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.