H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: ACCETTO

 G.: Let us begin with the phrase itself, because it behaves rather better than one first expects. Della dissimulazione onesta. At first glance it looks like the sort of title one would set for a schoolboy merely to see whether he blanches. S.: Because it sounds self-cancelling. G.: Precisely. Like “sincere deceit,” or “truthful concealment,” which the English ear distrusts before the mind has had time to inquire. S.: Yet Accetto means us not to stop at the ear. G.: No. He wants us to ask whether concealment must always fall on the side of falsehood. That is already a subtle move, and one which the ordinary moral vocabulary rather discourages. S.: Because ordinary vocabulary carries its own implicatures. G.: Very good. “Dissimulation” comes pre-loaded with a bad character reference. One hears the word and already half-condemns the act. S.: Which is exactly what Accetto is trying to undo. G.: Yes. He is, if one may borrow my own terminology with due caution, attempting to cancel a standing social implicature attached to the lexeme itself. S.: The implicature being: if he dissimulates, he deceives. G.: Quite. Whereas Accetto says: not so fast. There is a distinction between the active feigning of what is not there, and the prudent withholding of what is there. S.: Simulazione versus dissimulazione. G.: Exactly. The first invents; the second veils. S.: And for him that is already a moral distinction. G.: A deeply moral one. That is where he and I begin to converge and then immediately diverge again. S.: Because for you the first question is not good or bad concealment, but what inferential route takes one from what is said to what is meant. G.: Just so. I am interested in the machinery of recovery, the hearer’s reasoning under cooperative presumptions. Accetto, by contrast, begins with the soul and its intentions. S.: Yet the machinery and the soul meet in practice. G.: They do. Let us take a plain case. Suppose a guest at table asks a dangerous question in mixed company, and the host answers with studied incompleteness. S.: He does not lie. G.: No. He says less than the whole truth, perhaps shifts emphasis, perhaps lets silence carry part of the burden. S.: And yet the reasonable hearer may gather a good deal. G.: Exactly. If the hearer is sensible, he sees not only what is said but why so little is said, and in what circumstances. He reasons from the host’s restraint, not merely from the words. S.: So the unsaid is not empty. G.: Never. The unsaid is often where civility does its best work. S.: Which is why Accetto interests you. G.: Very much. Because he moralises a region of discourse which later philosophers often flatten into a choice between truth and falsehood. S.: He sees a third region. G.: Better: he sees that the space between blunt explicitness and outright falsification has its own ethics. S.: A prudential ethics of manifestation. G.: Admirably put. One does not owe every truth to every hearer at every moment under every description. S.: That sounds almost scandalous when stated nakedly. G.: Which is why civilised societies wrap it in tact, discretion, reserve, reticence, good breeding, and a dozen softer nouns. S.: But Accetto gives it the harder name. G.: Yes, and thereby risks scandal in order to gain accuracy. “Dissimulazione” shocks; “reserve” merely glides. S.: Then perhaps the title itself performs a kind of philosophical correction. G.: Indeed. It forces the reader to slow down and separate things he would lazily keep together. S.: Such as concealment and lying. G.: Exactly. Or sincerity and total explicitness, which are by no means identical. S.: Let us press that. Can one be sincere while withholding? G.: Certainly, provided the withholding is not undertaken in order to induce a false belief which one could not otherwise induce. S.: So your condition concerns intended uptake. G.: Naturally. If I conceal with the design that you should believe the contrary, I am drifting into deception. If I conceal because full manifestation would be indecorous, harmful, or a betrayal of another trust, the matter changes. S.: Then intention is central for both you and Accetto. G.: Yes, though not in the same register. For him intention is morally tinctured from the start; for me it is the hinge of speaker-meaning. S.: Still, both of you refuse to locate everything in the surface form of the utterance. G.: Quite. Neither of us is so foolish as to imagine that what is explicit exhausts what is communicatively going on. S.: Then why did Strawson trouble you in this vicinity? G.: Because Strawson, though acute on presupposition and ordinary talk, remains suspicious of anything that sounds like a rehabilitation of concealment under the title of sincerity. He likes frankness to look cleaner than it often is. S.: Whereas you think frankness can be vulgar. G.: It can be. “Candour” is a splendid ideal until it becomes a form of aggression. S.: So honest dissimulation may sometimes preserve the deeper cooperative order of the exchange. G.: Exactly. That is the point. If cooperation means making one’s contribution such as is required by the accepted purpose of the conversation, then there are occasions on which overstatement, over-disclosure, or brutal explicitness would violate the purpose more gravely than reserve would. S.: Which means that Quantity is not simply “say as much as possible.” G.: Heaven forbid. Quantity is “make your contribution as informative as is required,” not “bleed on the carpet.” S.: Very good. G.: Thank you. S.: Then Accetto’s world of courts, factions, patrons, jealousies, and dangerous sociability gives this an immediacy your Oxford examples often soften. G.: Yes. Oxford lets one illustrate with squash and tea. Seventeenth-century Italy often requires one to illustrate with survival. S.: So prudence there is not merely etiquette. G.: No. It may be political, existential, even spiritual. One does not always speak in drawing rooms; sometimes one speaks under princes. S.: Which is why his moral psychology matters. G.: Exactly. A heart must be balanced before reserve can be virtuous. Otherwise concealment becomes merely an instrument of vanity, cowardice, or intrigue. S.: So for Accetto the distinction is not verbal but characterological. G.: Deeply so. Honest dissimulation is not a technique detachable from the soul that deploys it. S.: Whereas for you the same outward act could be analysed by reference to intentions and rational recognisability without first writing a moral biography of the agent. G.: Correct. I can describe the structure of the communicative act without yet praising or condemning it. S.: But you do not therefore deny the moral dimension. G.: Not at all. I merely insist on analytical sequence. First ask what was meant, how it was conveyed, what assumptions made it recoverable. Then ask whether it ought to have been done. S.: Accetto almost reverses the order. G.: He often does. He asks first what sort of soul could conceal honestly, and then what sort of public conduct follows. S.: Yet he also understands the hearer. G.: Yes, because without a background expectation of sincerity dissimulation would be unintelligible. One can only withhold against a norm of ordinary openness. S.: So even concealment presupposes trust. G.: Absolutely. That is why the case is so delicate. Honest dissimulation is parasitic on a social world in which words and silences are usually taken in good faith. S.: Otherwise everything collapses into universal suspicion. G.: And universal suspicion is the death of conversation. S.: Then perhaps Accetto’s little treatise is really about rescuing conversation from a society of simulators. G.: Very likely. He says, in effect: because there are those who actively counterfeit, the good man may need to shelter truth without betraying it. S.: A defensive not an offensive concealment. G.: Precisely. That is the crucial asymmetry. S.: Let us try a case of silence. Someone is asked whether he approves of a certain alliance, and he answers only by changing the subject. G.: Good. The silence or deflection may imply disapproval, reluctance, danger, or tactful suspension. S.: And the hearer recovers which of these by context. G.: Yes. Context, occasion, known loyalties, tone, prior exchanges, all the rest. S.: So here too the “meaning” lies not in explicit assertion but in the rationally interpretable management of manifestation. G.: Exactly. Which is why I say that what is withheld can be just as communicatively active as what is uttered. S.: Then Accetto’s title is not paradox but precision. G.: That is what Speranza sees so well. S.: Because he understands that the phrase only appears contradictory so long as one confuses honesty with exhaustive display. G.: Yes. Modern people often do. They imagine that sincerity is achieved by total exposure, as though the soul were obliged to publish itself in full whenever questioned. S.: A very Protestant picture. G.: Or therapeutic. In either case rather exhausting. S.: Accetto would prefer measure. G.: Measure, prudence, recollection, inward governance. He is much closer to a moral art of self-command than to any cult of confession. S.: Which gives concealment a positive dignity. G.: Under conditions, yes. Not because hiding is intrinsically noble, but because undisciplined self-exposure can be both morally foolish and socially destructive. S.: Then one might say that for Accetto the vice lies not in concealment as such, but in the corruption of its aim. G.: Very good. The bad case conceals in order to falsify reality to another; the good case conceals in order to protect reality from vulgar misuse, harm, or untimely exposure. S.: That sounds almost Platonic. G.: A little, though with more courtly weather about it. S.: And your own account would translate that into the language of speaker-intention and audience-inference. G.: Naturally. The hearer asks: given what he said, what he omitted, and the evident constraints of the occasion, what am I intended to gather? If the answer is recoverable under cooperative assumptions, implicature is in play. S.: Even where the explicit content is meagre. G.: Especially there. Thin saying often carries thick intention. S.: Which is why understatement is philosophically richer than chatter. G.: Usually. Chatter mostly conveys that the speaker has time. S.: Let us consider whether “honest dissimulation” could ever fail by being too subtle. G.: Certainly. If the hearer cannot, in the circumstances, reasonably recover what is to be gathered, then the speaker has perhaps preserved innocence at the cost of communication. S.: So prudence must be measured not only by moral purity but by intelligibility. G.: Precisely. To conceal honestly is not to become opaque for vanity’s sake. One must still leave enough for a reasonable addressee. S.: Enough trace. G.: Yes. Enough sign, enough gesture, enough placement, enough silence of the right sort. S.: There are silences of the wrong sort too. G.: Of course. Some silences are merely evasive, lazy, contemptuous, or cowardly. S.: Then silence itself does not inherit virtue merely by being silence. G.: Heaven forbid. Nothing in conversation is redeemed by grammar alone. S.: So Accetto’s phrase demands a whole ethics of discernment. G.: Exactly. That is why it interests me. It is not a trick formula but the title of an entire region of practical intelligence. S.: And perhaps also of political intelligence. G.: Undeniably. In a dangerous court, one survives neither by constant candour nor by constant deceit, but by a disciplined art of manifestation. S.: Which sounds almost like camouflage. G.: A dangerous comparison, but not wholly wrong. Except that camouflage in the moral case must not become counterfeit. S.: So the self is not painted as other than it is, only not displayed in full. G.: Yes. Veiled, not fabricated. S.: Simulazione invents a mask; dissimulazione lowers a visor. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Though if you publish it, do not make me sound lyrical. S.: Never intentionally. G.: Good. Now, where does the cooperative principle stand in all this? S.: It seems less like a demand for explicitness than for responsible contribution. G.: Exactly. The principle is not a command to utter all one knows. It is a requirement that one’s move be such as the exchange rationally calls for. S.: Which may include protective incompleteness. G.: Yes. A physician does not always answer a frightened patient with the whole pathology in one sentence. A diplomat does not always answer a hostile envoy with a complete internal memorandum. A friend does not always answer a raw wound with naked verdict. S.: So charity and prudence enter the maxims from within. G.: They do, though I prefer not to sentimentalise the point. It is enough to say that cooperation in human conversation is purposive and situated. S.: Then Accetto supplies what your formal exposition leaves implicit: the moral atmosphere in which such situatedness acquires shape. G.: Very good. He gives the atmosphere, I give some of the inferential scaffolding. S.: And Speranza brings the two together. G.: With considerable tact. He sees that neither side should swallow the other. S.: Because if one simply says “Accetto anticipated implicature,” one loses the ethical depth. G.: Exactly. And if one says merely “Accetto moralises reserve,” one misses the rational structure by which the reserved meaning is nevertheless understood. S.: Then the best formula is that the truth may survive indirection. G.: Yes. And more strongly: there are cases in which truth is better served by disciplined indirection than by crude explicitness. S.: That is the sentence that would trouble moral puritans. G.: They are often improved by trouble. S.: You would say that. G.: Of course. S.: Then perhaps the final point is this. Honest dissimulation is not a permission to evade truth, but an account of how truth may be governed in its manifestation. G.: Splendid. Governed, not denied. Ordered, not falsified. Timed, not betrayed. S.: And all this belongs, for both you and Accetto, to the life of reason. G.: Yes. Reason is not exhausted by explicit statement. It also lives in reserve, proportion, relevance, tact, and the governed passage from the said to the understood. S.: So the space between speech and meaning is not a defect. G.: No. It is one of civilisation’s main theatres. S.: And Accetto knew that before Brighton. G.: Long before Brighton. S.: Then your talk on meaning revisited had a baroque ancestor. G.: More than one, I suspect. But this one had the honesty to say so while withholding just enough to remain civilised. S.: Very nearly an epitaph. G.: Too flattering. S.: A motto, then. G.: Better. S.: Honest dissimulation is not lying with gloves on. G.: No. It is truth under discipline. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Pugliese.