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.