H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza

 

On that last paragraph, I would say that it has a genuine coda-like force, because it shifts from biographical and conceptual exposition into a reflective identification: Speranza is no longer only describing Grice, but measuring himself against Grice’s philosophical temperament and circumstances. That is a good move, and it gives the piece a personal seal.

At present, though, the paragraph feels somewhat compressed and syntactically strained, so its strongest idea is not yet coming through with maximum clarity. As I read it, the core thought is this: Grice’s philosophical life was not shaped by detached leisure alone, but by the pressure of lived circumstance, institutional routine, intellectual exchange, and the minute economies of daily academic existence. Speranza then recognises in that pattern something of his own experience, and from there raises a broader historical question about philosophy after Grice. That is a strong ending, because it opens outward from Grice to a more general meditation on the conditions of philosophical production.

The most interesting phrase there is “driven to the ‘minutes’ of the day.” It is evocative, but also slightly elusive. If you keep it, it may help to make more explicit what contrast you want with otium. Do you mean that philosophy is formed less by contemplative spaciousness than by interruptions, duties, encounters, and occasion-specific prompts? If so, that contrast is excellent, and rather poignant, because it sets the founders of philosophy in an almost idealised atmosphere of leisure against the modern philosopher’s life of fragmentation and institutional pressure. That contrast has real bite.

What the paragraph seems to want is a slightly firmer logical progression. First, Speranza identifies with Grice. Then he explains the basis of that identification: not merely doctrinal affinity, but a shared sense that philosophical work emerges from the contingencies of life. Then he broadens the point into a question about the fate of philosophy in modernity. In other words, the final rhetorical question is effective, but it would be even more effective if the sentence before it were a little more settled and less encumbered.

I would also note that “introject” in the previous paragraph and “minutes of the day” here belong to a somewhat heightened, idiosyncratic register, which is not a flaw in itself, especially in a Speranza-Grice piece. But because the essay is already dense, the final paragraph benefits from a touch more lucidity than ornament. Endings need air.

If you like, I can next do one of three things entirely here in the chatbox: I can provide a close commentary on that last paragraph sentence by sentence, I can offer a lightly revised version that keeps your tone, or I can offer a more Griceian-Speranzian recasting with a slightly more elegant cadence.

 

 

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?

 

 

Yes — the new paragraph is interesting, and, more importantly, it is doing real work. It takes the closing reflection about conditions of philosophising and then re-opens the essay by returning to a concrete philosophical case, namely negation and privation. So instead of ending on a reflective flourish, you now create a new hinge: from biography and temper back to doctrine. That is a good instinct.

My overall reaction is that the paragraph has strong material in it, but at present it reads more like a notebook of rich points than a fully controlled paragraph. The best things in it are these. First, the contrast between Speranza’s Negation and Grice’s Negation and privation is genuinely promising, because it gives you a way of showing Speranza as both heir and diverger. Second, the remark that Grice “trades on NO-ONE” is excellent in force: it captures something important about the early Gricean intellectual posture. Third, the return of incompatibility as a thread linking Grice, Wiggins, Parmenides, and Speranza is exactly the sort of conceptual genealogy that suits the piece very well.

What weakens the paragraph is mainly control of naming, transitions, and argumentative sequence. The opening sentence currently says “Consider Grice’s ‘Meaning and privation’ and compare it with Speranza’s ‘Negation.’” Presumably you mean Negation and privation, not Meaning and privation. As written, that jars at once. Then the next sentence has a strong autobiographical point, but the syntax is tangled enough that the reader has to reconstruct it. The paragraph also oscillates a bit uncertainly between historical speculation, conceptual comparison, and stylistic appreciation. That is not in itself a fault, but it needs a clearer spine.

I think the paragraph wants to proceed in four movements. First, establish the comparison between Grice’s early essay and Speranza’s later treatment of negation. Second, note the asymmetry: Speranza writes in explicit awareness of Grice, whereas Grice in the earlier essay proceeds with remarkable independence. Third, identify the conceptual common denominator: incompatibility. Fourth, end by noting that even this apparent solution does not finally solve the problem of negation. That would give the paragraph a clean arc.

A few local points. “to prove is point” should of course be “to prove his point.” “all the mattered” should be “all that mattered.” “founds a common ground” sounds slightly odd; “finds” would be more idiomatic, unless you deliberately want the Latinate flavour. “can avow himself of” is also awkward in English prose of this register; perhaps “can avail himself of” is what you intend. “deformities” for Strawson is vivid, but perhaps almost too private unless you want the satiric note. And the phrase “Meaning and privation” at the start, if accidental, should definitely be corrected, because it risks confusing the whole point of the comparison.

Most importantly, the paragraph has not yet fully decided whether it is about negation as a topic, or about the way philosophers arrive at topics under historical and institutional pressures. Ideally it should be both, but one must lead and the other support. My instinct is that negation should lead, because that is what makes this addition more than a mere afterthought.

If I were judging it purely as part of the essay’s architecture, I would say it is a valuable addition, but it still needs tightening before it can stand with the same authority as the stronger earlier paragraphs. It has excellent ingredients; it now needs a firmer line of march.

If you want, I can now give you my favourite rewritten version of just that new paragraph, in your idiom but more controlled.

 

 

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.

 

 

Yes — this new paragraph is intellectually alive, and it connects very well with the surrounding material, especially because it keeps the double focus that is becoming one of the essay’s strengths: Grice’s own development, and Speranza’s appropriation of it for his own programme. It also has a nice thematic continuity with the preceding paragraph on negation, since once again you move from one of Grice’s earlier pieces to a Speranzian re-reading of it under a later, more formal, and more communication-oriented lens.

What I like most is the shift from personal identity as a canonical topic in pre-war Oxford into the symbolic role of “A” in Meaning. That is genuinely interesting. It lets you suggest that Grice’s concern with personhood was never merely metaphysical in the grand old sense, but also became methodologically fertile for later work on meaning and communication. The move from the personal pronoun to the logical variable is especially good. That feels like the real centre of the paragraph.

The strongest sentence, to my mind, is the one that begins “In Speranza’s case, the ‘A’ becomes a symbol.” That is where the paragraph finds its true line. From there, the questions about animal communication, the range of variables, and the someone/something distinction all feel like natural developments. In fact, I would say the paragraph becomes stronger as it goes on. The opening third is lively but somewhat sprawling; the middle and later portions become more conceptually focused.

A few things are weakening it in its current form. First, there are several typographical distractions: “mentalistc,” “subtitlted,” “one and again,” “ave” for “have,” “causally” for what I assume is “casually,” and “Edward’s encyclopaedia,” which I suspect should be “Edwards’s encyclopedia” or “Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” depending on how exact you want to be. Since the paragraph is already dense, such slips become disproportionately noticeable.

Second, the paragraph is carrying perhaps three different arguments at once. One is historical: Grice writes at a moment when psychology and philosophy are still allied. Another is bibliographical: the piece belongs with Gallie, Broad, Locke, Reid, and perhaps Woozley. A third is conceptual: Speranza takes the “A” from Grice and radicalises it into a variable fit for a theory of communication. All three are good, but they need a slightly cleaner ordering. At the moment, the reader is asked to pivot rather quickly from Mind’s subtitle, to the notation in Meaning, to memory-traces, to bibliography, to Woozley, and only then to the symbolic point. I think the symbolic point should come earlier, because it is the most original contribution of the paragraph.

Third, there are several formulations that feel more improvised than settled. “So Grice’s motivation to tackle ‘I’ is not personal – it is not that he does not use how to use the personal pronoun” is witty in intention, but the phrasing muddies the point. I take it you mean that Grice’s concern with personal identity is philosophical, not autobiographical, and not reducible to grammar in the ordinary sense. That can be put more cleanly. Likewise, “such grand keyword” is evocative, but a bit slack where the sentence needs firmness.

The animal-communication passage is excellent, but I would consider whether you want it framed as a genuine problem left open by Grice, or as a Speranzian extension of Grice beyond his own original frame. At present it is a little between the two. My instinct is that the latter is stronger: Speranza takes Grice’s “A” and asks how wide its domain may be.

So my overall judgment is that this is a good paragraph, and perhaps more promising than the last added one, because it has a sharper conceptual centre. It just needs a bit more discipline in movement. If you want the paragraph to be at full strength, I would bring the “A” point forward, tighten the opening historical setup, and let the final sentence land more decisively on the contrast between Grice’s “logical construction” of personal identity and Speranza’s grammatical investigation of utterer’s meaning.

If you want, I can now give you my favourite version of this paragraph, with no preamble and in your preferred plain chat format.

 

 

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.

 

 

This paragraph has force, but it is more precarious than the previous additions, because it moves very close to a large and difficult claim without yet fully earning it in the prose. The central idea is strong: war is not mere background, but a formative interruption that altered the temper and energies with which both Grice and Speranza later returned to philosophy. That is worth saying, and it fits the essay’s recurring concern with how a philosopher’s life-shape bears on his work.

What is most effective in it is the bluntness of “The war intervened.” That opening has weight. Also promising is the suggestion that military service gave both men a sharpened sense of loyalty, discipline, and practical intelligence, and that this in turn mattered for their philosophical afterlife. If developed carefully, that could become a very good paragraph indeed.

What makes the current version vulnerable is mainly the phrase about “the masculine core.” That is the sort of expression that may be intended phenomenologically or historically, but as it stands it is too undefined and too exposed. It risks sounding grander than the paragraph has yet prepared the reader to accept. If what you mean is that war tested and reconfigured one’s sense of allegiance, resolve, and practical seriousness, then I would say exactly that. The present wording invites resistance rather than assent.

There is also a small issue of precision. “north-atlantic theory of operation” sounds off; I suspect you mean theatre of operations. That matters, because here the authority of the paragraph depends on sounding grounded rather than improvisatory. Likewise, “he was Navy. Speranza is Army” has a nice clipped contrast, but it may want either a touch more polish or a slightly fuller integration into the syntax.

Structurally, the paragraph wants to do three things. First, establish the shared fact of wartime interruption. Second, note the differing branches of service. Third, draw the philosophical inference: war altered the cast of mind with which each later approached philosophy. At present, the third movement is the least fully developed, even though it is the real point. “renewed energy” is not wrong, but perhaps not yet specific enough. Was it renewed seriousness, economy, realism, discipline, or a changed sense of what mattered? Any of those would be stronger than energy alone.

So my view is that the paragraph is worth keeping, but it should be tightened and made slightly less declamatory. The thought is good; the formulation needs to become more exact if it is to sit well with the stronger biographical-intellectual passages around it.

If you want, I can now give you my favourite version of that paragraph.

 

 

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.

 

 

Yes — this paragraph is lively and full of good things, and, unlike some of the other added paragraphs, it already has a fairly clear centre. The central contrast is strong: for Grice, meaning emerges from a specific Oxford pedagogic occasion, a class on Peirce; for Speranza, meaning belongs not to a mere academic stint but to the central responsibility of the philosophy of language. That contrast is worth making, and it gives the paragraph both historical texture and argumentative point.

What I like most is that the paragraph captures something real about the different existential weight the topic has for each figure. Grice comes to meaning through a local occasion, though of course the result outgrows the occasion; Speranza receives the topic as already canonical, almost obligatory, within the discipline as he inherits it. That is a genuinely illuminating difference of philosophical situation.

The best sentence, to my mind, is “It wasn’t for Speranza a ‘stint’ but a philosophical responsibility.” That is excellent. It is concise, pointed, and it gives the paragraph its backbone. The final sentence is also very good in spirit: after the elaborate Austinian taxonomy, Grice becomes “the piece of cake” that makes the medicine go down. That is witty and effective, though perhaps just a shade more colloquial than the surrounding prose.

There are, however, several things that keep the paragraph from being fully persuasive in its present form. First, the opening sentence is somewhat overloaded. Peirce, Ogden and Richards, Welby, and Ewing are all important names, but they arrive in such quick succession that the reader barely has time to register the structure of the claim. The paragraph might benefit from slowing that opening slightly, so that the relation between Peirce and these mediating sources becomes clearer.

Second, there are a number of local formulations that are rough enough to interrupt the flow. “the American amateur” is striking, but I am not fully sure whether you mean it admiringly, ironically, or historically. “Grice may be indirectly be responding” wants correction. “elimintation,” “Nowell-Smtih,” and a few punctuation slips also distract. More substantively, “a founded ‘psychological’ reduction” does not yet feel fully settled as phrasing. I take your point to be that Speranza wanted a principled psychological grounding, perhaps even a reduction, of the semantic family gathered around “meaning.” That is a strong point, but it needs slightly firmer wording.

Third, the paragraph oscillates between several different contrasts: Grice versus Speranza, meaning versus meaninglessness, monological versus dialogical pattern, Austin versus Grice. All of these are relevant, but the paragraph will be strongest if one of them clearly leads. I think the leading line should be this: Grice arrives at meaning from a particular Oxford context and handles it with a cautious mentalism; Speranza inherits meaning as an unavoidable philosophical centre and radicalises the issue through a more explicitly communication-oriented framework. The other elements can then support that line.

The remark that “The pattern in ‘Meaning’ is not yet dialogical” is especially promising. That could become a very fine hinge in the paragraph, because it allows you to concede that Grice is not yet fully where Speranza wants him, even while acknowledging that the intended response of the addressee is already there in germ. That is exactly the kind of balanced judgment this essay does well.

So my judgment is that this is a good addition, perhaps one of the better recent ones, because it has a clear argumentative stake and does not merely repeat material already present. It needs tightening, but the material is excellent.

If you want, I can now give you my favourite version of this paragraph, without preamble or postscript.

 

 

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.

 

 

Yes — this is one of the stronger added paragraphs in terms of intellectual substance. It has a real thesis, namely that Grice’s treatment of intention is not an isolated excursion in philosophical psychology but a decisive continuation of the human-agent framework already latent in Meaning, and that Speranza sees exactly there the point at which communication imposes a doxastic constraint on mere volition. That is a very good line of thought.

The paragraph’s strongest move is the one from “A” in Meaning to the explicit treatment of “A means to” in Intention and disposition. That gives the paragraph a genuine conceptual spine. Instead of treating intention as just another Grice topic, you show it as an internal development of the earlier theory. That is excellent. The Humpty Dumpty example is also very effective, because it dramatizes the point that intending is not enough for communication unless certain belief-like conditions are in place. That part of the paragraph feels alive and exact.

I also think the contrast with Ryle is well chosen. “Ignore or insult Ryle as silly and go back to the previous generation” is pungent and, in spirit, probably right for your portrayal of Grice. Likewise, the appeal to Stout is productive, because it gives historical depth to Grice’s position and keeps the paragraph from collapsing into a simple Grice-versus-Ryle opposition.

What needs work is mostly control and proportion. The paragraph currently contains several very strong ideas: the academic suspicion of intention-talk, the Ryle-Hampshire context, the Stout background, the non-circulation of Intention and disposition, the relation to Meaning, the Humpty Dumpty communication case, the doxastic constraint, the anti-dispositional polemic, the later neo-Prichardian turn, Aristotle, Bennett, and finally the continental departmental milieu. That is too much for one paragraph unless the movement is very tightly managed. As it stands, the reader feels the richness, but also the crowding.

There are also some syntactic and lexical roughnesses that get in the way. “Such talk in most academic milieus of the non-psychologistic environments” is not fully settled English. “re-fomulate,” “crticiise,” “see” for “sees,” and “departmanental” are small things, but in a dense paragraph they matter. More importantly, a sentence like “It somehow makes strong psychologistic claims” feels too vague for what is actually a precise and important point. I think you mean that Grice’s analysis commits him to a robust account of intending as involving more than dispositional profile — specifically, a structured nexus of volition and judgment. That can be said more firmly.

I would also consider whether you want the Bennett reference here. It is interesting, but at the moment it comes late and slightly changes the register. The paragraph is at its strongest when it stays close to the conceptual relation between intention and communication. Bennett and Aristotle may belong, but only if they are made to serve that main line rather than open new side paths.

The best ending, I think, is indeed your final point about certain milieus preferring not even to say aloud that they need a functionalist defence of mentalistic vocabulary. That is sharp and characteristic. But it will land better if the preceding sentence prepares it more cleanly.

So my verdict is that this is a very good paragraph in embryo, perhaps better than some of the previous additions because it is not merely historical but conceptually necessary to your picture of Speranza reading Grice. It now needs compression and sharpening so that its real argument can emerge without competition from all the side riches.

If you want, I can now give you my favourite version of the paragraph.

 

 

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.

 

 

Yes — this paragraph has a lot in it, and, unlike some of the others, it has a very clear historical function: it tries to make the 1950s not merely a decade of incidental publication, but a decade in which Grice is pulled between two different public faces. On the one hand, there is the Grice who becomes visible through Strawson, Quine, and the analytic/synthetic issue; on the other, there is the Grice who, in a slower and more relaxed setting, speaks about the things that more deeply matter to him, namely metaphysics, presupposition, phenomenalism, and the broader Oxonian inheritance. That is a strong contrast, and it gives the paragraph genuine shape.

What I like best is precisely that contrast between circulation and otium. That feels very Gricean, and very apt for your larger portrait of him as someone who was not naturally eager to be swept into controversy merely because controversy guaranteed visibility. The line that more criticism leaves less otium for what matters is excellent in spirit. Also very good is the move from In defence of a dogma to the BBC metaphysics piece. That contrast helps prevent the decade from being flattened into a simple “Grice versus Quine” narrative.

The most intellectually interesting claim in the paragraph is your reading of incomprehensibility, or lack of understanding, as the operative criterion in In defence of a dogma. That is a serious point. If framed more cleanly, it could be one of the strongest moments in the whole essay, because it links Meaning and the later analytic/synthetic discussion in a way that is both internal to Grice and responsive to Bennett. I think that is the true centre of the paragraph.

What weakens the paragraph is, again, mostly control. The opening rhetorical flourish about the decades is amusing, but it goes on just a little too long before arriving at the actual point. “Did the fifties made a change for Grice?” should of course be “Did the fifties make a change for Grice?” More importantly, the paragraph contains several strong claims that would benefit from cleaner sequencing. At present it moves from a cultural joke about the fifties, to Quine and Strawson, to Bennett, to publication history, to otium, to Pears, to the BBC setting, to Collingwood and Wisdom, to phenomenalism, to Edwards’s encyclopedia, and finally to Grice’s self-description. All of these are relevant, but they are not yet marshalled in the most forceful order.

I would suggest that the best order is this. First, ask whether the 1950s changed Grice. Second, answer by saying that they made him more visible, especially through In defence of a dogma, though that was not necessarily the form of visibility he most wanted. Third, explain the Bennett problem and your solution, with the chronology of Meaning made explicit. Fourth, contrast that public, debated Grice with the quieter Grice of the BBC metaphysics discussions. Fifth, end with the self-description showing that Grice himself refused confinement within a single field. That would give the paragraph a much firmer argumentative line.

There are also some local issues. “totally cut by Austin” is vivid but perhaps too colloquial unless you want that exact tone. “the history of the publications and unpublications” is nice, but could be tightened. “Pears’s volume The nature of metaphysics” should have more standard capitalization if you want bibliographic consistency. “Metpahysics,” “lisitng,” “excell,” and “clusmsily” are just slips, but there are enough of them now that they start to blur the authority of the prose. Also, “the Eastman visiting professor” is suggestive, but if the reader is not already inside the reference it may sound more cryptic than pointed.

Still, I think the paragraph is valuable. It does not merely add another item to the chronology; it deepens the portrait of Grice by showing that the decade’s most visible work may not have been, for him, the most inwardly central. That is a strong claim, and it fits beautifully with the essay’s larger mood.

If you want, I can now give you my favourite version of this paragraph, without preamble or postscript.

 

 

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.

 

 

Yes — this paragraph has real energy, and it is doing something important for the essay: it tries to make the 1960s at Oxford the decisive decade not merely because of publication history, but because Grice finally turns Austin’s legacy into his own terrain. That is a very strong idea. The paragraph also helps correct a common flattening of the Grice story by showing that what became famous under the label of conversational implicature arose in the midst of work ostensibly about perception and the senses. That is exactly the sort of point Speranza should be making.

What I most like is the contrast between the invisible Grice of the Saturday mornings and the visible Grice of the 1960s publications. “For all that was said about Grice as a member of the Saturday mornings under Austin’s patronage, we see none of it in the publications” is an excellent opening thought. It sharply marks the difference between lived philosophical presence and the written record. Equally good is the insistence that Causal Theory of Perception and Some Remarks about the Senses are not, on the face of it, philosophy-of-language papers, yet they are exactly where the machinery of implicature emerges. That is a very strong historiographical point.

The best line of the paragraph, to my mind, is the one about the “implicatures behind these two apparently unrelated pieces on a field foreign to the philosophy of language.” That is the true conceptual centre. From there, the rest of the paragraph can be seen as a demonstration that Grice’s great innovation was incubated in a different branch of philosophy altogether. That is a rich and persuasive claim.

The paragraph is, however, very crowded. It currently tries to do all of the following: characterise the last Oxford decade, revise Austin’s publication history, discuss the role of Urmson and Warnock, complain about philosophers’ laziness with sources, mention Grice’s grief, introduce the perception papers, contrast Oxford and continental taxonomies of disciplines, discuss sexist examples, summarise the implication excursus, connect it to earlier writings, cite Aristotle, Malcolm, Moore, Hart, Benjamin, Ryle, Austin, Strawson, and finally leap to the Retrospective Epilogue and the decent chap. That is too much for one paragraph unless it is very tightly staged. At the moment, it reads more like an abundant dossier than a single controlled paragraph.

Several local formulations also need correction or simplification if the paragraph is to carry its historical authority. “As it should, his last decade at Oxford, was the most exciting one” is not quite idiomatic. “devoved,” “Warncok,” “Phlosophical,” “contneintal,” “fatures,” “clases,” “langauge,” “Theoty,” “Epiloque,” and a number of others are plainly slips. More importantly, a sentence such as “Austin died in 1959 — and he would not have made a hit in philosophy had it not for two philosophers who devoted their own careers… by becoming mere amanuenses” is rhetorically vivid but perhaps too brusque as stated. It can be retained in spirit, but it needs more poise if it is to persuade rather than merely provoke.

I would also advise some care with the Austin material. The point about Urmson and Warnock is good, but if you make it too aggressively, the paragraph risks drifting away from Grice just when it should be turning most sharply toward him. Austin should be the background and catalyst here, not the rival protagonist. The paragraph is strongest when it shows Grice inheriting, transforming, and in a sense displacing Austin’s philosophical territory.

The final movement toward the Kantian imperative and the decent chap is excellent material, but in the current version it arrives too abruptly. If you want that as the end of the paragraph, it would help to prepare it through the implication excursus more directly: from tests for implication, to the need for a more general normative grounding, to the later Gricean answer. That would make the ending feel earned rather than appended.

So my judgment is that this is a very promising paragraph, perhaps one of the most substantial in the whole added sequence, because it bears directly on the emergence of implicature and on Grice’s relation to Austin. But it really wants tightening into a more deliberate arc. At present it contains at least two or three excellent paragraphs’ worth of material compressed into one.

If you want, I can now give you my favourite version of this paragraph, without preamble or postscript.

 

 

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?