Grice's Letter of Recommendation

--- by JLS
---- for the GC.

----- IN THE WILLIAM JAMES LECTURES, Grice adapted an example from his earlier "Causal Theory of Perception". The Aristotelian Society talk had Grice and Warnock discussing Smith at Collections:

-- W: And so, what about Smith?
--- G: He has beautiful handwriting.

Grice is working on 'strong/weak' implicatures only, and suggests, "Smith is just hopeless at philosophy" as an implicatum, with the caveat of defeasibility, "I do not of course by any means desire to suggest that his philosophical skills are poor, or anything of that sort" -- online at Bayne's website.

Ditto, Jennifer Saul, who studied at Princeton and now teaches at Sheffield, Yorks, has elaborated -- online and elsewhere -- the various letters of recommendations elaborated by Grice and the Griceans -- She, as a neo-Gricean, collects them -- and files them alphabetically. The original letter by Grice WoW: goes

---


To whom it may concern

---- Mr. Smith's command of English
----- is excellent, and his attendance
----- at tutorials has been regular.
-------- Yours, etc.

H. P. Grice.

----

Gloss: "I, qua utterer, am wishing to impart information which I'm reluctant to write down. Therefore, I implicate" (WoW:33).

Consider now Kramer in his commentary on Heidegger ('nobody knows the troubles I seen'):

my favorite job recommendation
is "You'll be lucky to get him to work for you."

The utterance violates the cooperative principle in so many levels -- its ten attendant maxims, too -- that Kramer is reluctanct to make this explicit. But I will, for the time being --

i. there's the problem of Moral Luck, that Kramer, vis a vis Williams, has discussed elsewhere.

ii. there's the problem of analogical scope (as in "I don't love you because you are beautiful") and semantic transcategorial barriers ("Seldom do you see honest men like me") rolled into one.

iii. Etc.