Footnotes to Grice: latitudinal and longitudinal unities in conversational pragmatics

by J. L. Speranza

Footnotes to Grice:
Latitudinal and Longitudinal Unities in Conversational Pragmatics

“The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 69.

Introduction. I’ll start with my rewrite of the A. N. Whitehead much-quoted commentary above in "Process and Reality". "The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (1929:69). My rewrite: The safest general characterisation of the European pragmatic tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Grice. Of course Whitehead could have expanded on a few adjectives there: such as 'safe' (and 'safest'), 'general' (as opposed to 'particularised'?) and, most of all, "European"! -- as students of Plato have grown tired of hearing of all the Oriental influences -- in Orphism, for example -- that his philosophy testifies! Similar pragmatic qualifications may still survive to my rewrite. So I propose an argumentative play:

Speranza: The safest general characterisation of the European pragmatic tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Grice.

Argumenter: As opposed to 'unsafe'?

Speranza. Sure. For an unsafe characterisation, for Popper, is the thing to propose.

Argumenter: And how general?

Speranza: Too true, given that Grice only used 'pragmatic' once or twice in his opus magnum!

Argumenter: I take you take Anglo-American as European!

Speranza: I do!

And so on.

One hears of pragmatics perhaps far too often, but, how often do we hear of the philosophical "background" (or backgrounds) of, or to, as I prefer, pragmatics? In this essay I propose to examine some of the philosophical requirements that any model of pragmatics worth the name ‘pragmatic’. And the examination unashamedly puts forwards a "Gricean" (or "Griceian" as I also like to spell it) perspective.

This motivated NOT by an "amor theologicus" (which Grice refers to in his "Life and Opinions") but, rather, as Whitehead did with Plato, by using Grice as setting some standards for the different criteria of adequacy of any pragmatic model which will count as displaying a philosophical pedigree.

If philosophy -- or 'the European philosophical tradition', rather -- has been but footnotes to Plato (to speak safely and generally), surely the analogous thing can be said of Grice and pragmatics.

Grice never felt he was doing philosophy on his own. He enjoyed seeing philosophy as mutual enjoyment. Getting together to do philosophy should be like getting together to make music, he wrote. And this getting together he saw both latitudinally (the people you and I meet in this or that corridor) and longitudinally. He joined the efforts of Kantotle. Rather than Plathegel (Or Ariskant rather than Heglato). So here we find the first of our paradoxical considerations. It would seem that if the "European philosophical tradition" is Platonic in essence, pragmatics, via Grice, is Aristotelian -- (vide Atlas on Grice as Kantotelianism in Petrus).

But that would be a simplistic attitude. Surely there is a Platonic background to Aristotelianism. Just consider the axiomatic treatments of Platonism and Aristotelianism as provided by Grice's collaborator at Berkeley: A. D. Code (in PGRICE, ed. Grandy and Warner).

Rather, the question to ask would be: in what ways does the ‘unity’ in the contents of philosophy as a discipline -- the ‘latitudinal’ unity, now -- that Grice speaks of, and the unity in the historical development of such contents (that is, the ‘longitudinal’ unity, in Gricean parlance) guide any pragmatic model worth examining?

Grice’s substantive answers to the different components of the latitudinal components of 'conversational pragmatics' (along with its major alternatives) are considered, while a longitudinal conclusion for any ‘possible future’ pragmatic examined -- and one that respects the paleo-Griceian in any neo-Griceian model worth examining.

In tracing the longitudinal unity, we don't have to go back as far as Aristotle, or Kant. Historians today turn to be pretty myopic, and I won't be criticised when I argue that pragmatics was given birth within a specific historical context (Grice’s 'Play Group' at Oxford), and as such, one conntected with a specific methodology – the linguistic botany (or 'cartography', as I prefer) of 'ordinary language philosophy' -- as practiced by philosophers of Grice's generation -- or earlier, Austin's -- imbued with a special sensitivity for subtleties of meaning as well as a passion for philosophical argument. There was also a substantive thing shared by this group: a particular type of ‘intentionalist’ philosophy (of the Griceian type that never really was taken up outside Oxford) – and that the best should be made out of these ‘givens’ that define our discipline.

Like Austin, and Hampshire (to name just two philosophers of Grice's Play Group), it is best to describe Grice (as Suppes does in PGRICE) as an 'intentionalist', rather than as a behaviourist (which would have described philosophers of the previous generation, such as Ryle) or a cognitivist (as some neo-Griceians like to regard themselves). The intentionalism of Grice is evident when one examines his constant adherence to a methodology he inherited from Stout and which trades on introspection. From his very early "Privation and negation" (1939), to "Personal Identity" (1941), to "Disposition and Intention" (1949) via "Meaning" (1948) up to his "Reply to Richards" in a book that features "intentions" in its subtitle ("intentions, categories, ends" as being the three grounds of rationality) it is difficult to disagree with Suppes.

2. Pragmatics, 'footnotes to Grice'. The two faces of Grice, or of being Griceian, rather, should present themselves by now. When Grice looked back at the strands of his work, he detected two main ones, a substantive one, and a methodological one. I submit that this has a crucial consequence with regard to our idea of ‘pragmatics’ as a discipline. Reverting Grice’s order I propose to overview each of these two strands.

2. 1. The methodological. Scientists follow methods. There is "scientific method". This is a vademecum. There is no such thing as ‘scientific method’. There are scientific methods. Philosophy is different, and Grice, for one, never changed. The method, in the philosopher, makes the man. Grice’s method was intuitive, and acquired early enough, when, while passing from his alma mater of Clifton to Corpus Christi in Oxford, he relied on his sensitivity for nuances of meaning accompanied by an enthusiasm for philosophical argument.

His intuitions were rich, varied, and many, and he just needed time and interaction -- which he received profusely -- in order to order them. So, he found ‘philosophical analysis’ as the right way to give shape to his intuitions. Or rather, to express his intuitions in a lingua franca that he could share with other philosophers. It is this methodological strand that scans his writings in ‘pragmatics’. It is intuitive. But at the same time aims at sophistifiation. Already in his early "Personal identity" (1941) we see Grice paying respects to the history of the discipline (when choosing Locke's memory-based approach to consciousness) while looking for the new fashionable way to express it: in terms of 'logical construction'. Or consider, in a more pragmatic vein, that type of ‘signalling’ that pragmaticists often use when they write “?” or “??” to mean ‘pragmatic inappropriateness’. Qua pragmaticists, we are not concerned with well-formed syntactic utterances, or intensionally isomorphic semantic readings. No. We are concerned with making sense, for example, of Moore’s paradox, “It is raining, but I don’t believe” it, if sense could be made of that (and it could). In this vein, the diagnosis of a pragmatic inappropriateness runs hand in hand with a more general methodological philosophical strand. If Moore’s paradox is the bread and butter of philosophical pragmaticists, his remarks contra idealism, for example, are the bread and butter of the Griceian philosopher par excellence.

It has been said that the difference is often one of 'grammatical person'. Grice combines both approaches. There is a lot of 'third-person' perspective in most of Grice's writings. Consider his early "Meaning" (1948). When should we say that this utterer meant this or meant that? Is the displaying of a photograph an act of 'meaning'? and so on. Grice is using his own intuitions (or introspections) as he deals with issues that he wants to share with those who share those basic presuppositions. That type of intuitionism-cum-instropectionism is a typical requirement of a Griceian pragmatics that a non-Griceian can only challenge. And the onus is on the challenger in providing an eliminationist approach to the phenomena that is not reductive enough to leave everyone disatisfied.

2. 1. 1. Rudiments of the Gricean method as applied to pragmatics. It will do to consider in some more detail Grice’s overt appeal to intuitions. Let us just concentrate on his two main pieces, “Logic and Conversation” (1967) and “Meaning”
(1948) in that order -- while we recall that the first was written almost 20 years after.

Intuitions in “Logic and Conversation” run galore. In 'introducing' the term ‘implicate’, as a ‘term of art’, Grice wants to do it because it will do duty for what he feels are his own idiosyncratic usages of a triolet of verbs. "Implicate" is to do duty for ‘imply’, of course; but also, for ‘suggest, ‘and even ‘mean’". So even when if qua philosopher he is feeling tempted to go beyond the given of ordinary language, Grice is cautious enough to display explicitly what his new concoction is to be dummy for.

In providing the ordinary English glosses for "implicate", note Grice's cavalier attitude towards the identification of the first conversational implicatum in the set of "Logic and Conversation" lectures:

A: How is C getting on in his new job at the bank?
B: Oh, quite well, I think. He likes his colleagues, and
he hasn't been to prison yet.

+> “He is potentially dishonest” (or "His colleagues are known to be treacherous"). Note the appeal to a disjunctional approach to implicata where almost anything goes, provided some calculability is presented as reasonable.

If the middle Grice found 'implicate' a nice dummy for 'imply', 'suggest', and 'mean', the retrospective Grice of the "Retrospective Epilogue" could not just by any crypto-technicism, and he spends some delightful time in distinguishing not just 'imply' from 'suggest' but adding a new colloquiallism for good measure: 'hint'. What Grice then says (in 1987) then takes up a general interest in forms of indirect communication (of the type displayed by Holdcroft 1976).

Or consider, in the third William James lecture, Grice's also cavalier treatment of the Moore Paradox, which we were referring to above. "p but I don't believe that p" comes out as "not natural"? Not really. What comes out as "nont natural" is to say, following the schema of the previous technical lecture, that in uttering “p”, U has *implied* that he believes that p. The ‘natural thing to say’, Grice says, is that U has expressed that p. Again, to retain this 'intuition', Grice proposes a minor tweak: a conversational implicatum proper results from U's non-trivially following a conversational maxim. (But some pragmaticists have disagreed -- Leech, for example, or Harnish, still count violations of Moore's paradox as resulting from direct or trivial implicata).

A similar respect for the intuition, in this case, Albritton's, comes from the same lecture, with regard to the 'pretense' theory of 'irony', as Grice felt he had been a bit too technical in his dismounting irony as conversational implicature. Surely some qualification as to the type of content being expressed was in order.

Now for some intuitions in the paper that preceded the William James set of lectures by some 20 years before: "Meaning", as he presented to the Oxford Philosophical Society. Recall that he is bringing a colloquial English term, such as "mean" (verb, actually) back to the philosophical discussion after good old Peirce, for all his Anglo-American tradition in philosophy, had tried to evaporate, with his talking of indices, symbols, and interpretants. But why would we *not* consider that this or that case qualify as a case of ‘mean’? Consider the needed qualifications in the Herod case.

“By displaying the head of St. John the Baptist, Herod means that St. John the Baptist is dead."

Surely not! The case of a showing a photograph "of Mrs X in unduly affectionate terms with Y" versus merely drawing a picture. Surely not again! It is when forgetting the need to emphatise with Grice's intuitions, and the background that formed him, that one may feel a bit the pity of A. M. Kemmerling when he wondered, after writing his disseration on Grice on "Meinen", whether what Grice was saying applied only to English!

I'll close this methodological section with a plea for uncorrected intuitions then.

b. Latitudinal unity: from the methodological to the substantive. Grice has gone on record, e.g. by the University of California at Berkeley (library cataloguing) as a ‘philosopher of language’. His works are catalogued under ‘semantics’, and such. In other words, it’s very rare that academia will recognize a ‘philosopher’ as such. Or worse: a philosopher's philosopher, as Grice was (in my and M. Platts's words). There is ALWAYS the need, to add, “—of what?”. Philosophy of. Grice opposed this view, strongly. “Philosophy is, like virtue, entire”. A philosopher is a philosopher is a philosopher. But a pragmaticist, the latter-day embodiment of specialty in academia, can hardly (if not kant) cope with that. And so Grice is labeled a ‘philosopher of language’. All the remarks made by Grice -- on the nature of language, the rationality of conversation, and meaning – were NEVER meant as substantive remarks. They were, if you examine the context in which they were saying -- ALWAYS in the context of a philosophical seminar -- just as illustrations, for his philosophical pupils, of his pervasive ‘methodological’ strand. Perhaps “Meaning” (as read in 1948) was ‘substantive’? After all, it did not touch on the method of philosophy, except for that sad caveat that he surely should not be seen as "peopling our talk with armies of compicated psychological occurrences"! It was, on the face of it, just Grice’s reaction to the gross generalities of Stevenson 4 years earlier (vide "Zwischen Meinen und Kausalitat in Stevenson und Grice"). But again, a glimpse at the Grice archives simplifies things for us. For Grice was careful to keep the notes he prepared for a seminar he gave in Oxford on Peirce's theory of signs. And there the point is surely methodological. Grice's emphasis in finding philosophical import to talk of 'mean' is meant to balance all the crypto-technical (Grice's word) jargon by Peirce which, not only had failed to raise the proper questions worth making, but, as he puts it in a nod to his intelligent pupils, managed to raise some improper ones!

If we go earlier to Grice 1941, “Personal identity”, that is perhaps a different animal. Two years after his very first philosophical essay on "Privation and negation" (which proposed an empiricist answer to Plato's problem in "The Sophist" about the vacuity of negative statements), Grice seems now more explicitly concerned with method as such. It is not that he has a doubt about "I". He is challenging Gallie's and Broad's rather simplistic treatment of "I" as substances in constructions which are not logical enough.

The obsession with method perhaps Grice did inherit, more sensitive to these things than Austin was, to what he saw in Ryle. For, again with Ryle, it was the problem of the early twentieth-century philosopher, in Oxford, to find a niche for what he was going to say. Ryle found it in phenomenology and later logical behaviourism. Grice in his type of 'ordinary-language' intentionalism.

A later item of his, in the Grice archives, typically takes up an early reflection of his earlier self, and is entitled, symptomatically, “The logical construction theory of personal identity”, for this is what he was indeed into back in 1941, as he wrote, predictively, "I shall be fighting soon." His approach there, while substantive (and dealing with personal identity in terms of memory following the proposal by Locke in "Essay concerning humane [sic] understanding" (1690), and Hume, via Reid) is painted with a methodological strand of later vintage, as Grice reviews C. D. Broad’s cataloguing of possible analyses of “I” statements as being triple: "pure-ego", "disguised description", or, last but surely not least, "logical construction".

And this is a good exercise. If we proceed, as I have, elsewhere (at the Grice Club) year by year wtih each of Grice’s publications and unpublications, we perceive the methodological merging with the substantive, or rather, the substantive (being a philsopher, ANYTHING is prey for analysis) being the excuse for a self-justificatory use of a philosophical method. And it is the methodological that wins the day. Philosophers of his generation were NOT involved with answers to philosophical questions, but with posing the RIGHT kind of question. And again, it is
the post-Griceian who denies this who has the onus to prove otherwise -- as Aristotle tried to refute Plato, say.

Towards the Rudiments of a Substantive, albeit minimal Pragmatics. Now the question arises: how do we harmonise the common-sense, introspective, intuitionist, intentionalist attitude to philosophy -- with 'ordinary langauge philosophy' as defending not a couple of Oxford snobs (as some saw it) but 'the man in the street' as the later Grice preferred ("Notes on the Vulgar and the Learned") -- as it applies in the methodological, to the creation of a Theory? Or is Grice merely concerned with an ‘analysis’ -- where it is now seen as a mere 'clarification' of some usage or other? Here the issues are thorny, because pragmatics is understood, as it should NOT be understood, as a technical field (cfr. quantum-theory, or neuro-science and qualia, in G. Bealer's criticisms). In fact, any obscure term in pragmatics, when unnecessary obscure (e.g. ‘impliciture’) is best left aside when coming from a non-ordinary language philosopher. And we say thorny. When Urmson first edited Austin's How to do things with words, little did he care about titles for individual lectures. They have to be provided by Nidditch, in editorial assistance with Marina Sbisa. And, as Grice notes, "How to do" is plagued with technicism. So why allow for 'pirotology', 'conventional nongeneralised implicature' and commonground indicating device, but not 'impliciture'? I'll have a few words about this in the concluding remarks.

The logic of meaning. Do pragmaticists, whose mother tongue is NOT English (and who then do not share 'native speaker' intuitions with him) be so concerned, as Grice was, with what ‘mean’ stands for? Or was it Grice's fault to fail to perceive that when good old Peirce was trying to reintroduce 'index', 'symbol', and 'interpretant' in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition he was trying to be fair to the longer Graeco-Roman tradition in semiotics? Again, should we take Grice’s detailed clauses and subclauses as guiding some language-independent "Theory theory" that will be the basis for any pragmatics conceived as possible? Or is he suggesting that no observation can fail to be theory-laden, and that intutions come as they go?

The problems abound because to the common-sense, intuitionist, empiricist, intentionalist, and 'ordinary-language' attitudes to his enterprise, Grice added the 'liberal'. When Bennett was formatting on Grice's 'meaning' theories, he coined "meaning-nominalism" (the view that the meaning of token x is prior to the meaning of type X). Similarly, one can speak of 'meaning-liberalism'. Grice is a liberal, in the primeval Locke sense of the term, as when Locke (again edited by Bennett) speaks of the 'inalienable liberty' that an utterer has to make his words stand for any idea he pleases. Grice is clearest in his fascinating little paper to Wellesey College (of all places) when he refers to his philosophical problems having grown out of HIS approach to HIS use of words -- not any other's.

If the "Retrospective Epilogue" fails to display the charms of the early Grice's naivete regarding usages, it is also a more mature piece of work in more than one respect. We see his constant use of 'signification' and 'dictiveness' and even 'phrastic' and 'neustic', i.e. terms which are not strictly speaking colloquial, but ones which Grice finds, by now, familiar enough to use with his attentive audience. Again, these issues are thorny.

If Whitehead restricted his views to the "European" tradition, the same can be said about Grice. Only ONCE did he even suggest, in a nod to his collaborator Staal, that there may be an overalp with other traditions (non-Western): but it seems that while there is a bit of welcomed parochialism in the Oxford of his day to stick with 'mean' and 'imply' and 'hint' and 'suggest' and 'intend', it makes more of an European sense (imbued in a Graeco-Roman tradition) to use hybrid Greek or Latinate expressions, as Grice does with his phrastics and neustics (ultimately Hare, but Grice won't say it) and signification, iconicity and dictiveness. Note that if the early Grice found 'iconic' too technical to be true, it's mostly to iconicity that the latter Grice goes back in both his "Meaning Revisited" (Wharton's myth) and the 'minimal' general theory of 'representation' in "Retrospective Epilogue".

Similar considerations spring from a substantive approach to his logic of conversation. Should we replace Grice’s vague ‘maxims’, delightful as they are, in such a comical reference to Kant's obsession with the tetralogy of categories -- for more specific ones? We don’t think so. In any case, not as we read and re-read the William James Lectures set which is Grice's own little tribute to Kant. Perhaps when pragmaticists get familiar to what some regard as superior, his predated "Logic and Conversation" lectures at Oxford (for Hilary Term of 1966), with the equally charming desiderata, principle of conversational self-love and conversational benevolence, and requirements of candour and clarity, they will at least see who the last joke was on.

Grice never minded multiplying maxims, especially "Manner" ones. I counted them, and came to the conclusion that he must have had a decalogue in mind! But Leech is perhaps going to the other extreme by appealing to a maxim whenever a phenomenon is being studied. A similar ill-guided strategy results from little considerations of the philosophical import of 'rationality'. We all know about face and how to save it, but surely 'be polite' cannot count in the same Kantian set of categories. So that politeness implicata, charming as they are, kant count as conversational. Their place in the sub-theory of rational psychology is thus mitigated.

Keywords in Griceian pragmatics. While we proceed to the larger longitudinal issues, I shall offer some prospects rather than some retrospects. Grice was aware that while “philosophy, like virtue, is entire”, people are not that virtuous! They need to pigeonhole. And they need a ‘research programme’, if generational, rather than degenerative the better. They need a prospect, and a good one at that. Grice never cared for them, and it showed. He seldom received the institutional support from his administrators, and he called his notes “programme”. The philosopher is there just to give a programme, a sketch, some programmatic notes or other. Never to deliver a grand alternative 'mind style' (even if G. P. Baker dreamed he saw it). Grice was much more at ease, as a good first in Lit. Hum., with the past. (It is perhaps interesting to note that the first big critic of Griceanism came from Grice's first pupil at St. John's, Strawson, who, incidentally, never pursued the Lit. Hum. programme, but the by then more fashionable one at Oxford, the PPE).

If one reads the 'keywords’ in any issue of a pragmatics journal, one cannot but be overwhelmed -- especially if one has written them! Everything seems to counts as pragmatic: from politeness to neuro-science. But where do these keywords belong, philosophically? I propose a review.

Take “implicature”. For Grice, this belonged, strictly, to "psychologia rationalis". He wouldn't use Baumgarten's term, but the anglophone variety, "rational psychology" (Notes in the Grice Archive). For there must be a bit of psychology that is NOT rational: face considerations, politeness, our concerns for others as humans, our pre-rational adherence to affections, etc. But Grice's choice of a scholastic term for ‘rational psychology’ is telling.

Grice evidently, as he reflected on the development of his philosophical self, realised he had been all the time seeing ‘meaning’ (or 'signification' if you must, if you want to please Eco) as a psychological phenomenon. There is an unpublication in the Archives, entitled, “Meaning and Psychology” which deals precisely with this, and as it pertains to his early "Disposition and intention" and his dispute with the infamous remarks by Mrs. Julie M. Jack ("The rights and wrongs of Grice on meaning").

Again, he may have introduced ‘implicature’ as a term of art (in the 1966 lectures at Oxford -- the quote is too good to miss here. "I coin 'implicature'". Note that he is coining it in English. Sidonius, talking of Graeco-Roman tradition had coined it some centuries ago as is properly credited in Short/Lewis, "Latin Dictionary". But by the time he had given second, third, and fourth thoughts to it, the diagnosis was simple. What an utterer implicates, after all, is, ultimately, a part of what he intends, and if one does not want to get to Thomistic (Aquinas) about it, part of what he means. True, the distinction still needs to be drawn, between now, a colloquialism by Moore, the 'entailment' (qua logical implication) and the 'implicature' (or implicatura, if you must) qua non-logical implication of a special type -- cfr. Nowell-Smith on contextual implication, or Grant on pragmatic implication to mention just two Oxford examples).

Or take a not so often keyword which I foresee as the keyword for some pragmatics of the future: “disimplicature”. Does this 'term of art' belong to the 'art of logic'? After all, it is defined in terms of 'implicature' and 'entailment'. Grice’s motivation in coining disimplicature is natural enough, and it is also natural to see why he disregarded that particular line of research in his programme. The motivation in coining 'disimplicature' is a methodological, rather than substantive, one. It relates to what Travis identifies as the 'annals' of analysis where Grice excelled providing critiques 'to devastating effect,' as Neale has it, to the more extreme strains of linguistic philosophy. The brander of implicature is the enemy of the entailment. “That’s surely NOT an entailment; it’s a simple conversational implicature, of the perfectly cancellable type. It does not belong in ANALYSIS." (cfr. the Oxonian remarks on 'trying'). But Grice -- while agreeing that, to echo S. Yablo, who knew him from his Berkeley days, “implicatures happen” -- also found himself that the weapon was striking back at him with a vengeance. “Disimplicature” was the word! Thus, if a student of Griceanism out of context may be misled by overtechnical accounts of 'implicatures', what to say of 'disimplicature', as naively defined by Grice. An utterer, after all, -- as when he is allowed to display a 'relaxed use of an expression' rather than retreat to a strengthened implicature -- may on occasion be justified in his ‘loose language’. The utterer just drops an entailment (or two) as part of the logical form (and truth-conditions) of what he is attempting at communicating, and, by fiat, he may be said to have ‘disimplicated’ this (or that). Surely we sometimes use 'see' without the factive requirement that what we see is out there to be seen, and so on. An excellent tool for a philosopher, to respond to charges of subjectivism in one's talk. But the interesting bit that concerns our general point here is that both ‘implicature’ and ‘disimplicature’, then, while technicisms, and of a methodological strain, belong in “philosophical psychology”, of a rational kind. There's no way either notion make sense unless we assume the rationality of the utterer and his addressee.

"Philosophical psychology", simpliciter, was Grice’s term for what the more crytptic Anglo-American tradition in philosophy (but never Grice) called ‘philosophy of mind’. "Soul forever", Grice proclaimed, as he brings psychology back to where it belogs: philosophy. Grice was NO behavioursist, as Ryle was, and while he was no materialist, he was a functionalist. As such he was no cognitivist, or mentalist (there is an item in his unpublications, where he recognizes, in some of his enemies, only a very “modest” sort of ‘mentalism’). It is, after all, very Oxonian neo-Prichardian (rather than neo-Stoutian) notions of willing, and accepting, and believing, and intending, and implicating, and meaning, that constitute the core of Grice's philosophy.

Grandy and Warner found the best acrostic: P(hilosophical) G(rounds) of R(ationality) are: I(ntentions), C(ategories), E(nds). But what would be categories or ends, without being indended by a rational human, a person? Again, we see the notions Grice brands to deal with philosophical paradoxes: his method to get to the substance.

At this point, a diagram of where pragmatics fits in in an overall picture of ‘philosophy’ may be in order.
THEORY-THEORY -- philosophy as starting with 'metaphysics' and returning to it.
Eschatology -- the branch of metaphysics dealing with category-barriers (as in the figure of literal meaning, but also parable, metaphor, analogy).
Ontology
General
Special
-Cosmology
-- Psychology
---- Rational Psychology
A rationalist account (alla Kantotle) of meaning and communication
What an U means
what U explicitly displays + what U implies
What U implies ‘conventionally’ + nonconventionally
noncoversationally + conversatioanally
Generally + Particularly
---------------- and what he DISIMPLICATES.

3.2. Pragmatics and the longitudinal unity of philosophy.

Grice’s soul, it is not bold to say, was with the ‘longitudinal unity’ of pragmatics. As a Lit.Hum. graduate of Oxford, he knew that it’s the root of a notion that bestowes it with pedigree. If one reads the ‘Name index' of any pragmatics journal, one is appalled by the lack of mention of Wollaston! It’s very rare that philosophers of the history of philosophy will be quoted. Yet this is all that Grice cared for. He would quote Socrates anyday. Allow me then for a timeline of pragmatics as Grice saw it.
(a) Greek Grice. First comes, of course, Aristotle. Linguists have not read Aristotle. It’s just the cursory commentary by one R. H. Robins in A Short History of Linguistics. Yet Grice was imbued with all of the Organon. He had spent years teaching Categoriae to generations of Oxford students. And he enjoyed going back to the issues, usually with his student P. F. Strawson. It is a miracle that Grice managed to keep all the notes on this, since he found that a close textual analysis is what a philosopher needs. If we can say, “Greek Grice” meaning Aristotle, we know what we mean.
(b) Kantotle.Then comes Kant. Linguists will refer to the Gricean maxims, but I prefer the Kantian maxims. Grice’s cursory “echoing Kant” is jocular, but the more one deals with the transcendental justification of the rationality of language, the more Kantian Grice feels to be. There is a footnote to be made here: surely there is room for a Hegelian pragmatics. Grice preferred to combine Aristotle and Kant into “Ariskant”. When he found the idiom too heavy, he would just play around and look for a generality. Kantotle does the same duty. But what about Plathegel (a combo of Plato and Hegel)? And others. A pragmaticist needs to see his work as embodying a long philosophical tradition. That is what Grice did, to his credit.
(c) Austin’s kindergartens – and beyond. And if longitudinal unity for Grice was important, in today’s world where time has become a commodity, we have to praise Grice for his love for his own generation. Grice did more than anyone of his generation of Oxford philosophers in naming them (“the Play Group”) and look for generalities. This was the postwar group that included not just Austin and Grice but, in alphabetical order, Gardiner, Hampshire, Nowell-Smith, Paul, Pears, Strawson, Thomson, Urmson, and Warnock. Enough name-dropping to give a student of 20th century philosophy, where Grice belonged, his bread and butter. Just consider as an illustration the Table of Examples in “Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation” (WoW:I):
J. L. Austin, No modification without aberration
------------------------in “A Plea for excuses”
“He did it voluntarily”
H. L. A Hart, “He drove carefully” (Hart, in conversation)
P. F. Strawson – “Introduction to Logical Theory”
--- “If p, q” +> q is inferable from p
H. P. Grice, “The Causal Theory of Perception” (1961)
----- “The pillar box seems red to me” (I doubt it is; it’s not).
-------------------- Examples cited by Grice as philosophical utterances
-------------------- and claims worth considering from a ‘conversational
-------------------- pragmatic perspective.
The question is: who's next? Anyone browsing a pragmatics journal will note the lack of Oxford philosophers, and similarly, a browsing of publications of Oxford philosophers retrieve a lack of pragmatic treatment. So the next Grice will have to be found in those corridors of power. When Grice is given the due place in the history of that institution. Grice found ‘pragmatics’ as the way to imbue a philosophy student with the weapons to think critically about a large number of issues. Yet today, with the decay of privilege, philosophy is seen as ‘more’ than that. It has become technical, and too academic. And no need for a ‘pragmatic’ of general thought. In many cases, the lack of Grice in the modern syllabus and curriculum in Oxford is understandable. Each generation has its heroes, and the important geniuses remain the same: Aristotle and Kant. Grice should however be seen as more than a mere author of ‘secondary literature’ on those ‘greats’. The prospect here is optimistic.

4. Wither now.

In this overview of Grice’s motivation behind his ‘pragmatic’ we have touched on various issues. We have seen that there is a general methodological and philosophical concern with Grice that is not even shared by all philosophers, but we have suggested that the onus is on the non-Griceian. As much as, to echo Whitehead, it is the non-platonic to challenge Plato as the father of the European philosophical tradition. Grice's method is considered ‘dated’ now (‘linguistic botanising’), and Travis thinks it was already dated (and Grice knew it) when he was lecturing in Harvard about the heyday of Oxonian philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s (Ryle, Concept of Mind, that Grice cites, and other specimens). If it was dated by the time he tried to resurrect it for the entertainment of the ‘masses’ at Harvard back in 1967, the meta-methodological point may come back to us. Sometimes a rehashing of old methods just works marvels. All they need is a little change of idiom, and, abracadabra: a pragmatic technology. The method is ‘analytic philosophy’ reamins one, no less. But there is also the substance -- the 'hyle' rather than the 'morphe'. The method is best applied to SOME but not all notions: ‘emotion’, ‘irrationality’, ‘cultural constructions’, etc. are perhaps not easily amenable to Gricean treatment -- but just you wait and see.

The tips then follow different ordering. Frst, for the philosopher simpliciter.

What has Grice contributed to philosophy as such? In what way what he did say still has a bearing today? Is a reference to him merely historical?

In what way his contributions mark a place in the development of philosophy in Oxford?

To these grand questions, answers can only be summarized.

Grice created not just a discipline that authors keep footnoting to; he was also a leading philosopher of his generation, and we can only hope that more technical pragmaticists recognize this, with a view that more serious philosophers will see Grice where he belongs. Then, there are conclusion to be drawn from the preceding reflections for the philosopher of language in particular. Pragmtics may die, but ‘philosophy of language’ is too entrenched in syllabus and curricula in philosophy programmes the world over. Where does Grice fit in? First, in the analysis of ‘meaning’. We cannot talk ‘meaning’ unless we ‘mean’ or see what we ‘mean’. Grice’s flurry of examples and counterexamples to his necessity and sufficiency prong remain the best example of analytic philosophy at his best. Add to that the issue of ‘implication’ and ‘entailment’ and ‘implicature’ and you get into the details of the ‘shades’ of meaning. Add to that a consideration of the mechanisms involved in the ‘psychological’ transmission of content, and you get the whole ‘rationalist’ picture of the Gricean programme. A full course on just what Grice has to say about the narrow, ‘philosophy of language’ shoud fill a few volumes, and more importantly, should help us understand what other philosophers – notably those of his generation, like Austin, Strawson, or Hare, have said about it. Finally, there is a tip for the pragmaticist. Why is a philosophical interest a necessity? All too often, the pragmaticist just goes to the field ignoring the philosophical motivation. When Grice is appealed to, it should be done with respect for the tradition he represented. A more detailed characterization of his motivation, the authors he was familiar with, the techniques of his analysis, should be taken. If not, we know the consequences. We need a good immersion into the Gricean spirit to make the footnotes we are making to him Griceanly readable. Even a footnote needs to say.

End-notes

1---We can see Grice’s motivation in stressing the ‘implicate’ as an attempt to have Strawson abandon his use of ‘presuppose’ for his earlier ‘imply’.

REFERENCES

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