H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: I VERBALI DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE: ACRI

 G.: Let us begin where Austin began badly and Acri began better, with the word dialectic itself. S.: Because Austin made it sound like a local custom. G.: Precisely. As if one could simply oppose Athenian dialectic to Oxonian dialectic and think one had thereby done philosophy rather than geography. S.: Whereas Acri thinks dialectic has moods, not merely postal addresses. G.: Very good. That is exactly why he interests me. He sees that argument is not only a form but a temperature. S.: Turbo and sereno. G.: Yes. Disturbance and settlement, though even “settlement” is a little too legal for the second. S.: You would prefer composure? G.: Or stable grip. The sereno is not necessarily agreement; it is the point at which the issue becomes sufficiently held to be intelligently pursued. S.: So not peace, exactly. G.: No. A conversation may be perfectly serene while disagreement remains in full employment. S.: Then turbo is the first necessary violence? G.: “Violence” overstates it, unless one is reading Hegel after midnight. Better: the necessary unsettlement. Someone moves, presses, resists, interrupts, dislodges. S.: And this is where you connect Acri to your own notion of implicature. G.: Yes. Because in the disturbed phase much is conveyed obliquely. Tone, omission, impatience, irony, challenge, invitation, tactical understatement, all the small diagnostics of philosophical pressure. S.: So implicature is born in turbulence. G.: Often. Or at least it becomes most visible there. S.: That sounds rather unlike your official examples. G.: My official examples were designed for safety and teachability. Philosophical life is messier, and Acri is useful precisely because he admits the mess without worshipping it. S.: Unlike those who romanticise dialectic. G.: Exactly. He neither reduces it to polite method nor inflates it into destiny. S.: Then let us take Austin first. What exactly bothered you in his Athens-versus-Oxford contrast? G.: Its theatricality. Austin liked live distinctions, but sometimes he mistook a clever opposition for a stable one. Athens in his mouth risked becoming a grand externalisation of what Oxford liked to imagine about itself. S.: That it too had a civic seriousness? G.: Or a pedigree. But the actual contrast is more unruly. Athenian dialectic, insofar as it survives to us, is public, open-air, interrupted, porous, half sport and half civic nuisance. S.: While Oxford is indoors. G.: Indoors, examinable, timetabled, and faintly punitive. S.: The walls matter. G.: Immensely. A wall changes a question. Once one is in a room with a tutor and a degree hanging invisibly over the exchange, dialectic ceases to be merely an inquiry and becomes also an ordeal. S.: Then Acri’s categories fit Oxford better than Austin’s geography. G.: Exactly. A tutorial begins in turbo because one party wants to move the other, and the other either resists or shows the movement in the next reply. S.: Turbo one and turbo two. G.: Precisely. The dyad at work. Acri is very good on that, though his own phrasing is more Italian and more humane. S.: Colloquenza turbata. G.: Yes, and I rather like that. Not simply argument in a disturbed mode, but the very colloquy itself disturbed, as though the relation were shaken, not merely the content. S.: That already sounds more subtle than “debate.” G.: Much more subtle. Debate is too parliamentary. Acri gives one a living conversational weather. S.: And then the serene comes when the issue has become clear enough to bear disagreement. G.: Excellent. That is the point. The conversation need not end in harmony. It need only arrive at a form of mutual purchase. S.: A shared grip. G.: Yes. The issue becomes graspable by both, even if not resolved in the same way by both. S.: Until the next turbo. G.: Which, in Oxford, tends to arrive about five minutes before the hour. S.: Because then the pupil says what he ought to have said twenty minutes earlier. G.: Exactly. Or the tutor realises what he should have denied at the beginning. S.: Then Acri’s two dialectics are really cycles, not stages. G.: Better. One should not imagine a neat linear progression from confusion to peace. It is more tidal. Turbo generates sereno, which reveals the conditions for the next turbo. S.: That sounds almost Heraclitean. G.: Do not make Acri Greek too quickly. He has enough Vico in him to remain properly Italian. S.: Then let us talk about Vico. G.: A necessary turn. Acri’s interest in roots, expressions, and the living relation between idea and expression owes a great deal to Vichian sensibility. S.: Because words have roots and arguments have histories. G.: Precisely. Acri does not treat language as a transparent neutral channel. He wants to know how expression grows from imaginative and sensuous life. S.: Fantasma and imagine. G.: Yes. That is another reason he interests me. He knows that before the sober philosopher arrives with distinctions, there is already a sensible and imaginative field in which meaning is half-born. S.: So the disturbed dialectic is not merely social disturbance, but conceptual disturbance at the root. G.: Very good. The trouble is already in the relation between idea and expression. Language does not sit still for thought. S.: Which makes Cratylus unavoidable. G.: Entirely. If one cares about roots, names, natural fit, and the seductions of etymology, one ends up sooner or later with Cratylus looking over one’s shoulder. S.: Acri comments extensively on Cratylus, you say. G.: Yes, and wisely in the vernacular. That matters. He is not merely embalming Plato; he is forcing the old questions to speak Italian. S.: Which Speranza also does, in another register. G.: Exactly. That is part of Speranza’s tact. He does not translate Acri into sterile Griceanism. He lets Acri’s own vernacular pressure remain audible. S.: Turbo, turbata, serena, colloquenza, ardimento. G.: Those words matter. One loses something if one simply replaces them with “stage one,” “stage two,” “argument,” and “transition.” S.: Then ardimento is not merely courage? G.: No. It is something between daring, energy, and conversational thrust. Without it there is no disturbance, and without disturbance no serious inquiry. S.: So the philosophical vice would be excessive sobriety. G.: Acri would say so, I think. He explicitly contrasts the positivists with the filosofi sobri, and one hears both irony and impatience in the phrase. S.: Because too much sobriety becomes sterility. G.: Precisely. A conversation that never risks disturbance is often merely administratively correct. S.: That sounds like certain Oxford seminars. G.: More than certain. S.: Then you and Acri agree that argument needs a kind of ardour. G.: Under discipline, yes. I distrust philosophical hysteria, but I distrust bloodless correctness too. A certain managed unsettlement is healthy. S.: Managed unsettlement sounds like one of your maxims. G.: It ought not to. Maxims are for cooperation; unsettlement is what makes the cooperation worth having. S.: Then perhaps the cooperative principle itself presupposes a prior disturbance. G.: That is well said. One does not need cooperation in a vacuum. One needs it because interlocutors are bringing different commitments, resistances, half-formulated pressures to bear. S.: So conversation is born from asymmetry. G.: Often from asymmetry, yes. One knows more, cares differently, sees another implication, resists another conclusion. Turbo is the formal name for that friction. S.: Then your implicature in the turbo phase would be more unstable than in the serene phase. G.: Usually. In the disturbed phase, much is carried by pressure, tone, and provisional inference. In the serene phase, the same implications may become more stably recognisable. S.: So one could say that the sereno is where implicature becomes examinable. G.: Very good. In the turbulence one gathers more than one can yet sort; in the serene one begins to articulate what was going on. S.: That is almost your Sunday reflection on Austin’s Saturday mornings. G.: Exactly. I have always thought the real work of certain conversations occurs after the noise, when one can hear what, if anything, was actually said. S.: Or meant. G.: Indeed. Often especially what was meant. S.: Then the University Parks walk is already Acrian in spirit. G.: I suppose it is. Sunday provides the sereno to Saturday’s turbo. S.: And Hardie’s joke about A. and M.? G.: Ah yes. Ancient and Modern as if dialectic were a portable hymn-book. Hardie was good at disinfecting us against reverence for abstractions. S.: But he weaponised Acri politically. G.: Quite. He turned Acri into an anti-Hegelian tonic, which was not wholly unfair but not the whole story either. S.: Because for Hardie the point was that Hegel was using Plato for Prussian ends. G.: Exactly. Plato as costume, history as inevitability, dialectic as state-theology in motion. S.: Whereas Austin wanted the disturbance without the metaphysics. G.: Yes. Austin wanted clean moves, practical discrimination, no national-historical thunder behind the words. S.: Dialectic as etiquette. G.: A little harsh, but not false. Austin tried to make dialectic behave like a particularly alert form of linguistic manners. S.: And Hegel wanted it to behave like history’s engine. G.: Precisely. Acri sees enough of both temptations to reject them. S.: So where does he stand? G.: Somewhere more humane and more local. Dialectic is neither an imperial motor nor a set of drawing-room refinements. It is the lived oscillation between disturbance and settled grasp. S.: That sounds almost modest. G.: Which is why it is true. S.: Then is Athens irrelevant? G.: Not irrelevant. Athens matters as the public invention of dialectic, as the place where questioning, interruption, and civic visibility still cling to the form. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford matters as the domestication of that form into private pedagogical discipline. It takes the public sport and turns it into indoor examination and tutorial combat. S.: Then the historical formula would be: Athens invents, Oxford domesticates, Hegel nationalises, Austin polishes. G.: That is not bad at all. S.: Acri? G.: Acri diagnoses. S.: Better. G.: Thank you. S.: And Speranza? G.: Speranza re-hears. He lets us hear Acri in a register that resonates with my own concerns without cancelling Acri’s distinctiveness. S.: That is the point you admire most. G.: Very much. Too often historical comparison is annexation. One philosopher is rewritten in the terms of another until the earlier voice is lost. S.: Whereas here Acri still sounds like Acri. G.: Yes. Turbo remains turbo. Colloquenza remains colloquenza. Vico remains Vico. Plato remains refracted through Calabria, not simply subsumed into Oxford. S.: Then Speranza is not stealing Acri’s voice. G.: No. He is tuning it into a neighbouring key. S.: And that neighbouring key is conversational reason. G.: Exactly. Acri’s categories illuminate conversation from within, not because they were secretly waiting for me, but because they touch the same pressure-points by another path. S.: Then perhaps the key term is dialettica itself. G.: Entirely. We have let the word become either grandly historicist or tiresomely procedural. Acri restores its temperament. S.: Its moods. G.: Yes. And that is very important. Philosophical forms have moods. The same nominal structure may function very differently under disturbance and under composure. S.: Then do you think Austin missed that? G.: Largely. Austin saw acts and distinctions, but he was less alive to the large emotional and relational weather of discourse than he thought he was. S.: Yet he was certainly alive to tone. G.: Oh yes, locally, brilliantly. But he preferred to keep the tone under procedural description. Acri is less shy of saying that the conversation itself is troubled. S.: Colloquenza turbata. G.: Yes. I rather wish we had said that more often in Oxford. It would have saved us the pretence that all philosophical pressure is merely logical. S.: Then your own epagoge and diagoge distinction comes near this? G.: Near enough to be interesting. There are moments of leading-in, drawing-out, gathering, and then of carrying-through, but Acri’s terminology is warmer and less scholastic. S.: Warmer because more conversational. G.: Exactly. He writes as someone who knows that interlocutors are not only positions but persons. S.: Does this connect to his writing on love? G.: I think so. A man who has written on amore will not mistake discourse for pure geometry. S.: Yet he also cares about number in Plato. G.: Which is delightful. He can move from colloquy to number, from Cratylus to ideas, from roots of words to the puzzle of concepts. That range is one of his virtues. S.: And one of the reasons you like him. G.: Certainly. He is not a specialist in the miserable modern sense. He ranges as Lit. Hum. once allowed one to range. S.: All in the good Oxon. tradition, though he is in Catanzaro. G.: Exactly. It is always pleasing to find an older and less provincial version of one’s own better habits elsewhere. S.: Then is he a Platonist? G.: In some respects, yes, but not a museum Platonist. His theory of ideas is inflected by Vico and by an interest in expression that prevents the ideas from floating above language. S.: So idea and expression are reciprocal. G.: Yes. The idea needs expression, and expression is not a mere clothing but part of the idea’s historical and sensible life. S.: Then Cratylus becomes more than etymological play. G.: Much more. It becomes a testing ground for whether names arise by nature, by convention, by root, by use, by imaginative sediment. S.: Which sounds surprisingly close to your own suspicion that meaning is not exhausted by lexical assignment. G.: Quite. Though I should formulate it differently. Still, Acri is alive to the fact that words have more than one ancestry: institutional, sensual, imaginative, historical. S.: So the root of expression is not merely grammatical but anthropological. G.: Excellent. Yes. That is why fantasma and imagine matter. There is no clean leap from pure concept to pure word. There is an imaginative middle. S.: And the disturbed dialectic may be where that middle becomes visible. G.: Often. In peaceful exposition one forgets the buried pressures. In disturbance the roots show through. S.: Then turbo has a philological function too. G.: Very good indeed. Disturbance exposes the strain between what one wants to say and what one can say, which is often where etymology, metaphor, and old semantic deposits return. S.: That sounds more Vichian than Platonic. G.: It is, and Acri is clever enough to let both currents meet. S.: Then why do standard histories flatten him? G.: Because standard histories need labels. Platonist, Vichian, anti-positivist, southern intellectual, provincial pedagogue, take your pick. Once labelled, a thinker becomes fileable. S.: And Speranza resists that filing. G.: Yes. He lets Acri remain plural without becoming vague. S.: That is harder than it sounds. G.: Much harder. Most scholars either over-systematise or sentimentalise. Speranza does neither here. S.: Then perhaps the closing question is whether every true conversation must pass through disturbance. G.: I think Acri is right that without some unsettlement nothing genuinely philosophical begins. S.: Even if the unsettlement is very small? G.: Especially then. Sometimes the slightest pressure, a single hesitation, a shifted example, a corrected article, is enough to start the dialectical weather changing. S.: Then turbo need not be dramatic. G.: No. It may be almost invisible to the outsider. The important thing is that one interlocutor has ceased to be where he was. S.: And sereno is when both know where the new issue stands. G.: Precisely. Not solved, perhaps, but placed. S.: Until the next movement. G.: Always until the next movement. S.: Then Oxford has not one dialectic but two: the one that earns the degree and the one that begins afterward. G.: That is Acri’s best revenge on Austin. S.: And yours? G.: My revenge is to admit that he was right. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Calabrian, with a Sunday Oxford mist.