Grice's L

linguistic botany: Grice was a meta-linguistic botanist. His point was to criticise ordinary-language philosophers criticising philosophers. Say: Plato and Ayer say that episteme is a kind of doxa. The contemporary, if dated, ordinary-language philosopher detects a nuance, and embarks risking collision with the conversational facts or data: rushes ahead to exploit the nuance without clarifying it, with wrong dicta like: What I known to be the case I dont believe to be the case. Surely, a cancellable implicatum generated by the rational principle of conversational helpfulness is all there is to the nuance. Grice knew that unlike the ordinary-language philosopher, he was not providing a taxonomy or description, but a theoretical explanation. To not all philosophers analysis fits them to a T. It did to Grice. It did not even fit Strawson. Grice had a natural talent for analysis. He could not see philosophy as other than conceptual analysis. “No more, no less.” Obviously, there is an evaluative side to the claim that the province of philosophy is to be identified with conceptual analysis. Listen to a theoretical physicist, and hell keep talking about concepts, and even analysing them! The man in the street may not! So Grice finds himself fighting with at least three enemies: the man in the street (and trying to reconcile with him:  What I do is to help you), the scientists (My conceptual analysis is meta-conceptual), and synthetic philosophers who disagree with Grice that analysis plays a key role in philosophical methodology. Grice sees this as an update to his post-war Oxford philosophy. But we have to remember that back when he read that paper, post-war Oxford philosophy, was just around the corner and very fashionable. By the time he composed the piece on conceptual analysis as overlapping with the province of philosophy, he was aware that, in The New World, anaytic had become, thanks to Quine, a bit of an abusive term, and that Grices natural talent for linguistic botanising (at which post-war Oxford philosophy excelled) was not something he could trust to encounter outside Oxford, and his Play Group! Since his Negation and Personal identity Grice is concerned with reductive analysis. How many angels can dance on a needles point? A needless point? This is Grices update to his Post-war Oxford philosophy. More generally concerned with the province of philosophy in general and conceptual analysis beyond ordinary language. It can become pretty technical. Note the Roman overtone of province. Grice is implicating that the other province is perhaps science, even folk science, and the claims and ta legomena of the man in the street. He also likes to play with the idea that a conceptual enquiry need not be philosophical. Witness the very opening to Logic and conversation, Prolegomena. Surely not all inquiries need be philosophical. In fact, a claim to infame of Grice at the Play Group is having once raised the infamous, most subtle, question: what is it that makes a conceptual enquiry philosophically interesting or important? As a result, Austin and his kindergarten spend three weeks analysing the distinct inappropriate implicata of adverbial collocations of intensifiers like highly depressed, versus very depressed, or very red, but not highly red, to no avail. Actually the logical form of very is pretty complicated, and Grice seems to minimise the point. Grices moralising implicature, by retelling the story, is that he has since realised (as he hoped Austin knew) that there is no way he or any philosopher can dictate to any other philosopher, or himself, what is it that makes a conceptual enquiry philosophically interesting or important. Whether it is fun is all that matters. Refs.: The main references are meta-philosophical, i. e. Grice talking about linguistic botany, rather than practicing it. “Reply to Richards,” and the references under “Oxonianism” below are helpful. For actual practice, under ‘rationality.’ There is a specific essay on linguistic botanising, too. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.