H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza

 

H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza

This is not merely a study of H. P. Grice; it is an act of philosophical reclamation. With rare intensity, learned intimacy, and unmistakable personal voice, this essay restores Grice to the scale on which he ought to be read: not simply as the philosopher of conversational implicature, but as a thinker of communication in its deepest sense, of intention, of reason, of common sense, and of the lived institutional conditions under which philosophy itself gets made. What emerges is not a museum-piece Grice, embalmed in textbook orthodoxy, but a living Grice: exploratory, exacting, idiosyncratic, morally serious, and constantly more interesting than the narrow legend that has grown around his name.

The essay’s great strength lies in its refusal to separate philosophy from philosophical life. Oxford is not treated here as a backdrop but as an ecology, a pressure-system, a scene of rooms, classes, stints, colleagues, institutions, wars, and post-war returns. The title “Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy” is not allowed to pass as a mere academic label; it becomes, instead, a key to the peculiar social and administrative world in which Grice thought, taught, and wrote. That attention to the conditions of thought gives the whole essay a singular depth. It shows, with uncommon tact and force, that Grice’s philosophical style cannot be detached from the world that sustained and constrained it.

What is most admirable, however, is the interpretive audacity of the piece. Against the received image of Grice as above all the theorist of implicature, this essay insists that the true centre lies elsewhere: in “Meaning,” and beyond “Meaning,” in communication itself. That reversal is not merely provocative; it is illuminating. It reorganizes Grice’s corpus from within. Suddenly the famous later doctrine of conversational implicature appears not as an isolated triumph, but as the natural outgrowth of an earlier and more radical concern with utterer’s meaning, intention, the addressee’s recognition, and the all-important distinction between cause and reason. By following that thread, the essay reveals a unity in Grice’s work that standard accounts too often miss.

The treatment of Grice’s early papers is especially impressive. “Negation and privation,” “Personal identity,” and “Meaning” are read not as juvenilia or scattered curiosities, but as already bearing the marks of Grice’s mature method: the patient scrutiny of difficult examples, the search for logical construction, the refusal of easy reduction, and the effort to uncover the conceptual machinery beneath ordinary expressions. The result is a portrait of Grice as a philosopher whose deepest concerns were present from the beginning, even if only later given their most famous articulation.

Equally striking is the role played by Speranza himself. This is not a dutiful scholarly reconstruction by a detached commentator, but a genuinely original encounter between two minds. Speranza appears not merely as reader, but as inheritor, reformulator, and in some respects radicalizer of the Gricean programme. His preferred symbolic idiom, his emphasis on the exhibitive and the protreptic, his insistence on the willing and judging components of communication, and his persistent concern with the “A” of Gricean analysis all give the essay a distinctive internal drama. Grice is never merely expounded; he is tested, extended, and made to speak again within another thinker’s philosophical grammar.

There is a special pleasure, too, in the essay’s treatment of problem-cases and philosophical pressure-points. Urmson’s bribery example, Strawson’s infested rat, the anti-sneak clause, the subtle movement from communication to conversation, the symbolic reformulations of meaning, the role of the addressee, the distinction between explicit and implicit conveyance, the idea that recognition must function as a reason rather than a mere cause: all these are handled with a mixture of scholarly memory and personal excitement that makes the essay unusually vivid. The reader is not merely told what Grice argued; one is brought back into the atmosphere in which such arguments mattered.

The historical sections are no less compelling. The biographical narrative of Grice’s Oxford formation, war service, return to philosophy, relation to Austin, and gradual emergence into print is conveyed with both precision and interpretive color. Particularly memorable is the account of the 1950s and 1960s as periods in which Grice’s public profile changed without his ever quite becoming the sort of philosopher who sought publicity for its own sake. The contrast between the more visible Grice of “In defence of a dogma” and the quieter Grice of the BBC metaphysics discussions is beautifully judged. So too is the account of the final Oxford decade, where essays on perception and the senses become the unexpected cradle of the theory of implicature. This is historical writing with philosophical bite.

Another remarkable feature of the essay is its range. It moves with ease from Locke, Reid, Gallie, and Broad to Austin, Strawson, Ryle, Hampshire, Quine, Pears, Collingwood, Wisdom, Aristotle, and beyond. Yet this is never mere name-dropping. Each figure appears because he helps clarify a pressure in Grice’s development or a line in Speranza’s response. The result is a web of affiliations and contrasts that makes Grice appear not as an isolated genius but as a philosopher situated amid generations, disputes, rival temperaments, and unfinished conversations.

The essay is also, unmistakably, a defense of common sense without any loss of sophistication. One of its most enduring insights is that Grice’s rationalism, so often caricatured or minimized, is here shown as a virtue: the virtue of a philosopher who never took ordinary reasonableness to be philosophically beneath him. Communication first, rational constraints second: that moral ordering, so persuasively drawn from the late work, gives the whole essay a quiet normative force. It suggests that Grice’s philosophy mattered not only because it solved problems, but because it preserved a humane picture of what it is to mean, to understand, to converse, and to reason together.

And then there is the voice. Dense, allusive, witty, combative, affectionate, and at times gloriously eccentric, the prose refuses the flattening decorum of much academic writing. It belongs to a tradition of philosophical appreciation in which scholarship and temperament are inseparable. The essay is full of learned idiosyncrasy, but that is not a flaw; it is the sign of a mind refusing to become anonymous before its subject. One comes away feeling that Grice has not only been studied but met, and that Speranza, in meeting him, has revealed something about the vocation of philosophy itself.

Taken as a whole, this is an essay of remarkable ambition and uncommon intellectual personality. It offers a Grice far larger than the classroom summary, far stranger than the standard pieties, and far richer than the philosopher of implicature alone. It is at once an intellectual biography, a conceptual reconstruction, a polemic against reductive reception, and a testament of philosophical kinship. Readers interested in Grice will find here not just interpretation, but reorientation. Readers interested in the life of philosophy will find something rarer still: an essay that shows how thought is made in institutions, under pressures, through loyalties, by memory, and in the “minutes of the day.” It is an extraordinary homage, and more than an homage: a continuation.

 

 

H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza

The document is an extended reflective essay on the intellectual relation between H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza. It is not a neutral scholarly overview, but a highly personal, interpretive, and often polemical meditation on Grice’s philosophical development as seen through Speranza’s own interests, vocabulary, and intellectual self-positioning.

At its broadest, the essay has two interwoven aims. One is to reconstruct Grice’s Oxford career, especially from the late 1930s through the 1960s, by moving through his major writings and institutional roles. The other is to show how Speranza appropriates Grice, not merely as a historical figure in the philosophy of language, but as a philosopher of communication, intention, reason, and common sense whose work reaches far beyond the usual textbook emphasis on conversational implicature.

The essay opens by locating Grice institutionally as Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. John’s, Oxford, and it stresses the significance of that title. The author insists that “Fellow and Tutor” should not be collapsed into the more casual “Tutorial Fellow,” because the phrase reveals both Grice’s administrative role within the college and his practical tutorial function. This early emphasis on institutional setting is important because the document repeatedly argues that Grice’s philosophy cannot be separated from the academic ecology in which it was formed.

A major recurring thesis is that Grice’s real philosophical centre is not implicature but meaning and, even more broadly, communication. The essay argues that in continental or chair-based conceptions of “philosophy of language,” Grice properly belongs there, but with an important caveat: his essay “Meaning” always comes first, and his work on conversational implicature is secondary. The author presents Speranza as especially drawn to “Meaning,” which becomes the centrepiece of his own philosophical reworking of Grice.

From there, the document moves into a detailed analysis of Grice’s account of meaning, often restated in Speranza’s preferred symbolic idiom. Speranza reformulates Grice in terms of an opposition between an exhibitive and a protreptic conception of communication, and he emphasizes willing over judging. The essay uses notational devices such as W_Ap, V_A, and J_B to reinterpret Grice’s claims about utterer’s meaning, intention, and the addressee’s response. One of the main interpretive moves here is that communication is not merely about what one agent wills, but about what the addressee is intended to judge or think. The essay also stresses the importance of Grice’s distinction between cause and reason, arguing that the recognition of the utterer’s intention must be the addressee’s reason for the resulting response, not merely a causal antecedent.

The document spends considerable time on the problem-examples to Grice’s theory of meaning. Urmson’s bribery example is treated sympathetically as constructive pressure on the necessity conditions of Grice’s analysis. By contrast, Strawson’s “infested rat” example is presented as an ethically irritating but philosophically useful challenge to the sufficiency of the analysans. The author highlights Grice’s anti-sneak clause as a clever recursive repair and treats this as one of the most telling moments in Grice’s development.

A second major theme is that Grice’s work on conversation and implicature grows naturally out of his earlier work on communication. The essay discusses the “Prolegomena” and the methodological importance of taking an extended conversational unit, rather than isolated sentences, as the proper unit of analysis. Grice’s squash example, where B displays a bandaged leg instead of saying anything, is used to show that implicature is not always something added on top of what is said, but can be continuous with what is communicated even when nothing is literally said. The author argues that Grice’s later concern with rational co-operation has overshadowed what should be seen as the deeper and more fundamental topic, namely communication in both its explicit and implicit forms.

The essay then broadens into a biographical-historical account of Grice’s Oxford formation. It traces his path from Clifton and Corpus through Rossall, the Harmsworth scholarship, Merton, and then St. John’s. It presents the early essays “Negation and privation,” “Personal identity,” and “Meaning” as already displaying a characteristic Gricean method: beginning with puzzling examples and seeking a logical construction or analysis in more basic terms. This biographical narrative also emphasizes Grice’s war service and suggests that wartime experience gave both Grice and Speranza a certain seriousness, discipline, and renewed philosophical energy.

Several later inserted paragraphs deepen the comparison between Grice and Speranza through specific topics. One concerns negation. There the essay compares Grice’s “Negation and privation” with Speranza’s own work on negation, stressing both continuity and asymmetry: Speranza writes under the influence of Grice, whereas Grice in the early piece appears to be working with remarkable independence. In both, incompatibility becomes a central theme, though the author suggests that incompatibility does not finally solve the problem of negation.

Another paragraph takes up “Personal identity.” Here the essay argues that, although personal identity may seem remote from later philosophy of language, Grice’s treatment of the human agent in that early piece anticipates the symbolic “A” that becomes crucial in “Meaning.” Speranza is interested in expanding this “A” into a broader variable for communication, one that raises the possibility of animal communication and a spectrum from “someone” to “something.” The piece suggests that Grice’s concern with personal identity is not autobiographical but part of a larger attempt to provide logical constructions of philosophically troublesome concepts.

The document also discusses Grice’s essay “Intention and disposition.” This is presented as one of the most revealing but undercirculated texts in Grice’s development. The essay argues that Grice is confronting the question he bracketed in “Meaning,” namely what it is for a human agent to mean or intend something. Against Rylean dispositionalism, Grice turns back to G. F. Stout and develops a more robust psychologistic account, later recast in neo-Prichardian terms. Speranza especially values this because it supports the idea that communication involves not mere volition but a doxastic constraint: intention must involve judgment or belief-like structure, not just wishing.

The 1950s are treated as a decade of transition in Grice’s public profile. The essay highlights “In defence of a dogma,” co-authored with Strawson, as a moment when Grice enters larger debate through Quine and the analytic-synthetic distinction. Speranza reads the paper through the lens of understanding and incomprehensibility, arguing that Grice is effectively grounding the analytic-synthetic divide in the conditions under which one can say “I don’t understand.” The author also contrasts this more visible, controversial Grice with the quieter Grice of the BBC lectures on metaphysics, where themes such as Collingwood, Wisdom, phenomenalism, and metaphysical nonsense are said to reveal the topics that really mattered to him.

A major section is devoted to Grice’s final Oxford decade and especially to the relation between Austin and Grice. The essay claims that Grice’s participation in Austin’s Saturday morning gatherings left little trace in print, and that Austin’s posthumous fame depended heavily on Urmson and Warnock as editors and literary preservers. The death of Austin in 1959 is presented as a turning point. Grice then turns to areas Austin had dominated, especially perception and the senses, producing “The Causal Theory of Perception” and “Some remarks about the senses.” The document argues that these essays, though formally in philosophy of perception rather than philosophy of language, are crucial because it is there that Grice’s theory of implicature receives one of its most important early articulations. The implication excursus in “Causal Theory” is singled out for its tests of detachability, cancellability, and related distinctions, and the essay connects these to earlier concerns in “Meaning,” “Personal identity,” and “Negation and privation.”

Throughout, the author repeatedly returns to the claim that Grice’s fame as the philosopher of implicature has obscured his deeper interest in communication, intention, and rational constraint. The retrospective culmination of this line comes in the discussion of the “Retrospective Epilogue,” where the ordering of strands in Grice’s late work is read as evidence that communication comes first, while conversation as rational co-operation comes second. The author sees this as morally and philosophically important: Grice’s common-sense rationalism is not an embarrassment but a virtue.

The essay closes its main body by drawing Speranza himself explicitly into the picture. Speranza identifies with Grice not only intellectually but existentially. He suggests that both philosophers are shaped by the “minutes of the day,” meaning by institutions, interruptions, collegial interaction, and lived circumstances rather than by pure contemplative leisure. This leads to a final reflection on how much modern philosophy is formed by such pressures rather than by the otium associated with the founders of the discipline.

The document ends with a substantial reference list. It includes a chronological selection of Grice’s writings from “Negation and privation” through “Aspects of reason,” along with a number of unpublished or semi-published works by Speranza related to conversation, negation, Grice, and literary criticism. The references reinforce the essay’s structure, because the main discussion largely follows Grice’s corpus chronologically and uses that sequence to build an interpretive portrait.

In short, the document is a dense, allusive, and highly personal intellectual biography of Grice as seen through Speranza’s philosophical concerns. Its central claim is that Grice should not be reduced to the philosopher of implicature. Rather, he should be read as a philosopher of communication, intention, reason, and common sense whose work on meaning remains primary, whose Oxford life deeply shaped his philosophical style, and whose reception has often obscured what mattered most to him. Speranza presents himself not merely as commentator but as philosophical continuator, someone who extends, reformulates, and in some respects radicalizes Grice’s programme.

 

 

H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza

J. L. Speranza encountered Grice not as his personal tutorial fellow in philosophy – which was, of course, a good thing. Knowing Speranza, had THAT been the case, it would most likely have meant that Speranza would have shown no interest in Grice at all!

Still, THAT was Grice’s claim to glory: from 1938 to 1967 that was the post he held: Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, St. John’s, Oxford.

One need not be pedantic here, but the ‘and’ – in ‘Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy’ – is relevant: the more familiar expression ‘Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy’ may be used – and used to contrast that capacity with other sorts of fellows – professional fellows, for example – hides the fact that his capacity was partly administrative – as member of the Governing Body of Fellows – AND that his ‘justification’ within the St. John’s ecology was that he was allotted a room where he could execute the duties of Tutor in Philosophy along with the only other such fellow at the time: the Scots J. D. Mabbott.

By the time J. L. Speranza encountered Grice, Grice was already the Canon in the right way – neither Grice or Speranza would say ‘the right sense’ – ‘senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.’ In the continental philosophical fashion, centred around ‘chairs’ – it was within the ‘chair in the philosophy of language’ where Grice belonged – with one big caveat: Grice’s work on ‘Meaning’ came ALWAYS first – it showed the type of sophisticated analysis that would appeal to any philosopher interested in the key topic of the philosophy of language; Grice’s work on conversational implicature came second – if at all!

In the academic world where Speranza moved, Grice proved to Speranza to be particularly useful in providing solutions to well-known paradoxes in the whole gamut of philosophy. Grice’s analysis of ‘Meaning,’ – Speranza’s centrepiece – invited some re-formulations in Speranza’s terms: for example, the centring on an ‘exhibitive’ versus a ‘protreptic’ view of ‘communication,’ and the positing of the ‘willing’ element over the ‘judging’ element which Grice retains as a ‘question of personal preference’ in work attached to his ‘semiotic theory.’

At this point, Speranza was familiar with some developments in doxastics – as he calls the logic of belief – and Speranza was indeed pleased to see that such symbolism is used casually by Grice in ‘Vacuous Names’. Using an operator for ‘W’ – to stand for ‘wanting’ – but which Speranza here construes in the most general way to apply to any conatitive state, Grice is allowing for the use of subscripts: W_Ap (“A wants that p”). Speranza having been enchanted by Toulmin’s and Peacocke’s – and indeed Grice’s (“Presupposition and conversational implicature,” foonote on Hans Shuga [sic] – Speranza was not going to allow “p” to do the whole work --. Foreshadowing the inconvenices that Grice found in the treatment of definite descriptions in the work of his tutee Strawson, Speranza was thus ready to expand that W_Ap to read W_A(ιx.Ax & Bx).

But of course, Speranza knew at what Grice was aiming at – and Speranza indeed could feel what Grice was after when in his ‘Meaning,’ meant to be read, and read, at the Oxford Philosophical Society – and only later, and prompted by others – to the point of type-writing it and submitting for publication --. ‘Meaning’ is exploratory, and Speranza caught that immediately. In terms of the symbology expressed above, it was not merely an agent A that wills that ix.Ax & Bx – but the sort of convolutedness that incorporates the role of the ‘addressee’ – much better term that ‘audience,’ that Grice may occasionally use in informal contexts --. So the paradigmatic case becomes one where the ‘that’-clause does not involve ix.Ax & Bx at all but what A’s addressee – let us symbolise that as B – will PRIMARILY THINK. In symbols, now using “V” for ‘voliting’ and “J” for judicating: the basic form is V_AJ_B(ix.Ax & Bx).

Already in that exploratory ‘Meaning,’ Grice makes a further interesting point – whose cruciality Speranza well perceived as Speranza placed himself in the Oxford of the the late 1940s when that talk on ‘Meaning’ was given: ‘reason’ versus ‘cause’ – or rather ‘cause’ (more primitive) AND ‘reason’. Speranza felt the need to make explicit this distinction formally, and would use the bended arrow. The way it works in Grice is simple enough: the recognition (a form of judcation) of the utterer’s intention (a form of volition) should be the REASON, and not merely the case, for further ‘propositional’ or ‘psychological’ attitudes on the part of the addressee. In symbols VAJB(ix.Ax & Bx) -> JBVAJB(ixAx & Bx).

Speranza was especially pleased when he noted that Grice had taken into account a problem-example by J. O. Urmson in this context – and it is indeed the only philosopher Grice quotes when re-visiting what Grice rather pompously called the section against the alleged NECESSITY (not sufficiency) of his account of ‘Meaning,’ which Speranza by this time was treating already as touching on the philosophical concept of ‘communication.’ Grice does not elaborate on the original problem-example offered by Urmson – other than by way of topic – it involved a case of ‘bribery.’ Speranza was comforted to see that Grice’s original exploratory account in ‘Meaning’ was receiving positive, constructive, feedback from a man of almost Grice’s generation, another Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, who happened to share the alma mater of Corpus Christi at Oxford. Urmson would himself not present himself as an ‘expert’ on the matter, which made it all the more delightful to Speranza: these dons were discussing ‘communication’ among themselves, not caring about what the rest of the world may think about it --, as Grice cares to credit to problem-example to Urmson ‘in conversation.’

The SECOND problem-example – now involving the SUFFICIENCY of the analysans – came to Speranza with a different reaction. It involved Grice’s formal tutee – and Speranza felt for Grice in one important respect. For if a tutee prompts a former tutor to make more accessible (in ways in which perhaps the tutor would not wised) his exploratory ‘Meaning’ – what is the ethical point of presenting a problem example after that? Speranza’s only consolation came from Grice’s generous reaction – he treated the problem example – the ‘infested rat’—seriously enough – but not too seriously to require any further modification of the necessity, just the sufficiency – and Grice’s way out was clever – a mere anti-sneak clause which is recursive alla Peano at its best: let the proposed analysis be a conjunction: VAJBVA(ixAx & Bx) and VAJBVA(ixAx & Bx) à JBVAJB(ix.Ax & Bx) --, i. e. the protreptic versus exhibitive clause along with the reason-granting clause – to which the anti-sneak clause merely amounts that is the extra self-referential clause that (A) be out there in the open: i. e. that VAJBVA(A).

The meaning-nominalist strategy had been successfully pursued so now Speranza could move to deeper waters – especially, delighted as he was when he got to the ‘Prolegomena’ – the conference by Grice where he explains his rationale and underlying motivation for ‘Logic and Conversation’ – and Speranza felt fortunate for having the philosophical background and formation akin to Grice and which Speranza felt was necessary to appreciate the depth of that ‘implicature’ – or ‘implicatura’ as Speranza would have it – proposal. There distinction merely ‘boiled’ down to a division of ‘explicitness’ – the implication is more like an ‘implicitation’ and the whole paraphernalia can be traced back to cases of communication. To use one of Grice’s own it is important to combine this with a second important methodological constraint. Grice proposes himself and those who are willing to follow him seriously, to engage in a EXTENDED UNIT of analysis: the two- or four-conversational move conversation. His example:

A: Are we playing squash tonight?

B displays bandaged leg.

Grice’s gloss: B means he cannot play squash. There is nothing ‘said’ – so in this case the ‘implicatura’ is not something beyond what is said – it is just what B is communicating – i. e. meaning, suggesting, indicating, and so on. The way his examples which operate under a proposed ‘imperative of conversational helpfulness’ are not different in kind from the above – which makes no ‘technical’ use of a ‘technical’ term of art, such as ‘implicature,’ on which usually the non-philosophical mind is focused.

However, what the move entails for Grice is a further expansion of his earlier allusion to ‘reason’ in a basic act of communication – the addresse’s response as reason- rather than cause-governed. The distinction becomes one between what A has EXPLICITLY conveyed – to use Toulsmin’s example, ‘that the cat is on the mat’ – may need to be expanded into what A IS IMPLICITLY conveying – ‘So feel free to take her to the vet.’ The details of the reason-giving norms are not the crux for Grice’s analysis – and indeed, as need to expand onto his ‘Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St. John’s. He is now also a CUF University Lecturer in Philosophy: his stint to give a quota of lectures – and it is in this lectures – aimed not at his ‘intimate’ tutees in his small room at St. John’s, -- but at Examinations Hall for any member of the university to attend – that he played with all different variations of desiderata and principles and imperatives as expected in ‘conversation’ conduced by ‘decent chaps.’

It is in the wider context of the ‘class’ – as Oxonians refer to the ‘stint’ which is their quota as ‘Common Fund University’ Lecture in philosophy – that Grice would play with the ‘fundamental question’ about this stronger sense of ‘reason’ – is he being too much of a rationalist for the Oxonian ear? Is he indeed being, God forbid, Kantian? The ‘class’ environment inhibits any kind of rich interaction between the lecturer and his ‘audience’ – so it is not surprising that this aspect of his theory remained open-ended.

At this point, the philosopher who is paying attention may have an open fork of roads behind him: explore ways in which such open-ended questions can be solved, or be realistic and realise that H. P. Grice is now HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. And as such, a more fruitful approach would be to ‘introject’ in his shoes as he review his career.

When Grice was appointed a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. John’s he was the only one to come from a ‘public-school’ setting – Clifton – and that mattered. Clifton had brought him to Corpus via a classics scholarship and he pursued the Mods and the Greats which were the only want to get to philosophy in the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy, a branch of the overall Faculty of Literae Humaniores. It is interesting that after getting a double greats, he left for Rossall. His teaching post in classics did not last long, but the important thing is as what he then saw: a classics schoolmaster. He came back to Oxford thanks to a different scholarship: a senior scholarship of the newly instituted Harmsworth fund, which entailed two years of more or less intensive study in philosophy at Oxford’s oldest philosophy site: Merton – Work on ‘Negation and privation’ may be dated to this period. After one year as ‘probatory’ college lecturer at St. John’s, he was eventually appointed ‘Fellow and Tutor in philosophy,’ as the Oxford Gazette put it, to relieve the burden on Mabbott’s shoulders. War declared, Grice did not mobilise until 1940 – after draftin his ‘Personal identity’ submitted to Mind and published in 1941. The war was not just the war, but it got Grice into ‘intelligence’ games --. Back in Oxford, he was ready to deliver the talk on ‘Meaning’ in 1948. The next year he proposed a ‘class’ on ‘Intention and disposition’ and had perhaps the bad idea of letting his ideas circulate: the result: the fellow dons did not mince their words – but Grice, who had presented a profile of a non-reductionist in ‘Negation and privation’ (an account along introspective psychological lines) or ‘Personal identity’ and indeed ‘Meaning’ could now tackle Ryle directly, and call his account in ‘The Concept of Mind’ silly. The waves of pre-war Ayer did not touch Grice, and the ‘analytic’ vein run deep in him. Comparing the opening paragraph of ‘Personal identity’ with that of ‘Meaning’ we witness the same approach: some problematic examples that need a ‘logical construction’ in terms other than themselves – indeed the same in ‘Negation and privation.’ The 1940s came and went, an by the 1950s Grice had the rather misfortune of being associated with the senior J. L. Austin. In fact, this is how Speranza encountered Grice. Everybody with a minimal interest in the development of the philosophy of language in the twentieth century knew what Austin was after: the ‘ordinary-language philosophy’ (Grice would avoid ‘school’) as different from Ryle’s – and with it came the list of those who attended the ‘Saturday mornings.’ In SOME historical accounts of the period – say, by Passmore – Grice is indeed mentioned as a don who would publish amazingly little but was influential in his ways. The interactions with his former tutee Strawson proved in some ways unfortunate. The ‘In defence of a dogma’ has Grice as primary author but it was the co-author who had his wife typed it and submitted. More in Grice’s vein was his accepting the invitation by D. F. Pears to open a series of BBC third programme lectures in ‘metaphysics,’ which were eventually published. Here Grice is again primary author, but not to a secondary author, but to a secondary author (Strawson) and a TERTIARY author (Pears), so one can see that Grice’s reserve perseveres. He is not the type to be promoting himself and stuff. By the end of the 1950s Austin was gone, and the idea, a bit lunatic, by Grice, was to keep the thing going with the Saturday mornings – it didn’t quite work. The Master was gone, long live the master. Instead, Grice TURNED to Austin. Austin had been giving seminars on Sense and Sensibilia, and the first contribution by Grice, Austin gone, and the second, were on the area: ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ (co-symposiast at Cambridge) in 1961 and ‘Some remarks about the senses’ in 1962 in a volume commissioned by Blackwell. That was the whole written production of Grice at Oxford. – The rest is commentary: his responses to Strawson on ‘definite description’, his tribute to Quine in ‘Vacuous names’, the long-awaited lecture on his having been appointed a FBA in 1971 with ‘Intention and uncertainty’ and the John Locke lectures at Oxford usually appointed to a non-resident, as Grice at that time was not. He never went back to the topic of conversation and meaning – on his own ‘Meaning revisited’ was commissioned by Brighton, and lecture series followed in the new world. Perhaps it was in 1987 with his ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ that he felt it was his turn to expand freely on what he had been aiming to do. Intersetingly, in the Epilogue, the discussion of ‘communication’ (Strand V) precedes that of Conversation as Rational Co-Operation (Strand V). The moral is clear: the over-emphasised fame on the implicature had cast a shadow on what he always thought to be a more core and kernel topic on which a philosopher, even an Oxford one, should be interested: communication first (both explicit – or ‘dictive’ as he would say, using a Latinism – and implicit), ‘rational constraints’ of the most common-sense nature second. Adherence to common sense, which pervades BOTH his intention-based ‘semantics’ and his ‘implicature’ theory would hardly been regarded by Grice as a minus, but a plus – the plus of a man, who did not go to philosophy for his bread and butter, but but because he enjoyed it.

Speranza feels common ground with Grice in one big respect. Being able to introject easily into Grice’s shoes, and sharing some of his experiences, Speranza feels like Grice, due to the life he led, was driven to the ‘minutes’ of the day – that although his fresh starts in philosophy were heavily influenced by the history of the discipline behind him or by the interaction of the dons, or participants of venues he attended. How much of philosophy, especially since Grice’s time, is shaped by that, rather than the otium and the refreshing atmosphere of the founders of the discipline!

Consider Grice’s ‘Meaning and privation’ and compare it with Speranza’s ‘Negation.’ In that ‘Negation’, Speranza mentions that during an extensive presentation of the Grice programme, as framed by the limitations of this or that institution, Speranza felt as leaving ‘negation’ OUT – since, to prove is point, the truth-functional connectives seemed at that point all the mattered to him. The motivations behind Grice’s own ‘Meaning and privation’ are more difficult to fathom. It does look like a set question, and given that he submitted TWICE essays to the John Locke Prize, this may well be one. Compared to Speranza’s ‘Negation,’ which trades on Grice – Grice trades on NO-ONE! One interesting aspect is that when DECADES later, Grice was deciding on which to give one of his classes he chose the title ‘Negative propositions.’ At this point, he was well aware of the ‘deformities’ that Strawson had proposed. But in the earlier ‘Negation and privation’ the logic is simple: A and B – versus ~ (A is B). As he will do in future writings, he starts with problem examples: one he calls ‘negation’ proper (“The pillar box is not green” +> it is red”) the other privation (“I am not hearing a noise” – a negative counterpart to Gallie, “I am hearing a noise,” which Gallie had proposed as example of nonsensical use of “I” – “Who did it? Did you do it (Father to Child). “ ‘I’ didn’t do anything. The self is an illusion.” Grice typically founds a common ground between both ‘negatio’ and ‘privatio’ in terms of INCOMPATIBILITY of psychic elements. The manoeuvre resembles that of Speranza in ‘Negation’ where Speranza, now treading on Grice and his circle, can avow himself of Wiggins’s problematic considerations. The Speranza paper was indeed commissioned for a History of Logic, so Speranza had no better idea than to focus just on the Wykeham professors of that discipline with which Grice might have interacted, and Wiggins came first: ‘incompatibility’ indeed can be traced back to Parmenides – and Speranza indeed draws on a casual remark that Grice makes to the ‘strokes’ – and how ‘incompatibility’ or ‘other than’ does NOT solve the problem of negation, as apparently he thought it did when composing this piece for The Locke Prize.

The next piece by Grice is ‘Personal identity,’ and, in Speranza’s milieu, just to MENTION that topic would be ANATHEMA! Grice is writing (and indeed submitting the article) at a time when psychology and philosophy were ‘friends’ and ‘Mind’ (what can be more mentalistc than that) was subtitlted, “A quarterly journal of psychology and philosophy.” But in reading ‘Meaning,’ – one and again, -- Speranza notes the symbolism “A”: “I won’t deal with cases of ‘mean’ in “A means to” where “A” is a human agent – So THAT’s the symbolism that Speranza will adapt. The intricacies of the memory-trace involved Grice for too long – and especially after his piece was reprinted in a collection, he would reminisce on the ‘analytical bent’ – this is all pre-war Oxford, and anti-Ayer Oxford – that led him in the enterprise. The bibliography is dense: Gallie, Broad, Locke, Reid – Not the hors d’oeuvres of a philosopher of language. The analysis at which Grice arrives received little attention in the immediate literature – although Speranza was fascinated to see the thing quoted in the entry for ‘Personal identity’ in Edward’s encyclopaedia, and Speranza often wonders if nobody other than Grice ever offered such an ingenious counterexample to Reid to solve Locke. Speranza’s hypothesis is that Grice was especially being influenced by his colleague – and senior A. D. Woozley – who was indeed editing Reid at the time – because Reid is the interloper: Locke is the canon. So Grice’s motivation to tackle ‘I’ is not personal – it is not that he does not use how to use the personal pronoun. In Speranza’s case, the ‘A’ becomes a symbol: as when we say VAJB(ix.Ax & Bx) – can animal ‘communicate’ that? Can an animal ave the volition oriented towards, say, a specimen of its same species, that the cat is on the mat? Can a mouse ‘communicate’ that to another mouse? The symbolism presupposes then this idea of a range of variables that will incorporate not just ‘I’ but ‘thou’, and ‘he’ – indeed the ‘some-one’ in Grice’s parlance, as opposed to the ‘some-thing.’ Indeed Speranza was fascinated when Grice causally makes the point on two different occasions. In ‘Reply to Richards,’ Grice is willing to allow for someone or something to communicate – beyond personal identity, as it were. In ‘Meaning revisited’ he goes from a groan meaning or communicating pain to an agent doing so. So the problem remained, and if in Grice was motivated by his reading of Gallie and providing a ‘logical construction’ (Speranza prefers deconstruction) to ‘personal identity’ – such grand keyword – in Speranza’s case it was merely motivated by his attempt to delve into the logical grammar of an ascription of what an utterer means.

The war intervened – for both Grice and Speranza – so Speranza KNOWS what Grice knew. Grice was first in the north-atlantic theory of operation and then moved to Intelligence – he was Navy. Speranza is Army --. It is a ‘change’ that applies to the masculine core – in that one experiences one’s loyalties – And in both cases, war prepared both Grice and Speranza for further philosophical ventures, with renewed energy.

Back in post-war Oxford, Grice’s next target grows out of a ‘class’ – a stint – on Peirce – the American amateur who Grice reads in the light of such sources as Ogden and Richards, Viola Welby, A. C. Ewing’s Meaninglessness. The topic had a bite for Grice because he continued his ‘mentalistic’ or psychic talk – without ‘wanting to people one’s talking life with armies of psychological innuendos’ --. For Speranza, the very keyword: ‘meaning’ even ‘signification, or variants thereof, ‘signify, signifier, signified, communicate, -- were very much in the canon of any chair in the ‘philosophy of language.’ It wasn’t for Speranza a ‘stint’ but a philosophical responsibility. Grice may be indirectly be responding to that outsider as was Ayer in “Language, truth, and logic,” where it was meaningLESSness that was the topic. For Speranza, who had studied his Cratylus, and his De Interpretatione, and his Frege, it was more a way to have a founded ‘psychological’ reduction – if not elimintation – of what with Nowell-Smtih we could call a ‘casanova’ of a word. The pattern in ‘Meaning’ is not yet dialogical, although some of the examples Grice gives there do involve the intended response of the co-participant in the communicative act. When Speranza dealt with all this after deep endeavours with Austin’s phatic, and rhemic and phonic, and illocution, and locution, and perlocution, Grice was the piece of cake he needed that made the medicine go down!

If “Personal identity” was for Grice, but not for Speranza, a phrase that one could air lightly, the same applied to ‘intention.’ Such talk in most academic milieus of the non-psychologistic environments is seen with suspicion. Ryle had published Concept of Mind, and Hampshire will have “Thought and Action” soon enough – so Speranza realizes why the thing mattered to Grice. In his ‘Intention and disposition,’ Grice, in Speranza’s view, does what Grice does best: ignore or insult Ryle as ‘silly’ and go back to the previous generation of philosophers: in Grice’s case, G. F. Stout on ‘Voluntary action’ – on which Speranza had had occasion to discuss in connection with items like freewill in seminars conducted by science-oriented intellectuals. What Grice does is just re-fomulate that Stout analysis of what it means for the ‘human agent’ A behind his earlier ‘Meaning’ (“I won’t deal with “A means to” – where “A” is an human agent”) – and precisely NOW DO DEAL with that. The result will later disappoint Grice, and the point is important. Grice kept much of his development to himself. “Intention and disposition” was never circulated except – Grice’s misjudgement – by those who were more willing to crticiise it than provide constructive analysis. It somehow makes strong psychologistic claims: the ‘intention’ – the ‘mean to’ – and he’ll re-elaborate in neo-Prichardian (not neo-Stoutian) terms later in ‘Intention and uncertainty’ is one that Speranza clearly see as related with ‘Meaning’ and communication. Humpty Dumpty cannot just INTEND that ‘Impenetrability’ will be the vehicle by which Humpty Dumpty communicates to Alice that they should change the topic. The psychology of communication – even as analysed by the ‘armchair’ or cricketing or surfing philosopher – is a different one. There is, to use Facione’s wording, a doxastic constraint. There is a judication behind the mere volition. One is not wishing for the moon. Grice’s conceptual point is that ‘wishing for the more’ just does not count – the doxastic element is part of what is ENTAILED – not conversationally implied – when one uses the stronger language of ‘intending.’ The ‘disposition approach’ which Grice dubs silly Grice identifies with Ryle – and that polemic endured. Ryle was NOT a member of Grice’s acquaintances, so he felt free to have him as a target. Grice had not yet encountered Aristotle’s De anima serious ‘functionalist’ account that would allow him to use such mentalistic lingo with a straight face. Faced with Grice’s Method in philosophical psychology Speranza was ready to call it a ‘gospel’ – echoing Bennett’s praise of the piece as being one that should be learned by heart by every philosopher of mind (only that Grice would say ‘philosophical psychologist’). In the more departmanental chair-based milieu of continental philosophy where Speranza moves, the very NEED to provide for even a ‘functionalist’ approach to one’s mentalistic talk is often better left unsaid!

Did the fifties made a change for Grice? Why would they: We have the roaring twenties, and the swinging thirties, and the roaring sixties – but surely the ration-age of postwar and the fifties need no propaganda. The fifties saw Grice engaged, mostly as prompted by Strawson, in welcoming and praising Quine (who was totally cut by Austin) – so we do have the seminal ‘In defence of a dogma’ – which posed a problem for Bennett, and which Speranza solved. Knowing the whole history of the publications and unpublications, the story is easy to tell. In ‘Meaning’ Grice suggests that is ‘… communicates that…’ should serve as a basis for ‘… understands…’ and indeed that’s what Grice does in ‘In defence of a dogma’. “My neighbour’s three-year old son is an adult.’ “I don’t understand” Lack of understanding is the mark that Quine had in front of his face all along and was unable to see: it turns for Grice into the CRITERION for the distintion which he’ll later aptly ascribe to Leibniz: the analytic/synthetic divide. But Bennett was wondering: “And that’s why we were so happy to have ‘Meaning’ just two years later: Bennett’s argument going: we define ‘analytically false’ in terms of incomprehensibility (a semantic notion) and now we get rid of the semanticity in terms of psychology (“Meaning”). But of course, the story is not as is told by Bennett – for Grice had COMPOSED ‘Meaning’ years before his collaboration for ‘In defence of a dogma.’ In any case, it gave circulation to Grice, which was not perhaps what he was wanting. The more criticism to your views, the less OTIUM you have for things that matter. A totally different relaxed 1950s experience Speranza discovered in a copy by a philosopher of intention alla Pears: Pears’s volume The nature of metaphysics. Not your hot-cake selling bestseller. But it is in the relaxed atmosphere of the three smoking philosophers in slow dialogue at the Station of the BBC in London where Grice could peacefully and at his own pace talk of the things that mattered to him: Collingwood’s absolute presuppositions, Wisdom’s idea of metaphysics as INTERESTING (and not dull, as Ayer, the outsider, had it) NONSENSE. Grice is even allowed to go back to a love affair of his ‘Personal identity’: phenomenalism – for what can be more metaphysical than that? It even touched on his ‘Negation and privation.’ These were the topics that mattered to Grice – time-honoured Oxonian matters and none of the fads brought by the Eastman visiting professor! For Speranza, it is the “Metaphysics” piece that proves more revelatory, and excited was he when he saw that the piece was indeed, as ‘Personal identity’ under its relevant was, included again now under the entry ‘Metpahysics’ in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of philosophy. That meant it could be seen as ‘canonical’ in the sense of worth quoting as secondary bibliography. Still talk that goes outside the continental chair-based system of ‘the philosophy of language,’ but that shows that Grice will not be limited by that – Indeed when years later he was obliged to self describe, to trap students to the graduate programme, the note reads: “And Grice, while lisitng philosophy of language as his specialty, well knows that you cannot excell in one field without treading your foot, however clusmsily, into all the others!”

As it should, his last decade at Oxford, was the most exciting one for Grice, even if not complete decade. For all that was said about Grice as a member of the Saturday mornings under Austin’s patonage, we see none of it in the publications. It all went silently and as Warnock notes, in flinty experiences like public joint classes given by Austin and Grice (in that order) on Categoriae and De interpretatione. But Austin died in 1959  -- and he would not have made a hit in philosophy had it not for two philosophers who devoved their own careers – by becoming mere amanuensis to Austin – in the proceedings: Urmson and Warnock – Urmson/Warncok, Philosophical papers by Austin, posth.; Urmson’s How to do things with words, Austin, posth., Warnock, Sense and Sensibilia, post. Austin. Philosophers can be lazy and it is so much easier to deal with the written volume than check (especially Phlosophical Papers) all the diverse sources of such paraphernalia. Grice grieved Austin for a term or two and the sixties saw him seriously engaged in an area that had been Austin’s specialty – not the sense and sensibility of his homonym – but sense and sensibilia. Hence Grice’s “Causal Theory of Perception” – his locus classicus, as he puts it, of conversational implicature – arrived at dealing with notions and distinctions that Austin ignored (‘it looks red to me, that pillar box’) – and more obscurely, “Some remarks about the senses” in Butler’s “Analytic philosophy” published by Blackwell, who had promoted linguistic analysis in a previous series edited by Grice’s pre-war tutee A. G. N. Flew. Both essays may deal with topics that may interest a ‘philosopher of language’ but are NOT entitled, “Types of Implication” and “Molyneux and the Senses of Senses” – they are presented in terms of a very traditional branch of philosophy that has no strict equivalent in contneintal philosophy, where you will get your professor talk ‘gnoseology’ but leave ‘perception’ to the psychologist. For Speranza, of course, it was the IMPLICATURES behind these two apparently unrelated pieces on a field foreign to the philosophy of language that captivated him most. Grice’s examples are passee in being politically incorrect – see his illustration for ‘but’ and presupposition in that excursus on implication. He will later realise about that when discussing presupposition in ‘Presupposition and conversational implicature’ where he notes the need to move on from sexist Oxford. Speranza’s main interest was raised by the ‘implication’ interlude – because it showed fatures already present in ‘Negation and privation,’ and ‘Personal identity,’ and ‘meaning.’ Grice starts with stock examples – the four types of vehicles of signification – and goes on to propose tests that parallel those for ‘communicationN versus communicationNN (those dark clouds communicateN rain). The detachability, the cancellability (non-factvity) the vehicle being the IMPLIER or the implicature, and so on. Subtle topics. One passage that caught Speranza, qua philosopher,’s attention is that listing of problem examples including time-honoured ones like ‘What is actual is not also possible’ (present in Aristotle) – and less so for Grice’s Cantabrian obsession with Moore and what Malcolm (an American) was doing with him (“He doesn’t know how to use ‘know.’). That is why seeing the list reappear in the Prolegomena to his lectures and clases on conversation was particularly appealing for Speranza. The impersonality of the ‘Causal theory of perception’ philosopher’s paradoxes (or sophismata) now come with signature – and all are his colleagues: Hart is misusing ‘carefully,’ Benjamin (is reading Broad) and misusing ‘remembering’; Ryle and Austin – the two big heads of the ordinary-langauge movement – are both misusing ‘intentionally’ and Austin having the cheek to provide the wrong reason in terms of a theory “He did A M-ly.” The reason that had merely showed his ugly head in ‘Meaning’ was now in full vew in empiricist Oxford. The ‘maxim of pragmatic’ maximal informativeness (touched by Strawson in Introduction to Logical Theoty – that infamous footnote on the quantifiers) and turned to ‘entailment plus something else’ in Grice’s identification of a PARTICULARISED versus a GENRALISED implicature in the excursus in “Causal Theory” needed some refining: but what? Again, “Retrospective Epiloque” remains his best answer: Just a Kantian imperative – is that too much to ask for? Forget about his earlier desideratum of conversational clarity, his desideratum of conversational candour, his principle of conversational self-love and his principle of conversational benevolence, and the principle of conversational helpfulness – it’s just a matter of what a decent chap should do, with Grice’s implicature being: could it be that only Speranza and I are the ones noticing all this?

References

Grice, H. P. (1938). Negation and privation.

Grice, H. P. (1941). Personal identity, Mind: a quarterly revew of psychology and philosophy; rep. in J. R. Perry, Personal identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Grice, H. P. (1945). Common sense and scepticism. Class with A. D. Woozley.

Grice, H. P. (1948). Meaning. The Oxford Philosophical Society, repr. in WOW.

Grice, H. P. (1956). In defence of a dogma. With P. F. Strawson. The Philosophical Quarterly. Rep. in WoW.

Grice, H. P. (1957). ‘Metaphysics’ – with P. F. Strawson and D. F. Pears, in Pears, Metaphysics, the BBC Third Programme Lectures, -- London, Macmillan.

Grice, H. P. (1961). ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ – Symposium with A. R. White, The Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. Cambridge – chaired by R. Braithwaite – repr. in full in G. J. Warnock, The philosophy of perception. Oxford Readings in Philosophy.

Grice, H. P. (1962). Some remarks about the senses, in R. J. Butler, Analytical Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell. Repr. in WOW

Grice, H. P. (1967). Logic and Conversation: The William James Memorial Lectures, Harvard. Repr. in WoW.

Grice, H. P. (1967). Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation. In WoW.

Grice, H. P. (1967). Logic and Conversation. In WoW.

Grice, H. P. (1967). Further notes on logic and conversation. Repr. in P. Cole, Pragamtics. London and New York: Academic Press.

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Grice, H. P. (1967). Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning. Repr. in J. R. Searle, The Philosophy of Language, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. by G. J. Warnock. Oxford University Press. Repr. in WoW.

Grice, H. P. (1967). Some models for implicature. Published for the first time in WoW.

Grice, H. P. (1969). Vacuous Names, in D. Davidson and J. Hintikka, Words and objections: essays in honour of W. V. O. Quine. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Grice, H. P. (1971). Intention and uncertainty. Proceedings of the British Academy.

Grice, H. P. (1975). Method in philosophical psychology: Presidential address. Proceedings and addresses of the American Philosophical Association, repr. in Grice, The Conception of Value, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Grice, H. P. (1986). Reply to Richards. In R. E. Grandy and R. O. Warner, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Grice, H. P. (1986). Actions and Events. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

Grice, H. P. (1988). Aristotle on the multiplicity of being. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard

Grice, H. P. (1991). The conception of value.

Grice, H. P. (2001). Aspects of reason. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). On the way of conversation – presented to The Congress of Philosophy.

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Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Post-modernist Grice – presented to a Seminar in the Philosophy of Logic.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Grice’s meaning-liberalism. Presented to a seminar in the History of Modern Philosophy.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Conversational strategies? Presented to a seminar on J. Habermas.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Humpty-Dumpty’s conversational impenetrability. Presented to Jabberwocky.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) A brief history of negation.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Mise-en-abyme: Grice and literary criticism. Proceedings of a Congress – published.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Brooding over conversational brooding over: abstract in Proceedings of a Congress – published.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) The feast of reason. Presented and published in Congress.

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Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) Reflectiveness in philosophy and literary criticism. Published.