Conversational Habits Amongst Oxonians

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

----- WHEN I HAD TO CONCLUDE MY PhD dissertation on 'rationality' in face-to-face interaction (conversation) from a Gricean pragmatic perspective, I had, naturally, to conclude-conclude. So I found Elinor Keenan's work inspirational -- in a provocative way. For she was saying, reasoners reason differently in Malagasy. The Keenan alleged counterexamples originated outside philosophy, obviously, and they were never really taken up by philosophers. But I did find in the work of M. Hollis and others -- in the field of 'rationality' and 'relativism' a way to connect my and Grice's "universalistic" (or provocatively unversalistic claims, even) with what after Hegel I called the 'cunning' of (conversational) reason. In the end, and the more I read Grice, the more I find the charmingly parochialism of his examples. The manifestation of rationality may still be a manifestation of a universal faculty even if the cunningness of this notion allows us to appreciate it only in a specific spatio-temporal co-ordinate: the way philosophers -- like Grice -- conversed and conversed rationally, in the Oxford of his days