H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza

 

H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza

J. L. Speranza did not encounter Grice as his tutorial fellow in philosophy, which was probably just as well. Had Grice stood to him in that official capacity, Speranza might well have taken little interest in him at all.

Still, that was Grice’s official distinction: from 1938 to 1967 he held the post of Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. John’s, Oxford.

One need not be pedantic here, but the conjunction in that title is worth attending to. The more familiar expression “Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy,” though useful in distinguishing such a position from other kinds of fellowship, can obscure the dual aspect of Grice’s office. He was not only a tutor in philosophy, but also a Fellow, and thus a member of the Governing Body of the college. His role at St. John’s was therefore not merely pedagogical but administrative as well. As Tutor in Philosophy, moreover, he shared that responsibility with the only other holder of such a post at the time, J. D. Mabbott.

By the time J. L. Speranza encountered Grice, Grice had already entered the canon, and in the proper way, as neither Grice nor Speranza would have wished to say, “in the proper sense,” since senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. In the more continental habit of philosophical classification by chairs, Grice would naturally have been placed under the philosophy of language. Yet even that requires qualification. For what came first in Grice was “Meaning,” and it was there that one found the kind of subtle and sophisticated analysis bound to attract any philosopher concerned with the central problems of the philosophy of language. Conversational implicature came later, and in a sense secondarily, however prominent it would eventually become in the reception of his work.

In the academic world in which Speranza moved, Grice proved especially valuable as a source of solutions to a range of well-known philosophical paradoxes. Above all, it was Grice’s analysis of “Meaning” that became Speranza’s centrepiece. Yet Speranza did not merely inherit that analysis; he sought to reformulate it in his own terms. Thus he came to emphasise, for example, an “exhibitive” as against a “protreptic” conception of communication, and to privilege the element of willing over that of judging, the latter of which Grice had left, within his broader semiotic reflections, as something closer to a matter of personal preference.

At this point, Speranza was already familiar with developments in doxastics, as he called the logic of belief, and was pleased to find Grice using such symbolism with comparative ease in “Vacuous Names.” In employing the operator W for “wanting,” though here construed by Speranza in the broader sense of any conative state, Grice allowed for the use of subscripts, as in WAp, “A wants that p.” But Speranza, who had been struck by the symbolic refinements of Toulmin and Peacocke, and indeed by Grice’s own occasional technical gestures, was not content to let p do all the work. Anticipating the difficulties that Grice himself would later find in treatments of definite descriptions such as Strawson’s, Speranza was ready to expand the formula into the more articulated WA(ιx.Ax & Bx).

But Speranza knew very well what Grice was after in Meaning, first read at the Oxford Philosophical Society and only later typed and submitted for publication. Meaning is exploratory, and Speranza saw that at once. In the symbolism just introduced, the matter could not rest with an agent A willing that ιx.Ax & Bx. What had to be incorporated was the role of the addressee, a better term here than the looser audience of some informal formulations. The paradigmatic case was therefore not one in which the that-clause simply recorded what A wills, but one in which it turned on what A intends B to think. Hence, using V for voliting and J for judicating, the structure becomes V_A J_B(ιx.Ax & Bx).

Already in that exploratory Meaning, Grice makes a further point whose importance Speranza was quick to perceive as he imaginatively placed himself in the Oxford of the late 1940s in which the paper was first read. The crucial distinction is between cause and reason, or rather between a merely causal sequence and one in which recognition of intention serves as a reason. Speranza felt the need to render that distinction formally, and for this purpose he would deploy the bended arrow. Grice’s point is simple enough in outline: the addressee’s recognition, as a form of judication, of the utterer’s intention, as a form of volition, should function not merely as the cause but as the reason for the further propositional or psychological attitudes that arise in response. In symbols, then, the structure may be represented as V_A J_B(ιx.Ax & Bx) -> J_B V_A J_B(ιx.Ax & Bx).

Speranza was especially pleased to note that, in this connection, Grice had taken account of a problem-example due to J. O. Urmson. Indeed, Urmson is the only philosopher Grice explicitly cites when revisiting what he rather grandly called the section against the alleged necessity, rather than the sufficiency, of his account of Meaning, an account which Speranza was by then already treating as central to the philosophical concept of communication. Grice does not dwell on Urmson’s original example beyond indicating its topic, a case of bribery. Yet Speranza found it reassuring that the exploratory argument of Meaning had elicited constructive criticism from a near contemporary of Grice’s, another Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and a fellow member of the Oxford world. All the more appealing was the fact that Urmson did not posture as an expert in communication: the matter remained one for intelligent exchange among dons, and Grice, characteristically, is content to acknowledge the example simply as coming from Urmson in conversation.

The second problem-example, directed now against the sufficiency of the analysans, elicited a different reaction from Speranza. For this objection came from one of Grice’s own former tutees, and Speranza could not help but feel for Grice on that score. If a former pupil has already prompted his tutor to render an exploratory account more accessible than the tutor might otherwise have wished, what further propriety is there, Speranza wondered, in pressing yet another objection against it? His consolation lay in Grice’s generosity. Grice took the problem of the “infested rat” seriously, but not so seriously as to require any wholesale revision of the account: the difficulty touched sufficiency, not necessity. His response was characteristically deft, consisting in the addition of an anti-sneak clause, recursive in form and elegant in effect. The analysis now required not only the protreptic or exhibitive clause together with the reason-giving clause, but also a further self-referential condition to the effect that A’s intention be out in the open, that is, that V_A J_B V_A(A).

The meaning-nominalist strategy having been successfully pursued, Speranza could now move into deeper waters, and nowhere with greater delight than in the Prolegomena, Grice’s retrospective rationale for Logic and Conversation. Speranza felt fortunate to possess a philosophical formation close enough to Grice’s own to appreciate the real depth of the proposal concerning implicature, or implicatura, as he preferred to style it. For the distinction at issue was, in the end, one of explicitness: implication here was closer to an implicitation, and the whole apparatus could still be traced back to more general cases of communication. This point had to be combined with a further methodological commitment of Grice’s, namely, that the proper unit of analysis was not the isolated utterance but the extended conversational exchange, whether in two or more moves. Hence Grice’s own example: A asks, “Are we playing squash tonight?” and B responds not verbally but by displaying a bandaged leg. Grice’s gloss is that B means he cannot play squash. Nothing is said, yet something is unmistakably communicated. In such a case, the implicatura is not something over and above what is said; rather, it is simply what B is meaning, suggesting, or indicating. In that respect, the more elaborate examples governed by the imperative of conversational helpfulness differ not in kind, but only in degree, from this simpler case.

What this move further entails for Grice is an expansion of his earlier appeal to reason in the basic act of communication, the addressee’s response now being governed by reasons rather than mere causes. The distinction accordingly becomes one between what A has explicitly conveyed and what A may be implicitly conveying. To borrow a simple example in the Toulmin manner, the explicit content may be no more than “the cat is on the mat,” while the implicit upshot may be something like, “So feel free to take her to the vet.” The precise norms by which such reason-giving proceeds are not yet the main crux. More important is the widening of Grice’s analytic stage. By this point he was no longer only Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. John’s, but also a CUF University Lecturer in Philosophy, obliged to deliver lectures to a wider university audience. It was in those lectures, addressed not to a handful of tutees in his room at St. John’s but to a broader audience in the Examination Schools, that Grice developed the varying desiderata, principles, and imperatives governing conversation among what he liked to think of as decent chaps.

It was in the wider setting of the class, as Oxonians called the lecture-duty attached to a Common University Fund appointment, that Grice began to play more openly with the fundamental question raised by this stronger sense of reason. Was he becoming too much of a rationalist for Oxford ears? Was he, indeed, in danger of sounding Kantian? The lecture-room was not the most hospitable setting in which to press such matters to completion. Unlike the intimacy of the tutorial, the class inhibited any rich reciprocal exchange between lecturer and audience. It is therefore not surprising that this aspect of Grice’s theory remained, at that stage, somewhat open-ended.

At this point, the attentive philosopher may feel that the road forks. One path would continue the effort to solve the open questions Grice left behind; the other, perhaps the more realistic, would recognise that H. P. Grice now belongs to the history of philosophy. From that perspective, the more fruitful task is to place oneself, as far as one can, within the standpoint from which he might review his own career.

Seen in that light, Grice’s path acquires a particular coherence. When he was appointed Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. John’s, he brought with him a formation that was already somewhat unusual within that setting. He came from Clifton, the only public-school background among his immediate circle there, and Clifton had led him to Corpus on a classics scholarship. The route to philosophy at Oxford then still ran through the Literae Humaniores curriculum, through Mods and Greats, and Grice took that route in full. After taking a double first, he spent a brief period at Rossall, teaching classics, and that episode matters because it shows how close he remained, at that stage, to the figure of the classics schoolmaster. His return to Oxford, under the newly established Harmsworth senior scholarship, gave him two more concentrated years of philosophy, largely at Merton, where work such as “Negation and Privation” properly belongs. After a year as a probationary lecturer at St. John’s, he was appointed Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, in part to relieve Mabbott of the burden he had hitherto borne more or less alone.

War intervened, though not before Grice had drafted “Personal Identity,” published in Mind in 1941. The war years did more than interrupt an academic career: they sharpened habits of intelligence, interpretation, and indirection that would remain recognisably Gricean thereafter. When he returned to Oxford, he was ready, by 1948, to read “Meaning” to the Oxford Philosophical Society. In retrospect, that paper appears as the germ of much that followed. The next year, in proposing a class on “Intention and Disposition,” Grice allowed his ideas to circulate more widely, and the response from fellow dons was by no means indulgent. Yet this too matters. For by then Grice had already shown, in “Negation and Privation,” “Personal Identity,” and “Meaning,” a marked resistance to easy reductionism and a willingness to construct analyses in terms other than those furnished by the problematic expressions themselves. It is in that spirit too that he could later confront Ryle directly and dismiss aspects of The Concept of Mind as silly. The pre-war wave of Ayer never quite carried him away; the analytic vein in Grice ran deeper and in a different channel.

By the 1950s, however, Grice had acquired the slightly awkward fate of being associated, in the wider philosophical memory, with J. L. Austin. In one sense this was inevitable. Anyone with even a modest interest in twentieth-century philosophy of language knew what Austin stood for, and the Saturday mornings had already entered Oxford legend. In some historical accounts, such as Passmore’s, Grice appears as one of those dons who published remarkably little and yet exerted unmistakable influence. That picture is not false, but it is incomplete. The collaboration with Strawson on “In Defence of a Dogma,” though important, was not wholly characteristic of Grice’s own habits; even there, the mechanics of preparation and submission were more Strawsonian than Gricean. More revealing was his willingness to accept Pears’s invitation to inaugurate a series of Third Programme talks on metaphysics, which were later published. There too one senses Grice’s reserve: he is present, even primary, but never self-advertising. He was not made to promote himself.

Austin’s death altered the Oxford scene decisively. Grice briefly entertained the almost quixotic hope of keeping the Saturday mornings alive, but that world could not simply be prolonged by force of will. Instead, he turned toward themes Austin had himself left charged, above all those surrounding perception. “The Causal Theory of Perception” and “Some Remarks about the Senses” belong here, as does the broader Oxford effort to reckon with Austin after Austin. If one were to list Grice’s written Oxford oeuvre in the strict sense, it would remain surprisingly small: “Negation and Privation,” “Personal Identity,” “Meaning,” “In Defence of a Dogma,” “The Causal Theory of Perception,” and “Some Remarks about the Senses,” with ancillary pieces such as “Vacuous Names” and later interventions on definite descriptions and intention. The smallness of the list is itself revealing. Grice’s influence was never proportional to the bulk of his publications.

What followed belongs to a different phase: the British Academy lecture “Intention and Uncertainty,” the Locke Lectures, the American years, and eventually the more retrospective mode of “Meaning Revisited” and the Epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words. It may well have been only then, late in the day, that Grice permitted himself to say more openly what he had long been trying to do. And here Speranza’s instinct proves especially sound. For in the Epilogue the strand on communication precedes that on conversation as rational co-operation. The order is not accidental. The later fame of implicature had cast too long a shadow over what was, for Grice, the more central matter: communication first, both explicit and implicit; the rational constraints that govern conversational exchange only thereafter. That those constraints are, in the end, constraints of common sense would not have embarrassed Grice in the least. On the contrary, it would have confirmed something essential about him. His intention-based semantics and his theory of implicature alike are pervaded by an allegiance to common sense, and he would have counted that not as a philosophical deficiency but as a strength. It was the strength of a man who did not turn to philosophy for professional ornament or even for bread and butter, but because he found in it an activity worth pursuing for its own sake.

Speranza feels common ground with Grice in one major respect. Being able, as it were, to place himself in Grice’s shoes, and sharing something of the texture of his experience, Speranza sees in Grice a philosopher whose life drove him to the minutes of the day, so that even his freshest starts in philosophy were never wholly detached from the history of the discipline behind him, nor from the living interaction of dons and the participants in the various venues he frequented. How much of philosophy, especially since Grice’s time, has been shaped by just that, rather than by the otium and refreshing atmosphere we associate with the founders of the discipline?

Consider Grice’s ‘Negation and privation’ alongside Speranza’s ‘Negation.’ In that later piece, Speranza notes that, during an extended presentation of the Griceian programme under the constraints of this or that institution, he found himself leaving ‘negation’ out, since, for the purpose then at hand, the truth-functional connectives seemed all that mattered. The motivations behind Grice’s own ‘Negation and privation’ are more difficult to fathom. It has the look of a set question, and, given that Grice submitted essays twice for the John Locke Prize, it may well have been one. Yet the contrast with Speranza is instructive. Speranza’s ‘Negation’ openly trades on Grice; Grice, in ‘Negation and privation,’ appears to trade on no one. And when, decades later, Grice chose ‘Negative propositions’ as the title of one of his classes, he was already well aware of the deformities introduced by Strawson. In the earlier essay, however, the logic is still relatively simple: A is B, versus not-(A is B). As in his later writings, Grice begins with problem-examples: one of negation proper, ‘The pillar box is not green,’ with its suggestion that it is red; the other of privation, ‘I am not hearing a noise,’ as a negative counterpart to Gallie’s ‘I am hearing a noise.’ Grice’s characteristic move is to find common ground between negatio and privatio in terms of the incompatibility of psychic elements. The manoeuvre recalls Speranza’s own in ‘Negation,’ where, now treading on Grice and his circle, he can avail himself of Wiggins’s problematic considerations. Since the Speranza paper was commissioned for a history of logic, he had no better idea than to focus on the Wykeham professors of that discipline with whom Grice might have interacted, and Wiggins came first. Incompatibility, of course, can be traced back as far as Parmenides. Yet here too Speranza returns, by way of a casual Griceian remark on the ‘strokes,’ to the deeper point: incompatibility, or mere otherness, does not finally solve the problem of negation, whatever Grice may at one time have hoped when composing this essay for the Locke Prize.

The next piece by Grice is ‘Personal identity,’ and, in Speranza’s milieu, merely to mention that topic would be anathema. Grice was writing, and indeed submitting, at a time when psychology and philosophy were still friends, and when Mind, than which nothing could sound more mentalistic, still bore the subtitle “A Quarterly Journal of Psychology and Philosophy.” Yet, in reading ‘Meaning’ again and again, Speranza was struck by Grice’s symbolism: “I won’t deal with cases of ‘mean’ in ‘A means to,’ where ‘A’ is a human agent.” That was the notation Speranza would adapt. The intricacies of the memory-trace occupied Grice for a long time, and when the piece was later reprinted he himself would recall the ‘analytical bent’ that had led him into the enterprise: this was pre-war Oxford, and anti-Ayer Oxford. The bibliography is dense: Gallie, Broad, Locke, Reid; not exactly the expected fare of a philosopher of language. The analysis at which Grice arrived received little immediate attention, though Speranza was fascinated to find it cited in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on personal identity, and often wondered whether anyone other than Grice had devised so ingenious a counter-example to Reid in order to rescue Locke. Speranza’s hypothesis is that Grice was influenced especially by his senior colleague A. D. Woozley, who was then editing Reid; for Reid is here the interloper, Locke the canon. Grice’s motivation in tackling ‘I’ was thus not personal in any autobiographical sense. In Speranza’s own case, by contrast, the ‘A’ becomes a symbol: as when one writes V_AJ_B(ιx.Ax & Bx). Can an animal ‘communicate’ that? Can an animal have a volition directed towards another specimen of its species that the cat is on the mat? Can a mouse ‘communicate’ that to another mouse? The symbolism thus presupposes a range of variables broad enough to incorporate not only ‘I,’ but ‘thou’ and ‘he’ too: indeed the ‘someone’ in Grice’s parlance, as distinct from the ‘something.’ Speranza was fascinated that Grice himself casually 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; and in ‘Meaning Revisited’ he moves from a groan’s meaning, or communicating, pain to an agent’s doing so. The problem therefore remained. If Grice had been moved by Gallie and by the wish to provide a logical construction of ‘personal identity,’ that grand old keyword, Speranza was moved rather by the attempt to delve into the logical grammar of an ascription of what an utterer means.

The war intervened for both Grice and Speranza, and in that respect Speranza knows something of what Grice knew. Grice began in the North Atlantic theatre of operations and later moved into Intelligence; he was Navy. Speranza was Army. In each case, war brought a change that touched the very core of one’s sense of loyalty and discipline. And in both cases it prepared them, on their return, for further philosophical ventures, but now with a renewed seriousness and energy.

Back in post-war Oxford, Grice’s next target grew out of a ‘class’ — a stint — on Peirce, that American amateur whom Grice read in the light of such sources as Ogden and Richards, Lady Welby, and A. C. Ewing’s Meaninglessness. The topic had bite for Grice because it allowed him to continue his mentalistic, or psychic, talk, while still avoiding any wish to people one’s talking life with armies of psychological entities. For Speranza, by contrast, the very keyword ‘meaning’ — along with ‘signification’ and its variants, ‘signify,’ ‘signifier,’ ‘signified,’ ‘communicate’ — belonged squarely within the canon of any chair in the philosophy of language. For him, it was not a mere stint but a philosophical responsibility. Grice may even have been responding, if only indirectly, to that outsider as Ayer was in Language, Truth and Logic, where the topic had been meaninglessness. For Speranza, who had read his Cratylus, his De Interpretatione, and his Frege, the attraction lay rather in the prospect of a grounded psychological reduction, if not elimination, of what, with Nowell-Smith, one might call the Casanova of words. The pattern in ‘Meaning’ is not yet fully dialogical, though some of Grice’s examples already involve the intended response of the other participant in the communicative act. And when, after long endeavours with Austin’s phatic, rhematic, phonic, illocutionary, locutionary, and perlocutionary distinctions, Speranza came to Grice, he found in him the very piece of cake he needed to make the medicine go down.

If ‘Personal identity’ was, for Grice but not for Speranza, a phrase one might still air lightly, the same held for ‘intention.’ In most academic milieus hostile to psychologism, such talk was bound to arouse suspicion. Ryle had already published The Concept of Mind, and Hampshire’s Thought and Action would soon enough follow; so Speranza could see why the topic mattered to Grice. In ‘Intention and disposition,’ Grice does what, in Speranza’s view, he does best: he ignores, or dismisses as silly, the Rylean line, and turns instead to an earlier generation, in this case G. F. Stout on voluntary action. That was a topic on which Speranza himself had had occasion to reflect in connection with questions of free will in seminars conducted by more science-oriented intellectuals. What Grice does there is, in effect, to reformulate in Stoutian terms the status of the human agent A standing behind the earlier ‘Meaning’ — “I won’t deal with cases of ‘A means to,’ where ‘A’ is a human agent” — and now, precisely, to deal with it. The result would later disappoint Grice, and that point matters, for he kept much of his development to himself. ‘Intention and disposition’ was never really circulated, save through what was perhaps Grice’s own misjudgment, namely among readers more eager to criticise than to offer constructive analysis. Yet the piece makes strong psychologistic claims. The intention, the ‘mean to,’ which Grice would later recast in neo-Prichardian rather than neo-Stoutian terms in ‘Intention and uncertainty,’ is for Speranza clearly continuous with the concerns of ‘Meaning’ and communication. Humpty Dumpty cannot simply intend that ‘impenetrability’ shall be the vehicle by which he communicates to Alice that they should change the subject. The psychology of communication, even as handled by the armchair, cricketing, or surfing philosopher, is different. There is, to borrow Facione’s wording, a doxastic constraint: a judging behind the willing. One is not merely wishing for the moon. Grice’s conceptual point is that such wishing does not count; the doxastic element is part of what is entailed, not conversationally implied, when one uses the stronger language of intending. The dispositional approach, which Grice derides as silly and associates with Ryle, thus remained a standing polemical target; and since Ryle was never part of Grice’s personal circle, he could be attacked with relative freedom. Grice had not yet encountered in Aristotle’s De anima the more serious functionalist account that would later have allowed him to wear such mentalistic idiom with perfect composure. Faced with Grice’s method in philosophical psychology, Speranza was ready to call it a gospel, echoing Bennett’s praise of the piece as one that every philosopher of mind — or, as Grice would prefer, every philosophical psychologist — should learn by heart. In the more departmental, chair-based milieu of continental philosophy in which Speranza moved, the very need to defend even a functionalist version of one’s mentalistic talk was often better left unsaid.

Did the fifties make a difference to Grice? Why should they? We have had the roaring twenties, the swinging thirties, and the roaring sixties; the rationed, post-war fifties hardly seem to require propaganda. Yet the decade did mark a change in Grice’s public profile. Prompted largely by Strawson, he found himself welcoming Quine, whom Austin had more or less cut, and thus there emerged the seminal ‘In defence of a dogma,’ a paper that posed a problem for Bennett and one that Speranza takes himself to have solved. Once the history of the publications and non-publications is known, the story becomes easy enough to tell. In ‘Meaning,’ Grice had already suggested that ‘… communicates that …’ should provide a basis for ‘… understands …’; and that is, in effect, what he does in ‘In defence of a dogma.’ “My neighbour’s three-year-old son is an adult.” “I don’t understand.” Lack of understanding, or incomprehensibility, is the mark that Quine had before his eyes all along and could not see: for Grice it becomes the criterion for the distinction he would later, aptly enough, associate with Leibniz, namely the analytic-synthetic divide. Bennett’s puzzle was to ask why we should be so pleased to have ‘Meaning’ only two years later: if analytically false is explained in terms of incomprehensibility, a semantic notion, and ‘Meaning’ then reduces the semantic to the psychological, have we not merely shifted the difficulty? But the chronology matters. The story is not as Bennett tells it, for Grice had composed ‘Meaning’ years before his collaboration on ‘In defence of a dogma.’ In any case, that paper gave Grice a circulation he may not altogether have wanted. The more criticism attaches to one’s views, the less otium remains for the things that truly matter.

A very different, and far more relaxed, experience of the 1950s Speranza found in Pears’s The Nature of Metaphysics, hardly a hot-cake bestseller. It is in the unhurried atmosphere of three smoking philosophers in slow dialogue at the BBC in London that Grice appears most at ease, speaking of the matters that genuinely concerned him: Collingwood’s absolute presuppositions, Wisdom’s notion of metaphysics as interesting, and not dull, nonsense, and even the old love affair of ‘Personal identity,’ namely phenomenalism. It is here, too, that themes from ‘Negation and privation’ return by another route. These were the subjects that mattered to Grice: time-honoured Oxonian matters, not the passing fashions imported by the visiting professor from the East. For Speranza, it is precisely the ‘Metaphysics’ piece that proves most revelatory, and he was delighted to see that, like ‘Personal identity’ under its proper heading, it was included under ‘Metaphysics’ in Edwards’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That conferred on it a certain canonicity, at least in the sense of making it quotable as part of the secondary literature. The topic may lie outside the continental, chair-based confines of ‘the philosophy of language,’ but that is precisely the point: Grice was never to be limited by that label. Indeed, when years later he was obliged to describe himself for the sake of recruiting graduate students, he could write, while listing philosophy of language as his speciality, that one cannot excel in one field without treading one’s foot, however clumsily, into all the others.

As it should be, Grice’s last Oxford decade was his most exciting, even if it was not a complete one. For all that has been said about his place among the Saturday mornings under Austin’s patronage, almost none of it appears in the publications. Much of it passed in silence, or in the sort of flinty occasions Warnock recalls, such as the public joint classes given by Austin and Grice, in that order, on the Categoriae and De Interpretatione. Austin died in 1959; and, had it not been for two philosophers who devoted a good part of their own careers to serving as his literary amanuenses, he might never have had so commanding a posthumous presence. Urmson and Warnock made Austin available: Philosophical Papers, How to Do Things with Words, and Sense and Sensibilia are now easier for philosophers to handle than the scattered original sources, and philosophers are often lazy enough to prefer the convenient volume to the archival trail.

Grice mourned Austin for a term or two, but the 1960s found him seriously at work in what had been Austin’s own terrain: not the sense and sensibility of Austen’s namesake, but sense and sensibilia. Hence ‘The Causal Theory of Perception,’ Grice’s own locus classicus for conversational implicature, where he arrives at distinctions Austin had ignored, as with ‘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 earlier promoted linguistic analysis in a series edited by Grice’s pre-war tutee A. G. N. Flew. Both essays deal with matters that may interest a philosopher of language, but they are not called ‘Types of Implication’ or ‘Molyneux and the Senses of Sense.’ They are presented under the venerable heading of a branch of philosophy with no exact continental equivalent, where the professor may discourse on gnoseology while leaving perception to the psychologist.

For Speranza, of course, it was the implicatures at work behind these two apparently unrelated essays, on a field foreign to the philosophy of language, that proved most captivating. The examples may now seem passée, and sometimes politically incorrect, as with the illustration for ‘but’ and presupposition in the excursus on implication; Grice himself would later recognise as much in ‘Presupposition and Conversational Implicature,’ when he acknowledges the need to move on from sexist Oxford. But what interested Speranza above all was that this interlude on implication displayed features already latent in ‘Negation and privation,’ ‘Personal identity,’ and ‘Meaning.’ Grice begins with stock examples, the four types of vehicles of signification, and proceeds to tests parallel to those for communicationN as against communicationNN, as when dark clouds communicateN rain. Detachability, cancellability, the distinction between the vehicle and what is implicated: these were subtle topics. One passage that especially caught Speranza’s philosophical attention was the list of problem-cases, ranging from time-honoured examples such as ‘What is actual is not also possible,’ already present in Aristotle, to Grice’s more Cantabrigian concern with Moore and Malcolm on the misuse of ‘know.’ That is why it was so appealing to see the list reappear in the Prolegomena to the lectures and classes on conversation.

In ‘The Causal Theory of Perception,’ moreover, the impersonality of the philosopher’s paradoxes gives way to signatures: they are now Grice’s colleagues. Hart is said to misuse ‘carefully’; Benjamin, while reading Broad, to misuse ‘remember’; Ryle and Austin, the two great heads of the ordinary-language movement, both to misuse ‘intentionally,’ with Austin even having the cheek to offer the wrong reason in terms of a theory of ‘He did A M-ly.’ The notion of reason, which had shown its face already in ‘Meaning,’ was now fully in view in empiricist Oxford. The maxim of pragmatic informativeness, touched on by Strawson in Introduction to Logical Theory in that notorious footnote on the quantifiers, and turned by Grice in ‘Causal Theory’ into the contrast between entailment plus something else, and the distinction between particularized and generalized implicature, still required refinement. But what refinement? In the end, ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ remains Grice’s best answer: no more than a Kantian imperative, if that is not too much to ask. One may forget the earlier desiderata of conversational clarity and candour, the principles of conversational self-love and benevolence, even the principle of helpfulness itself; in the end it is simply a matter of what a decent chap does. And Grice’s further implicature might almost be this: could it be that only Speranza and I have quite noticed all this?