat-infested house,’ I was led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to “M-intentions”; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature.”

“So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison d'etre of the campaign.”

“A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and virtuous circularity.”

“According to my most recent speculations about meaning, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nested M-intention which is deemed to be present).

“The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto.”

“In which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose.”

“At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise.”

“Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language.”

“But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about, as I suggest in the last of my William James lectures.”

“I shall now take up, or take off from, a few of the things which Grandy and Warner have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to a chain of disciplines: metaphysics, philosophical psychology, and value.  

I shall be concerned less with the details of Grandy’s and Warner’s account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them.”

“Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal.”

“In any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings.”

"I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines."

“I might add that something has already been said previously about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my Carus lectures.”

“So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here I concentrate primarily on metaphysics.”

“I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.

“At the outset of their comments on my views concerning metaphysics, Grandy and Warner say, ‘Grice's ontological views are at least liberal;’ and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a ‘taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.’”

“I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima.”

“The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology.”

“Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology?”

"Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term 'metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?"

"If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it."

"That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical undertaking, which I will with striking originality call ‘first philosophy,’ is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate; and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics.

I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another."

"One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory."

"The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics."

"In these reflections I have derived much benefit from discussions with A. D. Code."

"It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories."

“In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.”

“A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us.”

“We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us.”

“Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on. I have at this point three comments to make.”

“First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogical in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus.”

“In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.”

“Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.”

"Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained."

“Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, for example, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded.”

“But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion.”

“Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics.”

“But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality.”

“In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics.”

“Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics.”

"It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics. The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach."

"The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements."

“That is, of course, a rhetorical plea, but perhaps such pleas have their place.”

“But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties.”

“Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? 'We'?”

"But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way"

"And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often?"

“These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not.”

"I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless."

"How could such entities have construction dates?"

"Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towards the authors of fiction."

"My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so I shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him."

"This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798."

"Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultra-lunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity."

"We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'de-personalized' (and 'de-temporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathematician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ultra-lunary numbers."

"In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity."

"Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character."

"It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements."

"It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism."

"A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed."

"As I see it, gradualism enters in in more than one place."

"One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator."

"In my view, it is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' (as opposed to 'the many') in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of 'the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrelevant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are not two parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones."

"Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory development."

"A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call 'overlaps.'"

"It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers."

"But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap."

"Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory."

"We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes."

"We can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories."

"Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics."

"One can only reach a proper understanding of a metaphysical concept like ‘law’ or ‘cause’ if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between a natural law and a non-natural law (like a ‘legal’ law or a ‘moral’ law)."

"‘How is such and such a range of uses of a word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking."

"I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago.

Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to constructivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, un-constructed section?"

"I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question."

"The forthright contention that, if there is a realm of constructs, there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it."

"But I am by no means sure that it is correct."

"I am led to this uncertainty initially by the fact that when I ask myself what class of entities I would be happy to regard as original and un-constructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer."

"Certainly not a common thing like a table or a chair; but would I feel better about stuff like a rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof?"

"I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic 'yes!'"

"Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-constructs."

"It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call an ontological scheme in which a category C1 of entities and a category C2 of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within an ontological scheme S1 and an ontological scheme S2 with a different ordering, what is ‘primitive’ in ontological scheme S1 not being primitive in ontological scheme S2, and that this might occur whether the ordering relation employed in the construction of each scheme is the same or not."

"We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness."

"All we would use would be the relative notion of ‘primitive-with-respect-to-an-ontological-scheme-S,’ or primitive_S1 for short."

"There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality.

But the application of the concept of authentic or maximal reality would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category C1 is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme Sn."

"I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines."

“The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, un-constructed, realm of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysical theory are likely to be peppered with allegations of a vicious circle; and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysical theory who gives serious attention to the methodology of his discipline.”

GRICE'S PELICAN AT CORPUS. 

"Where is any ‘first principle’ of first philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast?"

"In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of a real or apparent vicious circle, and to distinguish a circle, if any, which is virtuous, from a circle which is vicious."

GRICE'S PRIORITIES

"To this end, I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of ‘prior’ with a view to deciding when the supposition that A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of ‘prior.’"

"Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include ‘logically’ prior, ‘definitionally ‘prior’ or conceptually prior, epistemically prior, and axiologically prior."

I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prior-nessm of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorness-n of B to A."

"It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of the “conceptually” prior, the legal concept of ‘right’ is conceptually prior to the moral concept of right."

"The moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept."

"But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valuationally or axiologically prior to the legal concept."

"The range of application of a conceptually prior concept of a ‘legal’ right ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the axiologically prior concept of a ‘moral’ right."

"Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions.

It might be, perhaps, that the properties of a sense-datum, like the colour red (and so a sense-datum itself), is posterior in some way to a corresponding property of a material thing (and so to a material thing itself)."

"A property of a material thing, perhaps, render the property of a sense-datum intelligible by providing a paradigm for it."

"But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of material things and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally or conceptually explicable in terms of a sense-datum and its properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the afore-mentioned definitional or conceptual priority in the reverse direction."

GRICE PULLS HIMSELF UP BY HIS OWN BOOT STRAP. 

"It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if the philosopher is to succeed in the business of pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.

In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as “Boot Strap.”"

“The Boot Strap principle lays down that, when one is introducing the primitive concept of a theory Th formulated in the object-language L1, the philosopher has freedom to use a concept C1 expressible in the meta-language L2, subject to the condition that a counterpart C2 of such a concept C1 is sub-sequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language L1.”

“So the more economically the philosopher introduces the ‘primitive’ object-language L1 concept C1, the less of a task the philosopher leaves himself for the morrow.”

"I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question of how a metaphysical principle is ultimately to be established."

"A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argument, one that has been called by Kant, and by various other philosophers since Kant, a ‘transcendental’ argument."

"Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argument as a transcendental argument."

"Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis or category of items as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep."

"The practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking a transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or (the existence of) language, or conversation, or communication, perhaps lends some colour to the approach."

"My view (and my view of Kant) takes a different tack."

"One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of a transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that a transcendental argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such a transcendental argument aims at establishing."

"Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of rationality, or the notion of a rational being."

"Precisely what remedy I should propose for these omissions is far from clear to me."

"I have to confess that my ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state."

"But I will do the best I can."

"I suspect that there is no single characterization of a transcendental argument which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind."

"Indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of ‘transcendental.’"

DESCARTES'S COGITO.

"One pattern fits Descartes's ‘cogito’ argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic."

"This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt."

"And it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self-destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that he does not exist), and on the other hand the possession, by his act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character (being the expression of a doubt) which his act not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have."

"It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression of doubt the exercise of rationality will be impossible."

"But, while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument."

"Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what I might call 'epistemological nominalism'; that is, against someone who proposes to admit ys but not xs on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys but not for anything like xs, which supposedly go beyond ys."

"We can, for example, allow a sense-datum but not a material thing, if the thing is thought of as 'over and above' a sense-datum."

"Or we can allow a particular event, but not, except on some minimal interpretation, a causal connection between two events, E1 being the cause of its effect E2."

"The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy; that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure."

"If a material thing goes, a sense-datum goes, too."

"If a cause goes, a datable event goes too."

"In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of the third pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of rationality will have to go."

"A third pattern of argument might contend from the outset that, if such-and-such a target of the sceptic were allowed to fall, something else would have to fall which is a pre-condition of the exercise of rationality."

"It might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever."

"It is plain that an argument of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-condition of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic."

"But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect."

"Some less ambitious arguments might threaten a local breakdown of rationality, a breakdown in some particular area."

"It might hold, for instance, that a certain sceptical position, such as Hume’s, would preclude the possibility of the exercise of rationality in the practical domain.

While such an argument may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality."

"The really doughty sceptic may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason (but not pre-rational passion) from the area of action."

"The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of rationality."

"And here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail."

"A very important feature of these varieties of a ‘transcendental’ argument (though I would prefer to abandon the term 'transcendental' and just call it a 'metaphysical argument') may be its connection with ‘practical’ argument or reason."

"In a broad use of ‘practical,’ which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any psychological state or attitude or stance, including belief, which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic (or alethically satisfactory) argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted."

"Alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain or likely to be true."

"But, sometimes, we are led to the rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by considerations other than the likelihood of its truth."

"A thing that is a matter of faith of one sort of another, like one’s fidelity to one's spouse, or one’s belief in the justice of one's country's cause, is typically not accepted on evidential grounds but as a demand imposed by loyalty or patriotism."

"And the argument produced by that who wishes us to have such faith may well not be silent about this fact."

"A metaphysical argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with such examples one’s fidelity to one’s spouse or one’s belief in the justice of one’s country’s cause, i.e. of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith."

"In the metaphysical region, too, the practical aspect may come first."

"We must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of rationality."

"But, in the case of a metaphysical argument, the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability."

"Proof of the pudding comes from the need to eat it, not vice versa."

"These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some people, including myself, have felt with respect to a transcendental argument."

"It has seemed to me, in at least some cases, that the most that a transcendental argument may hope to show is that rationality demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis."

"This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted."

"It is now time for me to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical construction is effected, and I shall attempt to sketch three of these."

"But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such a construction routine."

"It is pretty obvious that metaphysical construction needs to be disciplined."

"But this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all."

"The list of available routines determines what metaphysical construction is."

"So it is no accident that metaphysical construction employs these construction routines."

"This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to me, and to others, as a difficult problem in the methodology of metaphysics."

"How are we to distinguish a ‘metaphysical’ construction (hypostasis) from a ‘scientific’ construction (hypothesis) of such an entity as an electron or a quark?"

"What is the difference between a metaphysical hypostasis and a scientific hypothesis?"

"The answer may lie in the idea that in a metaphysical construction, including ‘hypostasis,’ we reach a new entity (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose such an entity to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical construction."

"When the scientist hypothesizs, on the other hand, he does not rely on these routines at least in the first instance."

"If at a later stage the scientist shifts his ground, that is a major theoretical change.

I shall first introduce two of these construction routines."

"Before I introduce the third I shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to my task in other ways."

GRICE'S HUMEIAN PROJECTION.

"The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call “Humeian projection."

"Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about 'the mind's propensity to spread itself on objects.’"

"But Hume seems to regard the mind’s ‘spreading itself’ on objects as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, our nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason."

"In my version of the routine, one can distinguish four real or apparent stages, the first of which, perhaps, is not always present."

"At this first stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by ‘not’, or ‘or,’ or, to take a concept relevant to my present undertakings, the concept of ‘value.’"

"We can think of such initial item as, at this stage, an intuitive and unclarified element in our conceptual vocabulary."

"At the second stage we reach a specific psychological state or attitude or stance, in the specification of which it is possible, though maybe not necessary, to use the name of the initial concept as an adverb."

"We come to ‘not-thinking’ (or rejecting, or denying, e.g. that this is red or that I am hearing a noise – vide “Negation and privation”), ‘or-thinking’ (or disjoining) and ‘value-thinking’ (or valuing, or approving)."

“Each specific psychological state or attitude or stance may be thought of as bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of behavioural responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concept – ‘not,’ ‘or,’ ‘value.’”

"At the third stage, reference to the specific psychological state, attitude, or stance, is replaced by a general (or more general) psychological verb, together with an operator or device corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in a sub-clause."

“So we find reference to ‘thinking not-p,’ ‘thinking p or q,’ or ‘thinking it valuable to learn Greek.’”

"At the fourth and last stage, we remove the restriction imposed by the demand that the operator (“not,” “or,” “valuable”) at Stage III should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb."

"There is no limitation now on the appearance or occurrence of the operator and the operation in a sub-ordinate clause."

"With regard to this routine, I would make a few observations."

"The employment of the routine of Humeian projection may be expected to deliver for us, as its result, a concept – the concept(ion) of value, say, in something like a Fregeian ‘sense,’ rather than an object."

"To generate an object we must look to other routines."

"The provision, at Stage IV, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operator which corresponds to the initial, intuitive, concept is possible only via the provision of a condition of alethic satisfactoriness – a table -- or of some different but analogous valuation, for statements or expressions, within which each operator appears."

“Only thus can the permissible complexity be made intelligible.”

"Because of this, the difference between Stage II and Stage III is apparent rather than real."

"The Stage III provides only a notational variant of the second stage, at least unless Stage IV is also reached."

"It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine must not be merely formal or arbitrary, but principled, or reason-based."

"The invocation of a sub-sequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for."

"Subject to these provisos, application of this routine to our initial, intuitive, concept (‘putting it through the mangle’) does furnish one with a metaphysical re-construction of that concept."

"If the first stage is missing, we are given a metaphysical construction (not re-construction) of a new concept."

GRICE'S CATEGORY SHIFT. 

"The second construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and categories, and I will present my version of it as briefly as I can."

"Perhaps its most proper title is “Category Shift.”"

"But since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing new objects, or new subjects of discourse, by a procedure reminiscent of the operation of nominalization, I may also refer to it as ‘subjectification, or, for that matter, ‘objectification.’"

"Given a class of items which each can become a primary subject of discourse, namely a ‘substance,’ there are a number of ‘slots,’ or categories, into which predicates of a primary subject may fit."

"One is substance itself (secondary substance), in which case the predication is intra-categorial and essential."

"And there are others into which the predicates assigned in non-essential or accidental predication may fall."

"The list of these would resemble Aristotle’s ten-fold list of categories -- quality, quantity, and so forth – later reduced by Kant to just four (‘qualitas,’ ‘quantitas,’ ‘relatio,’ and ‘modus.’)"

"It might be, however, that the members of my list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, would not be fully co-ordinate."

"The development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows.

We might for example have to develop first the category of attribute, and then the sub-ordinate categories of quantitative attribute (‘quantity’) and non-quantitative attribute (‘quality’)."

"Or again the category of ‘event’ before the sub-ordinate category of ‘action.’"

"Now, though it is to be the primary subject of a predication, a substance may not be the only subject."

"Derivatives of, or conversions of, items which start life (so to speak) as predicable, in one non-substantial categorial slot or another, of substances, may themselves come to occupy the first slot."

"An initial predicable will be a quality of, or a quantity of, a particular type or token of a substantial."

"Not being a quality or a quantity of a substance, the initial predicable will not be a quality or a quantity simpliciter."

"It is my suspicion that only for a substance, as a subject, are all the categorial slots filled by a predicable item."

"Some substantial which is not a substance may derive from a plurality of items from different original categories."

"An event, for example, might be a complex substantial, deriving from one substance (“I”) one attribute (“rise”) and one time (“early in the morning”)."

"My position with regard to the construction routine of category shift, subjectification, or objectification, runs parallel to my position with regard to the first construction routine of Humeian projection, in that here too I hold strongly to the opinion that the eschatological introduction of (or eschatological shift to) a new category of entities must not be arbitrary, but principled."

"Category shift has to be properly motivated."

"If it is not, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely ‘a way of speaking,’ as when we say that Banbury’s disinterestedness or altruism is nowhere to be seen."

"What sort of principled motivation is called for is not immediately clear."

H. P. GRICE ON W. C. KNEALE.

"One strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up new applications for existing modes of explanation."

"It may be, for example, that the substantial introduction of an abstract entitiy, like the property of being red, makes possible the application to what W. C. Kneale in “Probability and induction” calls a ‘secondary’ induction, comprising the principles at work in a ‘primary’ induction."

"But it is not only the sort but the degree of principled motivation which is in question.

When I discussed the form of a metaphysical argument, it seemed that, to achieve reality, the acceptance of a category of entities had to be mandatory."

"The recent discussion, rather, suggests that, apart from conformity to a construction-routine, all that is required is that the acceptance is merely well-motivated?"

"Which of the two views is the correct one?"

"Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with two admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency?"

"Or is there just one sort of admission requirement, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?"

"Before characterizing my third construction-routine I must say a brief word about my take on what I regard as an essential property and about a final cause, or finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular, but for both of which I want to find metaphysical room."

"First, essence."

"In its logical dress, an essential property would appear either as a property which is constitutive or definitive or definitional of a given, usually substantial, kind; or as an individuating property of each individual member of a kind, an individuating property such that if an individual is to lose it, it would lose its identity (a = a), its existence, and indeed itself."

"It is clear that, if a property is one of the properties which constitute or define a kind, it is also an individuating property of each individual member of the kind, a property such that if an individual is to lose it, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist."

"A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the third construction routine might require, we subscribed to ‘The Grice-Myro View of Identity.’ (a =1 a, a =2 a )."

"Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio-temporal continuancy (as Strawson does in “Individuals”) as a constitutive or definitive property for a substantial kind, indeed for all substantial kinds."

"But there is another more ‘metaphysical,’ rather than merely ‘logical’ dress which an essential property may wear."

H. P. GRICE ON J. M. KEYNES: A TREATISE OF PROBABILITY (1921). 

"They may appear as a Keynesian ‘generator property’ (“A treatise of probability,” 1921), a ‘core’ property of a substantive kind which co-operates to explain the phenomenal and dispositional features of members of that kind."

"On the face of it, this is a quite different approach."

"But, on reflection, I find myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear."

"Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorising which is not too sophisticated and mathematicised, as maybe these days the physical sciences are, a logically essential property and a fundamentally explanatory property of a substantial kind come together."

"A substances is essentially (in a ‘logical’ way) a thing such that, in circumstances C, it manifests feature F, where each gap-sign is replaced in such a way as to display the most basic laws of the theory."

"So perhaps, at this level of theory, a substance requires a theory to give expression to its nature, and a theory requires substance to govern it."

"A final cause finality, particularly detached finality (a function or purpose which does not require sanction from a purposer or an user), is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with a ‘final cause.’"

"I am somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of superstitions and priestcraft."

"That, in my view, it is certainly not."

"The concepts and vocabulary of finality, operating as if they were detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedure for recognizing and describing what goes on around us."

"This point is forcibly illustrated by William Golding in his novel, “The Inheritors.”"

"There, Golding describes, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people."

"In the description, functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age couple is vividly shared by the reader."

"Now, finality is sometimes active rather than passive."

"The finality of a thing then consists in what it is supposed to do rather than in what it is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it."

"Sometimes, the finality of a thing is not dependent on some ulterior end which the thing is envisaged as realising."

"Sometimes, the finality of a thing is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous to the thing."

"And, sometimes, the finality of a thing is not sub-ordinate to the finality of some whole of which the thing is a component, as the finality of an eye or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which it belongs."

"When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these over-lapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality."

"And I shall also on occasion call it a metier."

"I will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous finality, which may attach to a substance, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous, and which will attach to the conception of kinds of substance or of other constructed entities."

"The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manoeuvre."

"It is this latter kind of finality which l have been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of construction-routines."

"Now it is my position that what I might call a finality-feature, at least if it consists in the possession of autonomous finality, may find a place within the essential propertiy of at least some kinds of substances (for example, a ‘person’)."

"A substances may be essentially ‘for doing such and such.’"

"Indeed, I suspect we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous finality not merely can fall within a substances essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature."

"If a substance has a certain metier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier."

"But it does have to be equipped with the motivation or propension to fulfil the métier should it choose to follow that motivation."

"And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, that motivation or propension must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the metier would be in line with its own essential nature."

"But however that may be, once we have a finality feature enrolled as an essential property of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory or system of conduct, say, rational conduct, for that kind of substance (say, human beings qua persons) which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's essential descriptive properties."

GRICEIAN TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION

"I can now give a brief characterization of my third construction routine, which is called Metaphysical Transubstantiation."

"Let us suppose that the Genitor has sanctioned the appearance of a biological type called ‘human,’ into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called rationality, perhaps on the grounds that rationality will greatly assist a human in coping speedily and resourcefully with survival problems posed by a wide range of environments, which a human would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain himself in."

"But, perhaps unwittingly, The Genitor has thereby created a breed of a potential metaphysician."

"And what the human does is (so to speak) to re-constitute himself."

"A human do not alter the totality of attributes which each human possesses."

"A human redistributes them."

"A property which a human possesses essentially as a human becomes a property which, as substances of a new psychological type, called ‘person’ he possesses accidentally."

"And the property or properties called Rationality, which attaches only accidentally to a human, attaches essentially to a person."

"While each human is standardly coincident with a particular person (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that person are no longer identical, when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist."

"But though logic is insufficient, it may be that other theories will remedy the deficiency."

"Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the human (or person) should have wanted to bring off this feat of trans-substantiation?"

"We need to provide metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which I have been presenting, for a reasonably un-impoverished theory of value."

"I shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with unsolved problems and un-formulated supporting arguments."

"What I have to offer will be close to, and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as, the content of my third Carus Lecture."

"Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher, Kantotle."

"It involves six stages."

"The details of the logic of value concepts and of their possible relativizations are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog."

"So I shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, I regard as two distinct dichotomies."

"First, there is a dichotomy between value-concepts which are relativized to some focus of relativization and those which are not so relativized, which are absolute."

"If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a type-writer is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type."

"With regard to this dichotomy I am inclined to accept the following principles."

"First, the presence in me of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a ‘bite’ on me, that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value concept to me does, or should, carry weight for me."

"Only if I care for my aunt can I be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden."

"Second, the fact that a relativized value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on my part for the focus of relativization, engages me does not imply that the original relativization has been cancelled, or rendered absolute."

"If my concern for your health stimulates in me a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medication, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still relativized to your health."

"Without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold."

"The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a transmitting relation which links the current bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants.'"

"In the case of the transmission of relativized value-concepts, the transmitting relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the relation which is embodied in the relativization."

"The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to promise-keeping or to my keeping a promise, and to attach indirectly or by transmission to my digging your garden for you, should that be something which I have promised to do."

"It would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and indirectly or by transmission to the payment of doctor's bills, an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativizing relation are one and the same."

"Stage II of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention."

"It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value, the notion of finality would be in a certain sense dispensable."

"And, further, that, if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity."

"A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of attributions of relativized value, is ‘mechanistically substitutable.’"

"That is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics and on the fact that the non-pursuit of certain goals such as survival and re-production is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanation is replaceable by, or re-interpretable as, an explanation of a sort congenial to a mechanist."

"But, if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwickian' in character, it is required that it be supported by a kind of finality which extends beyond this ‘overlap’ with ‘mechanistically substitutable’ finality."

"Autonomous finality is demanded, and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so he is committed to a denial of absolute value."

"That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand."

"To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion of ‘absolute value,’ though it makes a move in that direction."

"To say that metaphysical house-room be found for absolute value is a rational demand is, rather, to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be true that the notion of absolute value is acceptable."

"There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this want or desire."

"It might be that we feel a need to appeal to absolute value in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (for example) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself."

"Or again, it might be that, by Leibnizian standards for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires relatively simple principles, is richer and so better than a world which does not."

"But granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limits are imposed by metaphysical constructions already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimize the ‘conception’ of absolute value."

"What it is proper to believe to be true may depend in part on what one would like to be true."

"Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of positive freedom, a dignity which as a rational being a person enjoys, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of rationality, to fix its rules as well."

"In any case, a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safe-guard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one."

"I have some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with my ideas about the quasi-practical character of metaphysical argument."

"On the assumption that the operation of Metaphysical Transubstantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of a biological creature has been ‘invented’ into a class of psychological substances, namely a ‘person,’ who possesses as part of his essential nature a certain metier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of rationality, and who has only to recognize and respect a certain law of his nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realize his metier."

"The degree to which a person fulfils that metier will constitute him a good person (‘good’ qua person); and, while the reference to the substantial kind, ‘person,’ undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization."

"Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of substances, the way is opened for the appearance of transmitting relationships which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to suitably qualified non-substantial aspects if members of a kind, such as an action of a person or a characteristic of a person."

"While it cannot be assumed that a person will be the only original instance of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instances there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Humeian Projection."

"It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Humean Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in Aristotelian style, to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge."

"And a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating in conditions of freedom."

"A cat, adorable as it may be, will be less productive a source of such extension than a person."

"In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to a person as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value.

Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements."

"Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems."

"I do not find this thought daunting."

"If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished."

"And, if philosophy recurrently regenerated the same old problems, it would not be alive because it could never begin."

"So those who look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries up."