H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PE

 

Catalogue Raisonné of J. L. Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: PE

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Peano: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, il deutero-esperanto di Grice, formalisti ed informalisti, modernisti e neotradizionalisti, e la riforma della lingua d’Italia. Citato da Croce nella “Logica, o della sicenza del concetto”.  Giuseppe Peano (Spinetta di Cuneo, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, il deutero-esperanto di Grice, formalisti ed informalisti, modernisti e neotradizionalisti, e la riforma della lingua d’Italia. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning locates intelligibility in the rational practice of talk: what a speaker means is often underdetermined by what is said, and hearers bridge the gap by assuming cooperation and applying defeasible norms of relevance, sufficiency, and perspicuity to derive implicatures that are, in principle, calculable and cancellable. Peano represents a complementary but contrasting response to the same problem of meaning: instead of relying on pragmatic inference in ordinary language, he seeks to reduce interpretive latitude by engineering explicit form—through logical notation (including devices later used in the theory of definite descriptions) and through linguistic reform projects like Latino sine flexione, aimed at clarity, economy, and unambiguity by design. The comparison, then, is that Grice explains why ordinary discourse works despite leaving so much implicit, because conversationalists are rational agents who can responsibly recover intended content, whereas Peano tries to make as much as possible explicit in the code itself, shifting work from conversational interpretation to formal derivation; Grice’s “conversational reason” is an account of how meaning is reliably inferred in interaction, while Peano’s “formalist reason” is the aspiration to a system in which what would otherwise be left to implicature is stated, defined, and provably manipulable. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is fundamentally pragmatic and inferential: what a speaker means is not exhausted by sentence-meaning but is reconstructed by a rational hearer who assumes cooperation and applies norms (maxims) to derive implicatures in a way that is, in principle, calculable and cancellable; the “reason” is lodged in the interpersonal practice of interpreting intentions against shared standards of relevance, sufficiency, and so on. Peano, by contrast, represents the formalist impulse that Grice both admired and resisted: Peano’s logical work (including notations later central to Russell and Whitehead, and the iota operator used for definite descriptions) aims to regiment meaning by explicit formal devices, and his Latino sine flexione project (introduced in 1903 in his Revue de Mathématiques in the article De Latino sine flexione, lingua auxiliare internationale) pursues clarity, economy, and unambiguity by engineering the code itself—reducing morphology, standardizing forms, and making interpretation depend less on contextual guesswork. So the comparison is that Grice explains how ordinary language remains intelligible despite underdetermination because conversationalists are rational agents who manage the gap between “what is said” and “what is meant” through principled inference (implicature is a feature, not a bug), whereas Peano seeks to minimize that gap by design, shifting communicative work from pragmatic inference to explicit logical form and controlled linguistic structure; Grice’s “conversational reason” is a theory of how humans reliably transcend literal content in practice, while Peano’s “reason” is the aspiration to a language and notation in which much of what would otherwise be left to implicature is made overt, derivable, and surveyable—two complementary responses to the same problem of meaning, one interpretive and interactional, the other constructive and formal. Citato da Croce nella “Logica, o della sicenza del concetto”. L’unico italiano citato da nome da Croce nella Logica. La polemica Croce e il logicismo. Croce, P., e la lingua universal – Per che la lingua d’Italia non e formale per Croce. Grice: “My type of philosopher; he quotes from Breal, Mueller – I wish I could!” Grice: “As I reduce “the” to “every,” I am of course following Peano, who predates Russell!” -- important Italian philosopher. Linceo. P. Fa la sua comparsa una delle proposte di lingua internazionale inventata d’italiani che conosce più risonanza, il latino sine flexione di Peano, presentato nella Revue de Mathématique -- La Revue de Mathématique è creata dallo stesso P. Egli, assieme a molti altri filosofi, vi pubblica  propri studi e ricerche sulla logica e sulla storia della matematica. Il suo creatore non è in realtà un linguista o un esperto di lettere - sebbene partecipa più volte a dei congressi dove vienneno discussi problemi, oltre che di matematica, anche di filosofia, didattica e linguistica - ma, come per altri filosofi, i suoi interessi principali sono la matematica e la geometria. Dopo frequentare il liceo classico a Torino, s’iscrive al corso di laurea di matematica e nello stesso anno in cui consegue la laurea comincia ad insegnare presso Torino alla cattedre di algebra, geometria analitica, e calcolo infinitesimale. Grice on ‘Fido is shaggy,’ – “It is impossible to expect the philosopher to provide meaning-specifications for all parts of speech, so I will restrict myself to the ‘predicate,’ “shaggy.””. Vedasi sullo stesso soggetto il saggio su «Discussione de  Academia prò Interlingua. Implicatura, l’operatore iota, sull’articolo definito, sull’operatore ‘iota’, Deutero-Esperanto, l’errore di Quine, il carattere non primitive dell’operatore iota, Definite descriptions in Peano and in the vernacular, semantica filosofica. Grice: “St John’s, 1953. I’ve had it with Quine. Strawson, on the other hand, has not—this is about our joint seminar, in which Quine keeps turning up like a travelling evangelist with a single tract: Principia Mathematica here, Principia Mathematica there, Principia Mathematica everywhere. Don’t they have a Bible in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well? What irritates me is Quine’s breezy attitude toward Peano. The man behaves as if logic began in Russell’s rooms and ended in Harvard Yard. Yet it was Peano’s idea to define the “inverted iota” for definite descriptions by appeal to identity—indeed, to the Leibnizian thought that if there is exactly one such-and-such, then anything identical with it must share all its properties. Peano did the typographical genius; Russell did the publicity; and Quine does the shrug. I suppose, in time, Quine will concede the point—after enough correspondence, and after Russell has finished his long detour via Frege, imitating the Hun when he might have whistled an Italian tune all the way in and out. G.: Let us begin where the Italians begin, which is not with modesty but with a Formulario. S.: Good. One likes a philosophy that begins by printing itself in columns. G.: Peano had the great advantage of believing that if one cannot make meaning behave, one can at least make symbols behave. That alone separates him from most of Oxford. S.: Be fair. Oxford behaved with symbols, too. It simply pretended not to enjoy them. G.: Peano enjoyed them openly, which is more dignified. One starts with the old Formulario style and sees at once what sort of mind is at work: order first, ambiguity later, if at all. A little epsilon for membership, a turned C for implication, a binder for universality, and the unmistakable smell of a man who thinks ordinary language has been left unsupervised too long. S.: And no conversational remorse. G.: None. Peano’s moral is simple: if a thing can be made explicit, then make it explicit. Reduce the room for hearsay, irony, tact, and all the other civilised vices. S.: Whereas your later moral would be: if a thing is left implicit, someone with good sense may still recover it. G.: Exactly. Which is why Peano interests me. He is not the enemy. He is the formal relative whose will one resents and admires in equal measure. S.: Let us get the notation clear before Oxford muddies it. G.: Very well. In the old Peano-Russell line, universality is basic and existence is the marked case. One writes something like (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) for for every x, if x is F then x is G. S.: No inverted A. G.: No. That arrives later, in 1935, with Gentzen, who clearly had more eye for symmetry than the earlier generation. S.: And existence? G.: There one has the explicit sign, the inverted E. So one writes (∃x)(Fx) for there exists an x such that x is F. S.: So “all” is treated as default. G.: More or less. Or rather: universal quantification has the basic binder notation, and existence gets the marked badge. That is the style Russell and Whitehead inherit. One sees at once why Principia writes (x)Fx rather than ∀xFx. S.: And if Peano wanted membership and implication? G.: Then he is entirely at home. One writes x ε a for x belongs to a, and (x)(x ε a ⊃ x ε b) for everything in a is in b. S.: Which is perfectly clear and perfectly bloodless. G.: Those two things often coincide in logic. S.: And if he wanted an existential example? G.: Something of the form (∃x)(x ε a) which simply says: there exists at least one thing in a. S.: One can see why the man was useful to Russell. G.: Useful and embarrassing. Russell learned modern symbolic logic first through Peano, or at least first found the thing intellectually alive through him. Then Frege turned up as the deeper source of certain conceptual revolutions, and the family romance became complicated. S.: So we are now at the Oxford part. G.: Inevitably. Oxford likes to inherit by way of embarrassment. By the late 1930s, if one said “modern logic” in Oxford, one very likely meant something Russellian. But Russellian means, at once, Peano-shaped in notation and increasingly Fregean in conceptual depth. S.: And Whitehead? G.: Whitehead stands there in the title page and in the lineage, but for the undergraduate atmosphere one suspects Russell mattered more directly. A PPE logic paper would not have been a pure Principia baptism. It would have been a mixture: Johnson, Keynes perhaps, the old British logic inheritance, and then the more modern symbolic prestige arriving through Russell. S.: So if a young tutor at St John’s in the late 1930s is coaching a younger man for a logic paper, the whole thing is already mixed. G.: Precisely. One must imagine a young don who has read enough Russell to know what modernity is supposed to look like, enough Oxford to know that modernity must not become vulgar, and enough Greats to suspect that the square of opposition will be back before the week is out. S.: And the younger man is Strawson. G.: Let us allow him to be. St John’s, some term around 1938 or 1939. Grice is already there in official clothing; Strawson is changing subject and learning what Oxford calls logic while everyone around him quietly means several different things by the word. S.: One term of logic tuition, as legend has it. G.: One term is more than enough in Oxford if the minds are suitable. S.: And Peano would have been present? G.: Heard of, certainly. Read directly, perhaps less often. The route is through Russell and Whitehead, through Principia, through the very shape of notation. Peano is there like a watermark. A boy may not read him, but he writes in his wake. S.: I like that: logic as paleography. G.: Oxford always preferred inheritance to origin myths. Even revolutions arrive there as reading lists. S.: So picture the room. G.: A room at St John’s, some coal, some books, some shoes not polished enough for the College but polished enough for the tutor. Grice is preparing Strawson for the logic paper in PPE, not Literae Humaniores. This matters, because PPE permits a little more modernity while never abandoning the old apparatus entirely. S.: What would be on the table? G.: Johnson perhaps, Keynes perhaps, Russell certainly in the background, maybe Cook Wilson in the atmosphere if not in the bibliography, and the square of opposition still lurking like an old relative who has not been told the party is over. S.: And Grice, being Grice, feels a tension. G.: He must have. Not merely Peano versus Frege, which is too tidy, but the whole question of what one is teaching when one teaches “logic.” Is one teaching notation, conceptual discipline, the avoidance of contradiction, the analysis of ordinary forms, or the rites of examination? S.: Oxford answers: all of them, badly separated. G.: Quite. And the student answers: whichever of them gets me through Schools without spiritual collapse. S.: Let us be concrete. Suppose Grice writes on the paper: (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) G.: And says: there, my dear Strawson, is the official shape of “All F are G.” Or the shape Russell and Whitehead would prefer to give it. S.: But then the trouble begins. G.: Because ordinary language objects. It always does when formalism becomes too cheerful. Suppose the English sentence is: All the books in his room are by an English author. S.: Formally one is tempted to write: (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) G.: Where F means “x is a book in his room” and G means “x is by an English author.” S.: Which has the notorious consequence of being vacuously true if there are no books in the room. G.: Exactly. And that is where the later story becomes interesting. Peano would not mind much. Russell, in his more formal mood, would not mind enough. But ordinary language minds do mind, and by the early 1950s Strawson has decided to say so in print. S.: We are leaping ahead. G.: Leaping ahead is allowed if one is tracing an echo. The whole point is that Peano’s treatment makes universality basic, existence derivative, and thereby clears a path for a formalism in which “all F are G” may happily remain true when there are no Fs at all. S.: Whereas the ordinary speaker thinks that if one says “all the books in his room,” one is behaving as if there are books in his room. G.: Which is a very different matter. It is not, perhaps, what is explicitly asserted. But it is presupposed, or at least pragmatically expected, or at least suggested so strongly that anyone who violates it commits what Strawson later calls a linguistic outrage. S.: And then we have the famous example. G.: Yes. Someone says, solemnly: There is not a single book in his room which is not by an English author. S.: And later reveals that there are no books in the room at all. G.: In which case one does not feel exactly lied to. One feels wrong-footed. Misled. Violated in a more delicate register. S.: Which Strawson in 1952 tries to articulate against purely formal treatment. G.: Quite. And in the footnote he credits you-know-who. S.: The phrase being that the operation of a certain rule was first pointed out to him by Mr H. P. Grice, in a different connection. G.: There is the delicious phrase. In a different connection. Which surely suggests that Grice’s point had not originally been about books in rooms and existential import. S.: But perhaps about perception. G.: Very likely. “That pillar box seems red” as against “That pillar box is red.” The same skeleton is there. One does not make the logically weaker or more roundabout move if one could straightforwardly and responsibly make the stronger one, unless one has reason not to. S.: So one says “seems red” and thereby suggests something like: I am withholding “is red” for a reason. G.: Exactly. And similarly one says “There is not a single book in his room which is not by an English author,” and thereby behaves as if there are books in his room worth so classifying. S.: Thus the practical rule. G.: Yes. One does not make the logically lesser claim when one could truthfully, and with equal or greater economy, make the greater one. S.: That is a beautiful anti-formalist principle. G.: Or a beautiful explanation of why formal forms acquire ordinary-language overtones. Strawson wants to make it presupposition; Grice is already halfway to making it pragmatic expectation. S.: So Peano begins the line by privileging universal form, and half a century later Strawson and Grice are arguing about what that privilege misses in actual use. G.: Exactly. That is the elegance of the excursus. Peano cares to make the code explicit. Grice later cares to explain how rational hearers navigate what the code leaves open. Strawson sits in the middle and fumes at formalism in a very gentlemanly way. S.: Let us go back for a moment to Peano’s own innocence in all this. G.: He was innocent of Oxford, which is a blessing. Peano would write (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) and sleep well. S.: He would not ask whether an utterer who says “all the books in his room” is inviting assumptions about the existence of books. G.: Not as Peano. Perhaps as a reformer of language he might care, but his instinct is to repair the code, not to theorise the delicate manners of speakers. S.: Which is exactly why he is useful to Grice. G.: Useful and limiting. The formalist aspiration is noble: minimise ambiguity by design. But ordinary language survives by rational supplementation. Grice’s later point is that implication is not a bug in the system but one of the ways human beings manage to say less and mean more. S.: So if one were to teach Strawson logic in 1939 while carrying all this in one’s head, one might feel a certain tension. G.: Certainly. One has Peano in the bloodstream, Frege in the conceptual ancestry, Russell in the textbooks, Whitehead on the title page, Johnson and Keynes in the pedagogical climate, and then Oxford’s own old concern for exactness, ordinary language, and anti-vulgarity hovering over everything. S.: It is a wonder anyone passed. G.: They did not always gracefully. Strawson himself took a second in 1940, which is a useful reminder that great philosophers are not always tidy examined persons. S.: Perhaps especially not. G.: Quite. Examination rewards a certain sort of punctual explicitness which later philosophy sometimes repudiates. S.: And the square of opposition? G.: It would still have been there, because Oxford does not kill its dead. But by then it lives in uneasy coexistence with quantification. One can still teach A, E, I, O forms and then, in the next breath, write (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) and pretend the two belong to one civilisation. S.: Which perhaps they do, if one is generous. G.: Oxford always prefers layered inheritance to clean replacement. That is why Peano could be present in the notation and absent in the conversation. S.: So let us imagine the later scene, vague in date, Oxford enough in tone, with Grice and Strawson looking back. G.: Good. A room, probably College, perhaps after dinner, not too much port because the point is logic and not confession. S.: Strawson has his 1952 book in embryo or in hand. G.: And Grice has what he later calls, with suspicious modesty, a remark in a footnote. Strawson says: The interpretation I propose for the traditional forms has the merit of preserving ordinary presuppositions that formal systems ignore. S.: Grice replies: Or perhaps ordinary expectations that formal systems are not designed to capture. G.: Strawson says: If someone says, solemnly, “There is not a single foreign book in his room,” and later reveals there are no books there at all, one feels linguistically outraged. S.: Grice says: Quite so, but the outrage may arise from rational expectations governing why a speaker would choose that form at all, not from a semantic infection built into the words. G.: Strawson says: And what grounds those expectations? S.: Grice says: The same sort of thing that makes “That pillar box seems red” suggest something different from “That pillar box is red.” One does not use the lesser or more cautious form if the stronger one would do, unless one means to indicate something by that very caution. G.: Which is, in miniature, the whole later Gricean apparatus. S.: And poor Peano sits silently in the background, having begun all this by letting universality be basic. G.: Precisely. He did not foresee the ordinary-language rebellion, but he helped make it necessary. S.: It is a beautiful historical joke. G.: Better than beautiful. It is useful. One sees how formalism and pragmatics are not enemies so much as responses to different anxieties. Peano fears ambiguity in the code. Grice explains how rational agents survive it. S.: And Strawson, characteristically, is offended on behalf of ordinary speech. G.: Which is one of his more attractive traits. S.: We should mention the books example in formal dress, if only to keep the symbols in the room. G.: Yes. Let F(x) be “x is a book in his room.” Let G(x) be “x is by an English author.” Then the formal rendering (x)(F(x) ⊃ G(x)) may come out true even if nothing satisfies F. S.: Whereas the ordinary utterance: All the books in his room are by an English author normally behaves as if (∃x)F(x) were somehow in the air. G.: In the air, yes. Not perhaps asserted, but presupposed, suggested, invited, countenanced, licensed—choose your poison. S.: And if the speaker later reveals ¬(∃x)F(x) G.: Then one has not exactly been lied to, but one has been used badly. S.: Which is more Oxford than falsehood. G.: Very much so. Falsehood is vulgar. Misleading by over-refined form is educational. S.: That should be on a College crest. G.: It already is, in practice. S.: One last point. Peano’s universality being basic means that the old line naturally takes “for all” as the simpler thought and “there exists” as the marked one. G.: Yes. That is philosophically revealing. It means the formal tradition is often built from a vision of law-like generality downward, whereas ordinary speech often begins with occasions, objects, rooms, boxes, books, and only then rises to universal claims. S.: So Peano is top-down and Grice bottom-up. G.: More or less. Peano engineers from clarity downward; Grice analyses from use upward. S.: And the pity is that neither side quite abolishes the other. G.: Which is no pity at all. It is civilisation. The formalist keeps us from drowning in looseness; the pragmatist reminds us that looseness is often how intelligence breathes. S.: Then what does Peano contribute, finally, to the debate? G.: He contributes the severe dream: a notation in which the burden of interpretation is shifted from context to code. He contributes also the historical route by which Oxford learned to write modern logic. And therefore he contributes, indirectly, to the later revolt in which men like Strawson and Grice insist that meaning in ordinary language cannot be exhausted by what formalism captures. S.: So the little epsilon and the inverted E are not innocent at all. G.: Symbols are never innocent once Oxford has had time to teach from them. S.: And the pillar box? G.: The pillar box is simply the revenge of ordinary life upon notation. S.: And the books in the room? G.: The revenge of presupposition, or pragmatics, or plain decency—call it what you please—upon vacuous truth. S.: And Grice himself? G.: He sits between them, delighted. He likes Peano because he likes explicitness, and he resists Peano because he likes the rational life of implication more. He likes Strawson because Strawson hears the ordinary-language offence, and he resists Strawson because Strawson always wants to semanticise what may be explained by conversational reason. S.: Which is perhaps why the two together are better than either alone. G.: That is usually the truth in Oxford. The system runs by paired quarrels. S.: And the younger man in the tutorial room in 1939? G.: He learns, without being told, that logic is not merely notation, nor merely common sense, nor merely formal discipline, but the place where all three begin to rub against one another. He learns Peano by inheritance, Russell by curriculum, Frege by delayed seriousness, and Grice by the kind of tutorial pressure that makes one notice what a speaker is doing by saying what he says. S.: That is not a bad education. G.: It is a very Oxford one. And, for all my complaints, probably the only sort from which a later book on logical theory, with a footnote to Grice in “a different connection,” could naturally emerge. S.: Then shall we call it a Peano line after all? G.: Call it a Peano line if you like, provided you remember that by the time it reaches Oxford it has acquired ordinary-language manners, a little anti-formalist guilt, and just enough dry humour to prevent it from becoming Italian.Grice: Ma guarda, caro Peano, non riesco proprio a capacitarmi che Lord Russell non abbia mai voluto riconoscere apertamente il tuo merito per l’operatore “iota invertito”! Che indignazione – sembra quasi che l’eleganza filosofica abbia perso la bussola! Peano: Eh, caro Grice, la storia della filosofia è piena di queste omissioni. L’importante è che il latino sine flexione e il mio lavoro sulla logica abbiano lasciato un segno, anche se qualcuno preferisce ignorarlo. D’altronde, la lingua universale è una sfida che va oltre i titoli! Grice: Ma lo spirito conversazionale, caro Peano, dovrebbe portarci sempre a riconoscere ciò che è implicato, non solo ciò che è esplicitato. Se Russell avesse seguito la tua finezza logica, forse avrebbe capito il vero valore dell’implicatura! Peano: Hai ragione, Grice. Forse, come dice il proverbio, “il tempo è galantuomo”: prima o poi, anche il contributo più silenzioso trova voce. E intanto, continuiamo a discutere e a riformare la lingua d’Italia… con o senza l’indignazione di Russell! Peano, Giuseppe (1884). Calcolo geometrico secondo l’Ausdehnungslehre di Grassmann. Torino: Bocca.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pecori: la ragione conversazionale. P. is a canonico and author. His major works focus on Tuscan history, suggesting a strong connection to that region. He is a significant figure in the historical study of the Italian city of San Gimignano.  Luigi Pecori (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers recover what a speaker means beyond what is explicitly said by presuming rational cooperation and drawing defeasible inferences (implicatures) from shared expectations about relevance, informativeness, and clarity; meaning is thus anchored in communicative intention and the audience’s rational uptake rather than in the mere possession of a rhetorical handbook. Luigi Pecori, by contrast, is a nineteenth-century Tuscan canon and local historian whose work sits at the intersection of civic memory and pedagogy: his Delle istituzioni elementari di rettorica (Florence, 1859) is overtly prescriptive, written to supply Italian schools with an “all-Italian” book of rhetorical precepts, while his Storia della terra di San Gimignano (Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1853) exemplifies a chronicler’s sense that communities are held together by the orderly narration of deeds, documents, and civic language. The comparison, then, is between implicit norms and explicit rules: Grice tries to explain the tacit rational principles that already govern successful conversation and generate implicature when speakers appear to depart from them, whereas Pecori tries to provide overt instruction in how to speak and write well and to preserve a town’s identity through careful historical discourse. From a Gricean angle, Pecori’s rhetoric manuals are best read not as the foundation of meaning but as codifications of effects that conversational practice already achieves (guiding audiences toward intended conclusions), while from Pecori’s angle Grice’s maxims can look like a modern, analytically sharpened version of the same civic ideal: language disciplined so that a community can understand itself, deliberate, and endure. P. is a canonico and author. His major works focus on Tuscan history, suggesting a strong connection to that region. He is a significant figure in the historical study of the Italian city of San Gimignano. His most prominent publication is a detailed historical work: Storia della terra di San Gimignano: This extensive history of the town and surrounding area of San Gimignano, published in Florence by the Tipografia Galileiana. It covers the city's history from its origins to the modern era, with a focus on its fortress and castle. This work is considered an important source for historians studying medieval Italian cities.  P. is also mentioned in connection with a genealogical work, possibly as a subject or collaborator:  Memorie genealogico-storiche della famiglia P. di Firenze: This work, which focuses on the genealogical history of the P. family of Florence, is collected by Passerini. His work delle istituzione della rettorica is less detailed in the provided snippets, but these other publications establish his primary focus as an Italian historian and local chronicler of the Tuscany region. DELL’ISTITUZIONI DI RETTORICA PROPOSTO AI STUDIOSI. Già da qualche tempo è nata tra gl’uomini di lettere una lodevole gara di promuovere in ogni maniera di studj l'istruzion vostra coll'agevolarvene la via mercè di ben ordinate opere elementari, di dotti e succosi commenti, d’accurate edizioni di classici ; nel che spendono con indefessa sollecitudine ed ottimo intendimento l'ingegno e l'opera. Ma frattanto nelle scuole nostre lamentasi il difetto d'un libro di precetti rettorie! accomodato all'età vostra ed alla pre- sente condizione dei tempi , e d' indole tutta italiana. SÌ è cercato, é vero, ora di raffazzonare la rettorica di Blair, ora d'ampliarne g d'arricchirne il compendio con dotte e sagacissime aggiunte, ora di racconciarne altre, ed altre farne di nuovo; ma tut- tavia tra i libri di rettorica più comunemente conosciuti non se ne riscontra in generale dai savj istitutori vo- stri alcuno abbastanza soddisfacente , Divina Commedia. Grice: Caro Pecori, tu che conosci ogni angolo di San Gimignano, dimmi: è vero che tra le torri si trovano ancora studiosi nascosti a scrivere trattati di rettorica? Pecori: Ah, Grice, se le torri parlassero racconterebbero di più dispute accademiche che di assedi medievali! E se qualcuno trova un libro di rettorica soddisfacente, lo tenga stretto come la ricetta del panforte! Grice: Dunque, tra storia, genealogie e precetti, qualche segreto si nasconde anche tra le pagine della “Storia della terra di San Gimignano”? O è tutto chiaro come il vino toscano? Pecori: Grice, il segreto è che il vino toscano aiuta a capire la storia meglio della rettorica! E poi, se la Divina Commedia l’ha fatto Dante, io posso almeno raccontare le avventure di un canonico tra i vicoli di Firenze! Pecori, Luigi (1875). Storia della città di Volterra. Volterra: Tipografia della Speranza.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pelacani: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la scuola di Parma -- filosofia emiliana  Antonio Pelacani (Parma, Emilia-Romagna): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers recover what a speaker means beyond what is explicitly said by presuming rational cooperation and drawing defeasible inferences (implicatures) from shared norms of relevance, informativeness, and clarity; meaning is centrally tied to intention-recognition in interaction, not merely to any sign-like correlation. Pelacani’s intellectual world, by contrast, is late medieval scholasticism, where “meaning” is primarily treated through the metaphysics and psychology of intellect (possible versus agent), the logic of demonstration, and the exegetical discipline of commenting on authoritative texts; the governing norms are those of dialectic and theological-philosophical legitimacy rather than those of ordinary conversational exchange. The comparison, then, is a shift of explanatory level: Grice offers a pragmatic account of how rational agents manage mutual understanding in the everyday traffic of speech, while Pelacani offers a theoretical account of how cognition itself is structured (passive reception and active intellection) and how philosophical claims are warranted within an academic and ecclesiastical culture that polices error, attribution, and heresy. From a Gricean angle, Pelacani’s controversies show that even the most abstract debates depend on conversational conditions—what counts as an acceptable move, what is assumed, what must be made explicit—but Grice relocates the source of meaning from scholastic apparatus to the public rationality of speakers; from a Pelacani-like angle, Grice’s maxims would look like a local grammar of discourse that presupposes deeper commitments about agency, intellect, and the production of understanding that scholastic psychology tried to articulate at the level of mind rather than talk. Grice: “At Oxford, Strawson used to confuse Pelacani with Pelacani!”. Lettore (Grice: “reader or lecturer?”) a Bologna, divenne consigliere di Visconti.  In questa veste si trova più volte coinvolto in processi per eresia montati da Giovanni XXII per gettare nella polvere il Visconti. Grande commentatore di Avicenna e Galeno. Treccani Dizionario biografico degl’italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia. Saggi: “Circa intellectum possibilem et agentem”; “De unitate intellectus”; Utrum primum principium sive deus ipse sit potentie infinite”; “De generatione et corruptione"; “Questiones super tre metheorum.” passivo/attivo; non-agens/agens. Grice: “Merton, 1937. Perhaps it is a blessing to be an Englishman: I can read Locke on the soul and spare myself what Antonio Pelacani once contrived. But at Merton they insist on calculating everything, and Wainwright—our resident historian of reverent dispositions—pressed on me Pelacani’s Padua exercise, Circa intellectum possibilem et agentem. “The intellectus,” Wainwright reminded me, “is something Locke never really had.” “Nor did Pelacani,” I replied, rather pointedly, and thereby offended him. And then the Latin began to irritate me. If one is going to be pedantic, why not circa intellectum possibilem et intellectum agentem? Unless, of course, he is quietly smuggling, or ‘mis-identifying,’ in a unity by letting the second intellectus drop out. “Mystifying,” Wainwright said, in his severest tone, “is the word you want.” And charitably, he went on to explain that these Italians were chasing the old Greek distinction—nous pathetikos and nous poietikos—so that Pelacani’s“possibilis” is perilously close to “passibilis,” and all it takes is a vowel to send a whole tradition off its rails. Which is especially disappointing, since Italians are supposed, of all people, to keep their vowels clear enough for an operatic ear.” Grice: Pelacani, mi è sempre colpito il tuo modo di affrontare la ragione conversazionale, soprattutto nei tuoi studi sulla scuola di Parma. Alla Oxford, mi divertiva la confusione che Strawson faceva tra te e il tuo omonimo! Ma dimmi: come vedi il ruolo dell’implicatura conversazionale nella filosofia italiana? Pelacani: Grice, la questione dell’implicatura mi affascina. Credo che la filosofia emiliana, e quella italiana in generale, abbia sempre cercato di leggere tra le righe, non solo ciò che è detto esplicitamente. Nei processi per eresia che coinvolsero Visconti, era proprio la sottigliezza conversazionale a fare la differenza tra verità e inganno. Grice: Hai ragione, Pelacani! Nei tuoi commentari su Avicenna e Galeno, si percepisce la tensione tra ciò che è passivo e ciò che è attivo: non-agens e agens. Penso che la distinzione conversazionale sia fondamentale anche nell’analisi dell’intelletto possibile e agente. Come concili questa dualità nei tuoi saggi? Pelacani: La dualità è il cuore del mio pensiero. Nei “Circa intellectum possibilem et agentem” cerco proprio di mostrare come la conversazione filosofica sia un gioco sottile tra passività e attività, tra ciò che si riceve e ciò che si produce. In fondo, come dice un proverbio emiliano, “Chi ascolta bene, sa parlare meglio.” So here without forgetting "Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts." provide two different weekly essay assignments coming from an oxford tutor of philosophy -- without mentioning the first names, but teasing the tutee about these two Pelacanis, from Parma, etc -- make the asignment philosophical, and tease about tere being two, but do not mention their first names and distinguish them by other clues, etc if at all – Grice’s weekly essay assignment: Write on Pelacani as a thinker of intellect, agency, and demonstration, taking particular care to show that you know why possible and agent intellect are not merely two medieval ways of saying “something happens in the head.” You should explain how the relevant distinctions bear upon cognition, responsibility, and philosophical method, while resisting the temptation—common, understandable, and fatal—to wander into the sign-theory, optics, or semantic preoccupations of the other Pelacani simply because the surname has already done too much of the work for you. A good answer will make clear why a dropped intellectus in a Latin title is not yet an argument, and why Parma has no right to be treated as a single doctrine. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

Pelacani, Antonio (1316). Circa intellectum possibilem et agentem. Padova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pelacani: la ragione conversazionale, la dialettica, e l’implicatura conversazionale – filosofia emiliana -- filosofia italiana –  Biagio Pelacani (Noceto, Parma, Emilia-Romagna): la ragione conversazionale, la dialettica, e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers recover what a speaker means beyond what is explicitly said by presuming cooperative rational agency and then inferring implicatures from shared expectations about relevance, informativeness, and clarity; meaning is thus centrally intention-based and socially accountable. Pelacani, by contrast, belongs to the late medieval logical and semantic tradition in which signification is treated as a property of terms, concepts, and inferential roles within dialectic: he is preoccupied with significatio (including natural signification), the ways parts of speech express concepts, and the conditions under which anything at all can function as a sign, extending well beyond vox to gestures and other sign-vehicles. The comparison is therefore a shift in the locus of normativity: Grice locates it in conversational practice and its rational expectations (how an utterance counts as a move in cooperative exchange), whereas Pelacani locates it in the discipline of dialectical analysis (how expressions signify within a theory of concepts and argument), with “natural” signification treated as evidential rather than intentional. From a Gricean perspective, Pelacani supplies a rich pre-history of the distinction between signs that indicate and speakers who mean, but he does not yet isolate the distinctive pragmatic mechanism by which a speaker exploits shared rational norms to convey more than is said; from a Pelacani-like perspective, Grice’s implicature looks like a modern, context-sensitive extension of an older project: explaining how signs, rules, and inference together make communication intelligible, whether the vehicle is a word, a handwave, or a carefully timed silence. Grice: “Some like P., but P.’s MY man.” Dottore diabolico. Grice: “I would call him a philosophical grammarian; he considers the topic of ‘meaning,’ ‘significatio,’ and agrees with me that ANYTHING can signify, a handwave, etc – hardly just ‘vox’! He is especially interested in ‘significatio naturaliter,’ which he explains, er, naturally. He deals with the concepts expressed by the different parts of speech – adverbs, etc. – and disapproves of the idea that the ‘arts’ of language are ’scientia.’ He saw himself, as I do, as a PHILOSOPHER, and would consider everything related to the language used by philosophers as PRO-PEDEUTIC --. Parente di Antonio P. Della sua medesima casata un altro filosofo. Frequenta la facoltà artium philosophie a Pavia, dove, come titolare della cattedra di magister philosophie et logice, delegato dal vescovo, diploma in arti un certo Bossi. Insegna a Bologna e Padova. Contesta molte regole della meccanica del LIZIO e sostenne l'applicazione di strumenti matematici per sostituire le regole obsolete. In particolare conduce studi sull'ottica nelle Quæstiones de perspectiva. Nel saggio De ponderibus si occupa di statica ed elabora in De proportionis una teoria del vuoto che si contrappone alle tesi del continuo dei fisici del Lizio. Si occupa anche del moto dei pianeti in Theorica planetarum e mette in discussione la cosmologia del Lizio negando che si puo sostenere l'incorruttibilità dei cieli e l'interpretazione teo-logica dell'esistenza di un primo motore immobile, vale a dire del divino. Nega quindi la possibilità delle dimostrazioni a posteriori dell'esistenza del divino e dell'immortalità dell'anima individuale. implicature, prospettiva, filosofia della percezione, origini del libertinismo, commentario in detaglio sulla semiotica di Occam – dialettica – segno, nota, sermo. Shorpshire sull’immortalità dell’anima.” , “L’animismo ‘smoke means fire, literally.’  Grice: “St John’s, 1952. Yesterday, in the joint seminar with Austin and Hare on the Nicomachean Ethics, I mentioned the Magna Moralia in passing, only to have Hare object—rather more loudly than he usually does: “But that isn’t Aristotle!” As if it mattered. Hare has a way of making the history of philosophy sound as though one must both run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. Why should the text be disqualified just because the attribution is dubious? It reminded me of good old Biagio Pelacani. He spent term after term lecturing on quaestiones super De caelo et mundo at Padua on the assumption that the work was Aristotelian. The moral, which I ought to press on Hare in public, is that this hardly disqualifies Pelacani’s labour: the exegesis can be brilliant even when the author turns out to be a non‑Stagirite. One can do first-rate philosophy on a mistaken attribution; indeed, one often does. Grice: Pelacani, ti ho visto agitare le mani in aula. Era una lezione di semiotica o stavi solo cercando di scacciare una mosca filosofica? Pelacani: Caro Grice, ogni gesto è un segno! Magari la mosca era solo una metafora della ragione conversazionale che svolazza tra la dialettica e l’implicatura. Grice: Allora la prossima volta dovrò portare una lente d’ingrandimento: per distinguere tra significatio naturaliter e una semplice pizza parmigiana! Pelacani: Se trovi una pizza in aula, Grice, significa che la dialettica si è fatta appetito. In fondo, come dicono a Parma, “chi ragiona troppo finisce col mangiare freddo!” Grice’s weekly essay assignment: Write on Pelacani as a philosopher of signification, dialectic, and the conditions under which anything at all may count as a sign, taking care not to let the theological psychology, political entanglements, and Avicennian-Galenic burdens of the other Pelacani drift across the page merely because you have mislaid the century. You should ask whether natural signification, inferential role, and the extension of signhood beyond vox amount to a genuine philosophy of meaning, or only to a formidable preface to one; and you should do so without assuming that every handwave in Parma already contains a complete theory of implicature. If you find yourself writing about Visconti, heresy-trials, or the active intellect before the second page is over, begin again from the title and improve your conscience. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

Pelacani, Biagio (1385). Questiones super De caelo et mundo. Pavia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pellegrini: la teoria del segno e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “As an university lecturer at Oxford, I had to give this or that seminar on topics of my interest. Ewing was writing on meaninglessness –which struck my attention, since I don’t think Ewing cared much to talk about meaningfulness in the first place! P. did Antonio Pellegrini (Venezia, Veneto): la teoria del segno e l’implicaura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning distinguishes natural meaning (where a sign is evidence, as spots mean measles) from non-natural meaning (where what is conveyed depends on a speaker’s intention being recognized), and it explains understanding as a rational, cooperative inference from what is said plus context plus attributable purposes. Antonio Pellegrini’s I segni de la natura ne l’huomo (Venice, 1545; edited by Cristoforo Canale) belongs to an earlier semiotic-physiognomic tradition in which meaning is primarily read off nature: external features, gestures, and expressions are treated as signs that reveal inner affections of the soul, useful not only to moralists but to painters and sculptors, and the interpretive task is to diagnose character from visible marks rather than to reconstruct communicative intention. The comparison is thus a shift from sign-reading to intention-reading: Pellegrini treats the human body as a natural text whose “signs” disclose passions independently of what the subject is trying to get an audience to think, whereas Grice treats a central range of meaning as essentially interpersonal and purposive, generated by the speaker’s plan to influence an addressee by getting that plan recognized. From a Gricean standpoint, Pellegrini’s project captures only one pole of the landscape (what Grice would call natural meaning) and misses the distinctively conversational phenomenon in which the same smile, frown, or utterance can be deployed strategically to suggest, mislead, reassure, or retract—effects that arise not from nature alone but from the norms and reasoning that govern talk between agents. Grice: “As an university lecturer at Oxford, I had to give this or that seminar on topics of my interest. Ewing was writing on meaninglessness –which struck my attention, since I don’t think Ewing cared much to talk about meaningfulness in the first place! P. did: he refers to ‘the signs’ – I signi’ – of the nature – fisi, what I call ‘natural meaning’ – of ‘man’ himself – my topic of research since I fell in love with Locke!” Keywords: sign, signify, physiognomy, fisonomia – segno come relazione triadica – Peirce – Those spots didn’t mean anything to ME; to the doctor, they meant measles. I SEGNI DELLA NATURA NELL'UOMO. Della fisonomia naturale Della fisionomia naturale,  nella quale con bellissimo ordine s'insegna da segni esterni della natura a conoscere gl’affetti interni dell'animo dell'huomo. Opera non meno dotta, che utile generalmente a tutti, & in particolare a qualunque che di pittura, e scoltura si diletta. Con un indice copioso di quanto in detta opera si contiene. Al signor Gio. Dominico Peri (Milano). For an earlier example, Martius, De homine. Cristoforo Canài HI DELLA NATVRA NELL’VOMO. Con Trimlezw. ^òi^Jf-^^-. In vinetia , per Gm^vm ^ 7v A* LO ECCELLER^ tipmo Duca di Camerino , Il Signore Ottauio Farnefe , Chrijfoforo ^ecanale, Onofcendo per uiua ^ certa froua , EcceUen^ tipmo Trencipe^che lo intendere pienamente ^i affetti humani, apporti in tutte le opera^ tiont de la uit a, gr andiamo gioua, mento , ^ Comma dilettatione a .Mortali ) m'e caduto ne t animo , per fare queHo piacere, ^questa utilttade agli huomini, dt pub li ed' re ( anchora che fenz^a ilconfènti- mento di lui) alcuni ragionamene ti : fcritti ne gli anni p affati , da a ij mio compare iiPkfeJJer (tT : Me i quali ( fe in alcu - n altro liho ) fi può perfettamente imprendere , quejia fi diletteuole > f^* fi gioueuole dottrina . Eiluero, che il penfarmi di uolere far con- tro a la opinione, ^ del Compare,  de lo amico J,a mente^pronta da fe y a procacciare il bene, l'utile commune. Segno, segno naturale. Grice: “St John’s, 1948. November. I suppose I had it coming. That fourth paragraph in Meaning—my invited paper to the Oxford Philosophical Society (invited by my own tutee, no less)—was bound to draw criticism as surely as moths to a flame or nails to a magnet; I cannot decide which is the worse mixed metaphor. I had been insisting, rather loudly, that my distinction between natural meaning and non-natural meaning improves upon, and in any case goes beyond, Pellegrini’s ramblings as Canale has seen fit to curate them. Pellegrini talks about signs—I segni; I do not. I talk about the non-natural; he does not. For him it is all segni de la natura—note Canale’s editorial bravado in turning della into de la, which is proofreading for you—and to cap it all, ne l’huomo, a phrase that manages to be both archaic and phonetically abrasive. Still, I find I can be magnanimous about it. When the utterer is a human agent, “I mean to forgive Pellegrini” is best read as “I intend to let his editor have his way”—at least for the purposes of a footnote, and perhaps for the peace of the Society.” Grice: Caro Pellegrini, ogni volta che parli di segni naturali mi viene da chiedermi: secondo te, il mio sorriso significa che ho capito o che sto solo cercando di essere gentile? Pellegrini: Eh Grice, dipende se il sorriso è spontaneo o studiato! Come diceva mia nonna a Venezia, “Ogni segno nasconde un affetto, ma ogni affetto può mascherare un segno!” Grice: Allora dovrò chiedere a un pittore di farmi il ritratto, così magari scopriremo se la mia fisonomia racconta più della mia filosofia! Pellegrini: Grice, se il pittore ti ritrae con una mano sulla testa, vuol dire che stai pensando; se ti dipinge con una pizza, vuol dire che hai fame! In fondo, tra segni e implicature, è tutta una questione di interpretazione… e di appetito, ovviamente! As per passage below on PELLEGRINI, I SIGNI DE LA NATURA NE L'HUOMO -- and as per passage I cited in different session above in this thread, provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. on that, as they discuss G's (I think they are 3) sample sentences containing 'mean' -- and then provide the translations to Italian using segno and segnare and then to Latin signum, and SIGNARE and SIGNIFICARE with G. finding the -ficare otiose, when SIGNARE does, and using symbolism, for S(x,y,z) i. e. signare as a triadic relation x signat y -- strictly that p for the signatum is ALWAYS propositional and z being the addressee to which the x means or signat -- and x being ambiguous with UTTERER and UTTERATUM but G. preferring to say that it is the UTTERER wo signat by uttering the utterance, and if we use emissor, the emissum is the -that'-clause that follows the signare -- signat quod -- and the problem with those quod clauses in Latin which sometimes use the accussative in the relative clause as acdtually the agent or subject if what follows is an infinitive -- and tehy discuss all the inadquacies of 'mean,' and all the virtues of 'signare' with Pellegrini in between -- just the thing, no preamble or ps, dry Oxonian humour -- and use symbol but in plain type so that it cdoes not dislocate the current -- thantks G.: Pellegrini again, then, and his I segni de la natura ne l’huomo. S.: With Canale’s orthography already asking for a footnote. G.: Yes. De la, ne l’huomo, all that editorial bravery pretending to be antiquity. S.: And your complaint from Meaning was that Pellegrini talks of signs where you talk of the non-natural. G.: Precisely. He gives me segni de la natura. I want, at the interesting point, not merely segni, but something done by an utterer to an addressee under a recognisable intention. S.: Still, let us begin with your three examples. G.: Good. First: “Those spots mean measles.” S.: Your natural meaning case. G.: Exactly. No utterer needed, no intention, no conversational stage-management. The spots mean measles in the sense that they are a sign of it. S.: Then English first, with sign. G.: “Those spots are a sign of measles.” S.: With the verb. G.: “Those spots sign measles” is ugly enough to teach caution, though one might tolerate “Those spots sign the presence of measles.” S.: And with signify. G.: “Those spots signify measles.” Better English, but already a little donnish. S.: Then Italian. G.: “Quelle macchie sono segno di morbillo.” S.: With segnare. G.: “Quelle macchie segnano il morbillo” is poor, though “segnano la presenza del morbillo” is survivable. S.: And significare. G.: “Quelle macchie significano il morbillo.” That is the idiomatic winner. S.: Then Latin. G.: “Illae maculae sunt signum morbilli.” S.: With signare. G.: “Illae maculae morbillos signant” is possible, but harsher and more material, as though one were branding disease. S.: And significare. G.: “Illae maculae morbillos significant.” The schoolroom would prefer that. S.: Yet you think the -ficare is otiose. G.: I do. Signare already gives the work if one lets it. Significare is signare after a career in rhetoric. S.: Then example two. G.: “Those spots didn’t mean anything to me, but to the doctor they meant measles.” S.: Which already introduces the addressee as epistemic difference. G.: Yes, but still not utterer’s meaning. The difference is in recognitional competence. S.: English with sign. G.: “Those spots were no sign to me, but to the doctor they were a sign of measles.” S.: With signify. G.: “Those spots signified nothing to me, but to the doctor they signified measles.” S.: Italian. G.: “Quelle macchie non erano per me alcun segno, ma per il medico erano segno di morbillo.” S.: With segnare. G.: “Quelle macchie non mi segnavano nulla, ma al medico segnavano il morbillo” is bad enough to deserve preservation as a warning. S.: And significare. G.: “Quelle macchie non significavano nulla per me, ma per il medico significavano il morbillo.” S.: Latin. G.: “Illae maculae mihi nullum signum erant, medico autem signum morbilli erant.” S.: That sounds Romanly clumsy. G.: Latin earns its clumsiness by honesty. S.: With signare. G.: “Illae maculae mihi nihil signabant, medico autem morbillos signabant.” S.: With significare. G.: “Illae maculae mihi nihil significabant, medico autem morbillos significabant.” S.: Then example three. G.: “The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year.” S.: Natural again, but looser. G.: Yes. Not a bodily sign now, but a state of affairs with inferential consequences. S.: English with sign. G.: “The recent budget is a sign that we shall have a hard year.” S.: With signify. G.: “The recent budget signifies that we shall have a hard year.” S.: Italian. G.: “Il bilancio recente è segno che avremo un anno difficile.” S.: With segnare. G.: “Il bilancio recente segna un anno difficile” is possible, but drifts toward marking out rather than meaning. S.: With significare. G.: “Il bilancio recente significa che avremo un anno difficile.” S.: Latin. G.: “Hoc novissimum vectigal signum est nos annum difficilem habituros esse.” S.: And signare. G.: “Hoc novissimum vectigal annum difficilem signat” is tolerable if one likes compressed Latin and mild violence. S.: Significare. G.: “Hoc novissimum vectigal significat nos annum difficilem habituros esse.” S.: So far Pellegrini is content. G.: Entirely. His signs of nature are all on this side, where x gives one y, or rather gives one to gather that p. S.: And p, you now insist, is always propositional. G.: Strictly, yes. Even where the old phrase says “mean measles,” the analytic expansion should be “mean that he has measles.” S.: So the signatum is always a that-clause. G.: Exactly. Otherwise one gets lost among labels and diseases and forgets the content. S.: Then let us symbolise. G.: Good. Let S(x,p,z) mean: x signat that p to z. S.: Triadic. G.: Necessarily, once the interesting cases arrive. S.: But for natural meaning the z may be merely the interpreter. G.: Yes. In the spots case, x is the spots, p is that he has measles, z is the doctor or any competent interpreter. S.: And in the purely natural case there may be no utterer. G.: None. Which is why I distinguish natural meaning from the non-natural. S.: Yet you now want to move from signum to signare and then beyond to the utterer. G.: Precisely. Because once we come to the second batch of examples in Meaning, it is no longer the object x that really signat, but the utterer by means of x. S.: The bus bell. G.: Yes. “Those three rings on the bell mean that the bus is full.” S.: There an utterer lurks, namely the conductor. G.: Exactly. And one can then say not merely S(x,p,z), but better U signat that p to A by uttering or producing x. S.: So x becomes ambiguous between utterer and utteratum. G.: Which is why I prefer to reserve agency to the utterer and treat x as vehicle. S.: Then formula. G.: Let U be the utterer, x the utteratum or sign-vehicle, p the propositional signatum, A the addressee. Then U, by x, signat that p to A. S.: Or S(U,x,p,A), if one likes overpopulation. G.: I do not. Too many arguments breed bad manners. S.: Then perhaps simply U signat p ad A per x. G.: Much better. Latin helps by making one honest. S.: You also introduced emissor and emissum. G.: Yes. If one insists on avoiding utterer and utterance, one may say emissor for the agent and emissum for the produced sign-vehicle. S.: Then emissor signat quod p to addressee by means of emissum. G.: Exactly. Though Latin quod clauses are not always obliging. S.: That is the next trouble. G.: Naturally. Latin may say significat quod p, but once one drifts into accusative-and-infinitive or relative constructions, the agent in the subordinate matter begins to slide around. S.: For example. G.: One may want “B signat that he cannot play squash,” and Latin tempts one toward B signat se ludere non posse, where the accusative subject of the infinitive becomes a little too intimate. S.: Or quod se non posse ludere, which is ugly in another register. G.: Precisely. The poor language was not designed for twentieth-century philosophy of language, though it does its best. S.: Yet signare still seems to you cleaner than mean. G.: Very much so. Mean in English is intolerably overworked. It covers intend, signify, imply, denote, indicate, matter, import, entail in common speech, and means as instrument to make things worse. S.: Means and ends again. G.: Exactly. A philosopher says mean and half the room hears intend, the other half hears indicate, and the third half hears “What do you mean, third half?” S.: Hence signare. G.: Yes. Signare has the virtue of suggesting directed marking without already deciding between natural indication and non-natural communication. S.: Whereas significare sounds like a schoolmaster who has already tidied the case. G.: Splendidly put. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep it. Now let us do the shift from Pellegrini to you. S.: To me. G.: To my account, yes. Pellegrini reads natural signs in the human body. I separate the natural case from the non-natural one and then ask what the utterer is doing. S.: So your key question is not “What does this sign naturally reveal?” but “What does U intend A to gather by x?” G.: Precisely. And that is why S(x,p,z) is not enough for the interesting cases. One needs U signat p ad A per x, with the understanding that A is to recognise U’s intention and arrive at p by reason, not merely by causal prompting. S.: Then the squash leg. G.: Exactly. A asks, “Will you play squash?” B displays a bandaged leg. S.: Pellegrini might say the bandage is a sign of injury. G.: Yes, natural enough. But my interest is that B, by displaying the leg at that moment, signat that he cannot or will not play squash. S.: So p is “I cannot play squash with you.” G.: Exactly. Not “I have a bandaged leg,” which A can already see. S.: Then in Latin. G.: B, crure obligato ostenso, signat se pilae lusui interesse non posse. S.: Not bad. G.: Only because I have omitted the addressee. S.: Add him, then. G.: B, A interroganti, crure obligato ostenso, signat se ludere cum eo non posse. S.: And if one wanted the explicit quod. G.: B signat quod ludere cum A non potest. Serviceable, though less classical in flavour. S.: So your preference remains with the utterer as subject. G.: Entirely. The utterance or display is the vehicle; the agent is the signans in the fully interesting sense. S.: Yet you still keep signans and signatum. G.: Why not. Signans for the produced item or even for the producing agent under a different abstraction; signatum for the propositional content, though I insist the latter is always that p. S.: Always propositional. G.: Yes. The trouble with “mean measles” is precisely that it disguises the that-clause. S.: Then your own examples become: Those spots sign that he has measles. Those spots signified nothing to me, but to the doctor they signified that he had measles. The recent budget signs that we shall have a hard year. G.: Horrid English, but philosophically clarifying. S.: Signify would save the ears. G.: Yes, but at the cost of granting -ficare more respect than it deserves. S.: You are unkind to suffixes. G.: Only when they loiter. S.: Then Italian again with your stricter account. G.: “Quelle macchie sono segno che egli ha il morbillo.” “Quelle macchie non erano per me alcun segno, ma per il medico erano segno che egli aveva il morbillo.” “Il bilancio recente è segno che avremo un anno difficile.” S.: And with significare. G.: Entirely normal: “Quelle macchie significano che egli ha il morbillo.” “Quelle macchie non significavano nulla per me, ma per il medico significavano che egli aveva il morbillo.” “Il bilancio recente significa che avremo un anno difficile.” S.: Segnare still resists. G.: It does, though one can force it: “Quelle macchie segnano la presenza del morbillo.” But that already shifts away from the pure that-clause. S.: So Italian gives you segno as noun, significare as standard verb, segnare as the underlying action of marking. G.: Exactly the point. Segnare may be the more primitive for formal purposes, even if significare is the smoother surface verb. S.: Then Latin. G.: “Illae maculae signum sunt quod morbillos habet.” Or more tersely, “Illae maculae significant eum morbillos habere.” S.: Accusative-and-infinitive again. G.: Yes, and there the grammar helps and hinders at once. It gives you a compact proposition, but threatens to make the subject of the content too fused with the matrix. S.: Still, it is elegant. G.: Latin often is when it is not impossible. S.: Then the bus bell. G.: Better still for the non-natural case. “Those three rings on the bell mean that the bus is full.” S.: Your rewrite. G.: “The conductor, by giving three rings, signs to the passengers that the bus is full.” S.: Which in your notation is U signat p ad A per x. G.: Exactly. U is the conductor, x the three rings, p that the bus is full, A the passengers. S.: Italian. G.: “Il conducente, con tre tocchi di campanello, significa ai passeggeri che l’autobus è pieno.” S.: With segnare. G.: “Il conducente, con tre tocchi, segna ai passeggeri che l’autobus è pieno” is possible only for a philosopher in a hurry. S.: Latin. G.: “Conductor tribus tintinnabuli pulsibus viatoribus signat raedam plenam esse.” Or, if one cedes the suffix: “Conductor tribus pulsibus significat raedam plenam esse.” S.: You still prefer signat. G.: I do. Signat is bony enough for analysis. S.: Then the famous distinction returns. In natural meaning, p follows from the sign in the evidential sense. In non-natural meaning, U means that p by x to A. G.: Precisely. Pellegrini lives mostly in the first region. I care chiefly for the second. S.: Though he helps by preserving the noun segno. G.: He does. And by reminding one that signs were once treated as visible clues to hidden affetti, useful to painters and sculptors no less than moralists. S.: Which lets you say that your smile may mean you understand or only that you are trying to be polite. G.: Exactly. And Pellegrini would first ask whether the smile is spontaneous or studied. S.: While you would ask what the utterer intends the addressee to take from it. G.: Precisely. The physiognomist reads from the body outward. I ask what one does with the body in an exchange. S.: Then the whole point of your quarrel with sign is that it tempts one to stop too soon. G.: Very much so. Sign is a useful beginning. Meaning, in the interesting non-natural sense, requires intention, recognition, reason, and addressee. S.: Yet signare as triadic relation still helps formalise the terrain. G.: Exactly. S(x,p,z) is useful as skeleton. But the living case is better given as U signat p ad A per x. S.: So strictly the signatum is p, propositional; the addressee is A; the signans in the full sense is U; x is the vehicle. G.: Yes. And if one insists on emissor and emissum, that is merely a different costume for the same cast. S.: Emissor per emissum signat quod p ad A. G.: Good enough for a blackboard, bad enough for publication. S.: Dry enough. G.: Sufficiently Venetian, with Pellegrini still reading faces while we quarrel over clauses.Pellegrini, Antonio (1545). I segni de la natura ne l’huomo, ed. da Canale. Venezia: Farri.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pellegrini: la ragione conversazionale e il pirotese. “Grammatica di lingua italiane semplificate”in Basel.  Ugo Pellegrini (Pesaro, Marche): la ragione conversazionale e il pirotese. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers recover what a speaker means beyond what is literally said by presuming rational cooperation and inferring implicatures from shared expectations about relevance, informativeness, and clarity; the focus is on how common ground and practical reasoning make ordinary exchanges work even when speakers leave much unsaid. Ugo Pellegrini’s interlingua project, by contrast, is a deliberate engineering of common ground: dissatisfied with Esperanto’s morphology and with Peano’s Latino sine flexione, he aims to design an auxiliary language whose lexicon is maximally familiar across the neo-Latin languages and English, thereby reducing the inferential burden on interlocutors and making interpretation more automatic, less dependent on local idiom. Where Grice treats understanding as an inferential achievement governed by conversational norms within a natural language, Pellegrini treats understanding as something to be secured by redesigning the code itself, so that the cooperative work Grice describes (bridging gaps, repairing ambiguity, calculating what was meant) is minimized by construction. From a Gricean angle, Pellegrini’s “twenty lessons” is an attempt to manufacture, in advance, the very mutual knowledge and shared conventions that ordinary conversation must constantly negotiate on the fly; from a Pellegrinian angle, Grice’s maxims look like a second-best remedy for a world with too many languages, where communication succeeds only because speakers are charitable and clever enough to keep filling in what the code fails to supply. “Grammatica di lingua italiane semplificate”in Basel. Del urbe Pesaro esseva un pionero de interlingua. Ille adhere al movimento pro interlingua e pois devene representante pro Italia del Union Mundial pro Interlingua, sequente professor, adv. GUGINO , qui pro rationes de supercarga de labor, demissiona como le prime secretario national del Union Mundial pro Interlingua. Ille examina le grammatica de esperanto e lo ha judicate non apte al solution del problema del lingua auxiliar international specialmente pro su lexico hybride e semiartificial e le uso del desinentia -n pro indicar le accusativo e in le parolas que exprime direction, data, duration, precio, mesura e peso. Ille examina anque le Latino sine flexione de PEANO , ma mesmo iste systema non le place a causa del manco del articulo e per le conjugation verbal troppo simplificate e innatural. Desde alora P. pensa que usante le parolas commun al linguas neolatin e al anglese e alicun vocabulos latin on po codificar un lingua international facile e belle. Iste conviction resta sempre in su mente. In Eco del Mondo ille lege le articulo Le lingue internazionali moderne per Percival, in le qual on parla del labores dell’International Auxiliary Language Association e indica su adresse. Ille constata que su opinion in re le lingua auxiliar international ha essite quasi realisate per Occidental de Wahl, Mondial de Heimer e Neolatino de Schild, systemas del quales le articulo presenta un texto specimen, ma ille pensa que le labores del IALA haberea date al mundo le lingua auxiliar melior. Quando le pressa publica le nova que le esperantistas habeva interessate le UNESCO a fin que esperanto venirea recognoscite qua lingua international, P. scribe al IALA precante de voler intervenir presso le UNESCO al scopo de facer cognoscer su labores re le lingua auxiliar international, in modo que esperanto, jam refusate per le Societate del Nationes, non haberea alicun successo. Assi ille vene in contacto con Gode, Schild, Fischer, Berger, Bakonyi  e tante alteros e comencia a propagandar interlingua in tote Italia. Grice: “St John’s, 1950. I suppose it was Strawson who got me into this. He is busy assembling a bulky tome he means to call Introduction to Logical Theory—not an introduction, since he still can’t forgive Russell his affection for indefinite descriptions. And that, by some perverse association, reminded me of Ugo Pellegrini of Pesaro—the land of Rossini. Ever since 1948 this worthy man has been worrying about “auxiliary languages,” though the phrase itself strikes him as a grammarian’s redundancy: nothing is otiose in grammar, perhaps, but “auxiliary” is very nearly otiose when applied to languages in toto. In any case he has now produced a small, rather comic pamphlet: a Corso d’interlingua in venti lezioni. I mentioned it to Strawson, thinking he might tuck it into an appendix somewhere—out of courtesy to a fellow sufferer of the prefix inter-. But he said the inter-language we have between us is quite enough already.” Grice: Caro Pellegrini, ti vedo immerso tra grammatiche semplificate e lingue ausiliarie… Ma dimmi, hai mai pensato che una buona pizza potrebbe essere la vera lingua universale? Pellegrini: Ah Grice, se fosse così, le riunioni dell’Union Mundial pro Interlingua sarebbero molto più gustose! Ma temo che il problema principale sia trovare le desinenze giuste… anche per la mozzarella! Grice: E se adottassimo il sistema “Latino sine flexione” per le ricette? Così niente declinazioni: solo ingredienti e un po’ di passione. Ma mi raccomando, niente articolo: il basilico resta basilico! Pellegrini: Grice, in fondo credo che la lingua più facile e bella sia quella che tutti capiscono… soprattutto quando si tratta di mangiare! E poi, come dice il proverbio di Pesaro: “Chi parla poco, mastica meglio!” Pellegrini, Ugo (1955). Corso d’interlingua in venti lezioni. Pesaro: Schild.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pellegrini: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’amore come affezione dell’animo, e la sua manifestazione nei maschi nobili. Grice: “I like P.: he found Aristotle’s ‘obscure’ for the youth the manual Ethica Nichomaechaea is intended for!” È, secondo TIRABOSCHI,  Lellio Pellegrini (Sonnino, Latina, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’amore come affezione dell’animo, e la sua manifestazione nei maschi nobili. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a rational, norm-guided practice: speakers rely on shared expectations about cooperation, relevance, and intelligibility, and hearers infer implicatures by reasoning from what is said, the context, and the speaker’s presumed aims. Pellegrini, by contrast, is a late humanist Aristotelian whose work is framed less by the micro-pragmatics of everyday exchange than by pedagogical and rhetorical discipline: he treats moral philosophy as something whose utility must be defended in an inaugural oration, and he tries to make Aristotle’s Ethics usable for the young by clarifying obscurity, enumerating affections of the soul, and shaping the student’s character before natural philosophy is attempted. The comparison is therefore between two modes of normativity: Grice finds the norms in the implicit rational governance of ordinary conversation, where “use” is shown by how interlocutors actually manage meaning beyond the literal; Pellegrini finds the norms in the explicit curriculum of moral formation, where “use” is argued for as a civic and educational aim and where obscurity is remedied by commentary rather than by pragmatic inference. From a Gricean perspective, Pellegrini’s project presupposes the very conversational capacities Grice theorizes—students must be able to pick up what is suggested by examples, admonitions, and moral vocabulary—yet Pellegrini’s confidence lies in authoritative exposition and rhetorical guidance, whereas Grice’s lies in the inferential powers of conversational participants to recover what is meant even when it is not directly said. Grice: “I like P.: he found Aristotle’s ‘obscure’ for the youth the manual Ethica Nichomaechaea is intended for!” È, secondo TIRABOSCHI, filosofo che da' suoi meriti e dalle promesse fattegli da più pontefici pareva destinato a' più grandi onori; ma che non giunse che ad ottenere alcuni beneficii ecclesiastici. Tenne la cattedra di filosofia a Roma. Pubblica il “De affectionibus animi noscendi et emendandis commentaries” e un'edizione della traduzione in latino di Lambin dell' Etica Nicomachea di Aristotele -- i “De moribus -- corredandola di un riassunto e di commenti, nei quali altera il testo di Aristotele di cui lamenta la difficoltà e l'oscurità. Benché Aristotele del Lizio sconsigli lo studio dell'etica ai giovani, ancora immaturi per una retta comprensione dei principi morali, al contrario, ritiene che lo studio dell'etica deve essere impartito prima ancora di quello della filosofia della natura, in modo che i giovani possano affrontare gli studi scientifici con animo libero dalle passioni. È più oratore che flosofo. Nn pensa ad inovar cosa alcuna, e segue costantemente insegnando i precetti del filosofo stagirita. Altri saggi: “Oratio habita in almo urbis gymnasio de utilitate moralis philosophiæ, cum ethicorum Aristotelis explicationem aggederetur” (Roma); “De Christi ad coelos ascensu” (Roma); “Oratio in obitum Torquati Tassi philosophi clarissimi; Tiraboschi, “Storia della letteratura italiana” (Società tipografica de’ classici italiani, Milano); Carella, L'insegnamento della filosofia alla Sapienza di Roma: le cattedre e i maestri; Renazzi, “Storia dell'università degli studj di Roma. P. scrive II important commenti su Aristotele del LIZIO, uno in cui enumera gl’affezioni dell’anima – dall’amore all’ira – amore, speranza, ira, audacia, temore, dolore, animosità. Nell’introduzione, elabora un concetto generale di che cosa e un’affezione dell’anima – il corpo non è menzionato. Etica nicomachea. Grice: “St John’s, 1956. I’m about to embark on my first trio seminar—with Austin and Hare—on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea, and I find I can’t stop thinking, not about the syllabus, but about Hardie and, worse, Pellegrini. Hardie, because I mean to use his notes to stuff any attendee who thinks Aristotle can be done on the wing; Pellegrini, because he had the cheek to ask, in his insolent Latin prose—in an oratio delivered at Rome, no less—the very question that first occurred to me when Hardie began drilling me in Aristotelian moral philosophy: De utilitate moralis philosophiae, cum ethicorum Aristotelis explicationem aggrederetur. What is the use of it? And is not Pellegrini almost too ingenuous to think Aristotle will supply the right answer to a question that is, in its way, already a little stupid?: Grice: Caro Pellegrini, mi ha sempre incuriosito il tuo modo di affrontare l’amore come affezione dell’animo, soprattutto alla luce dei tuoi commenti sull’Etica Nicomachea. Trovo affascinante come tu ritenga che i giovani debbano studiare l’etica prima ancora della filosofia della natura; è una prospettiva che ribalta la tradizione aristotelica. Qual è, secondo te, il motivo profondo di questa scelta? Pellegrini: Grice, ti ringrazio della domanda. Ritengo che l’animo umano vada temprato attraverso la riflessione morale, prima di tuffarsi nelle discipline scientifiche. Solo educando le passioni e comprendendo affezioni come l’amore, la speranza o l’ira, si può affrontare la conoscenza con uno spirito realmente libero. E, a proposito di giovani, penso che l’etica sia la bussola necessaria per non smarrirsi nel mare della scienza. Grice: Questa visione mi colpisce molto. Forse, come diceva Aristotele, alcune passioni sono oscure, ma tu con i tuoi commenti le hai rese più chiare e accessibili. Mi piace anche il tuo approccio: più oratore che filosofo, capace di comunicare i principi etici in modo diretto. Ritieni che l’amore, tra tutte le affezioni, abbia un ruolo privilegiato nell’animo umano? Pellegrini: Assolutamente, Grice! L’amore è la radice di tante altre passioni e delle azioni nobili. Nei miei commenti, ho sempre cercato di mostrare come l’amore si manifesti nei maschi nobili, elevando l’animo sopra le passioni negative. In fondo, il corpo resta in secondo piano: è l’anima, con i suoi moti interiori, a guidare il vero cammino morale. E come dice un vecchio proverbio italiano: “Dove c’è amore, c’è cuore e ragione.” Pellegrini, Lellio (1560). Oratio de utilitate moralis philosophiae, cum ethicorum Aristotelis explicationem aggrederetur. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Perniola: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la scuola di Asti -- filosofia piemontese -- filosofia italiana –  (Asti). Filosofo italiano. Asti, Piemonte. Studia la filosofia del meta-romanzo a Torino sotto PAREYSON Mario Perniola (Asti, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how we routinely get from what is said to what is meant by presuming rational cooperation and then drawing defeasible inferences (implicatures) from a speaker’s choice of words, the context, and recognisable intentions; the point is to make the tacit rational economy of ordinary talk explicit without turning it into mere rhetoric. Perniola, formed in the Pareyson milieu in Turin and beginning with Il metaromanzo (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), approaches meaning through reflexivity, mediation, and cultural forms: the modern novel’s self-reference becomes a privileged site where discourse comments on itself, where “communication” is thematized as trauma or miracle, and where avant-garde strategies make the frame visible rather than leaving it as an invisible background. The comparison is thus between two kinds of “meta”: for Grice, the meta-level is an analytic reconstruction of the rules that make conversational understanding possible (why a move would be rational here, what it would implicate), whereas for Perniola the meta-level is an aesthetic-cultural operation in which the work turns back upon its own conditions of possibility and forces the reader to experience the instability of reference, voice, and authority. From a Gricean angle, the metaromanzo can be redescribed as a systematic generator of implicatures about authorship, sincerity, and point, exploiting and frustrating the cooperative expectations that ordinarily guide interpretation; from a Perniolan angle, Grice’s maxims can look like a deliberately “anti-literary” attempt to domesticate the play of discourse by showing that even our most indirect effects remain answerable to reasoned norms, not merely to stylistic invention. Studia la filosofia del meta-romanzo a Torino sotto PAREYSON. Incontra VATTIMO ed ECO, che si è fatto tutti gli studiosi di spicco della scuola di Pareyson. Allegato alla all'avanguardia dei situazionisti. Insegna a Salerno e Roma.  Collabora a agaragar, Clinamen, Estetica Notizie. Fonda Agalma. Rivista di Studi Culturali e di Estetica. L'ampiezza, l'intuizione e molti-affrontato i contributi della sua filosofia gli fa guadagnare la reputazione di essere una delle figure più importanti del panorama filosofico. Pubblica “Miracoli e traumi della Comunicazione”. Le sue attività ad ampio raggio coinvolti formulare teorie filosofiche innovative, filosofare, l'estetica di insegnamento, e conferenze. Si concentra sulla filosofia del romanzo e la teoria della letteratura. Nel suo saggio “Il meta-romanzo:, sostiene che il romanzo da James a Beckett ha un carattere auto-referenziale. Inoltre, si afferma che il romanzo è soltanto su se stesso. Il suo obiettivo e quello di dimostrare la dignità filosofica del meta-romanzo e cercare di recuperare un grave espressione culturale. Montale gli loda per questa critica originale del romanzo come genere filosofico. Però, non solo hanno un'anima accademica ma anche una anima anti-accademica.. Quest'ultima è esemplificato dalla sua attenzione all’espressioni alternativa e trasgressiva. Un saggio importante appartenente a questa parte anti-accademico è “L'alienazione artistica”, in cui attinge la filosofia marxista. Sostiene che l'alienazione non è un fallimento di arte, ma piuttosto una condizione dell'esistenza stessa dell'arte come categoria distintiva dell'attività umana. I situazionisti (Castelvecchi, Roma) esemplifica il suo interesse per l'avanguardia. Dà conto dei situazionisti e post-situazionisti nel quale è stato personalmente coinvolto. Ha videnzia anche le caratteristiche contrastanti dei membri del movimento. In “Agaragar” continua la critica post-situazionista della società capitalistica e della borghesia. Saggio sul negativo”.  Grice: “St John’s, 1966. I think I’ve had it. I have to cross from Blackwell’s back to St John’s, and there, shining in the window, is the latest Continental novelty: Perniola’s Il metaromanzo, with a cover clever enough to count as an argument. When I was tutoring Strawson for his logic paper in PPE—Hilary or Michaelmas ’38?—we spent a whole hour on “metalanguage”: his view that it was a very good idea, mine that it was not. The OED will no doubt testify that meta- in this use comes into English through Russell—“the Lord,” as we sometimes call him here—and it was meant to contrast a metalanguage with an object-language. The phrase itself always amused me, since Russell’s great mistake was to be too comfortable with “objects”: his background being mathematics rather than philosophy, he never developed the proper philosophical suspicion of them. But to see meta- now slapped onto romanzo, as if there were an object-novel waiting in the wings to match it, is… well, la dolce vita, I suppose.” G.: Blackwell’s, 1966. I was hoping for a detective novel and found a metaphysical prefix. S.: That is usually how these things happen. What is it this time. G.: Perniola. Il metaromanzo. One can scarcely buy coffee now without a man placing meta- on the counter as if it were a civil right. S.: You object to the prefix or to the novel. G.: To the confidence. A novel is at least a thing one can read. A meta-novel sounds like a supervisory committee for novels. S.: Then the obvious question is: what is the romanzo here, and what is the meta-. G.: Precisely. And the answer is less obvious than the title pretends. If this were Russell in his tidier moods, the romanzo would be the object-language and the metaromanzo the metalanguage. But literature refuses to sit still long enough to be sorted by a logician. S.: Russell would at least have liked the pair. G.: Russell liked pairs that could be indexed. Object-language, metalanguage, and so on up the ladder until one runs out of rungs or patience. S.: You are thinking of Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. G.: Yes, 1940 for the English dignity of object-language in Russell’s hands, though I now gather he is not first. A philosopher is never first when he is most pleased with himself. S.: We now have the genealogy, do we not. Carnap in German first. G.: Carnap in 1934, yes. Logische Syntax der Sprache. Objektsprache and Syntaxsprache. One must say it in German first because the English has already gone wrong. S.: Gone wrong in what way. G.: Because object-language sounds as if it were a language about objects, or, worse, about what Quine will later call what there is. Whereas Carnap in that phase means merely the language under syntactic description. S.: The object of discussion, not the language of objects. G.: Exactly. A bureaucratic object, not a metaphysical one. The object-language is the language being inspected; the syntax-language is the language doing the inspecting. It is all much more civil in German. S.: And then comes Stebbing. G.: 1935, apparently, in a review of Carnap, before the English translation of Logische Syntax appears in 1937. Which is exactly the sort of thing Stebbing would do: bring a foreign term into English and make it sound as if it had always been sensible. S.: Object-language in 1935, then. G.: So I am told. Then Grelling in 1936 with metalanguage, which is more violent but less misleading. A metalanguage at least announces its meddling. S.: And Tarski. G.: Tarski supplies the seriousness. The hierarchy of object-language and metalanguage becomes decisive there, whatever the English words happen to be doing in other people’s mouths. He is also, as they now say, foundational for metalogic, though I suspect the word was prettier in other hands. S.: And Russell arrives in 1940 and popularises the pair. G.: Yes. Which is very Russell. He likes a distinction best when he can receive it from the Continent and then issue it in English prose as if it had tidied itself. S.: You are unkind. G.: Only historically. But now, with Perniola in 1966, we have another branch of the family. Meta-romanzo. Which tempts one into all the old mistakes. S.: For instance. G.: For instance thinking that romanzo is the object-language and metaromanzo the metalanguage. That would be too easy, and too false. S.: Yet perhaps productively false. G.: As many continental things are. One can begin there and then be corrected by the material. S.: So let us begin there. The romanzo is the object-language. G.: If one insists. The ordinary novel, let us say, the narrative doing its work under the pretence of transparency. Then the metaromanzo would be the novel that takes the novel itself as its own object. S.: A language under analysis, but now the language is a genre. G.: Good. That is already better than oggetto-romanzo, which would sound like a piece of Italian furniture. S.: Oggetto-romanzo is ghastly. G.: It sounds like something one leaves in the hall and dusts seasonally. S.: Whereas metaromanzo at least has a programme. G.: Yes, though one should distrust programmes in literature even more than in logic. They tend to arrive after the work and explain it with suspicious punctuality. S.: You are thinking that meta- in Italian by 1966 has already become a free formative element. G.: Quite. Once a prefix begins travelling without a passport, every discipline mistakes it for a method. Meta-linguaggio is one thing. Meta-romanzo another. Meta-politica, meta-teatro, meta-critica: soon enough meta- becomes a way of sounding as if one has climbed above one’s own object. S.: Which is often only a way of standing on a chair. G.: Precisely. And philosophy is full of chairs already. S.: Carnap would have hated this promiscuity. G.: Carnap would first have tried to classify it, then perhaps to cleanse it, and finally, if pushed far enough, call it a pseudo-problem. S.: With Piroten. G.: Yes, dear old Piroten. The useful nonsense-word of a system-maker who wants to show that formal consequence can be clear before lexical content is. “Piroten karulisieren elatisch,” and so on. One need not know what a Pirot is to see that if a is a Pirot and all Pirots karulize elatically, then a karulizes elatically. S.: A neat little paradise of inferential role. G.: Quite. The formula before the world. If you like: Pa (x)(Px⊃Cx)(x)(Px \supset Cx)(x)(Px⊃Cx) therefore Ca S.: A child could follow it. G.: A child perhaps. A metaphysician rarely. The point is that the formal structure can be understood before one has fixed any denotata. S.: Which is why you resist the Quinean pull toward objects. G.: Exactly. Carnap in 1934 is not yet Quine in 1960. He is not asking what the variables really range over. He is arranging a hierarchy of languages. S.: Then comes the Paris shift. G.: Ah yes, the tragic thing-language. S.: Tragic? G.: Let us say philosophically regrettable. One moves from Objektsprache as the language under analysis to Ding-Sprache, or thing-language, as the basis of science. And at once the old bureaucratic modesty vanishes and things begin to enter. S.: Public things, intersubjective things, not merely objects in the Quinean inventory. G.: Granted. Carnap is not yet doing Word and Object in the savage way. Still, it is a bad moment for anyone who dislikes reification. Once you let Ding into the room, the furniture starts winning the argument. S.: And object-language in English already sounded more reified than Objektsprache ever needed to sound. G.: Precisely. English makes object do too much. It hears object and begins wondering about what names denote, what variables range over, what sorts of things there are. Carnap, at least in 1934, mostly wanted the modest distinction between the language talked about and the language doing the talking. S.: Which is an almost innocent distinction. G.: Innocent enough to become dangerous once translated. S.: So now bring Perniola back in. G.: Very well. Perniola in 1966 does not care in the least whether object-language came into English through Stebbing or whether metalanguage first appears in Grelling. He has a more interesting nuisance in mind: the novel that turns back upon itself and thematises its own conditions. S.: Which sounds like Carnap if one has had too much port. G.: And sounds like literature if one has had too much theory. The metaromanzo is not a syntax-language about the romanzo in any clean sense. It is the romanzo infecting itself with self-reference. S.: So the metalanguage collapses into the object-language. G.: Exactly. Which is why Russell would hate it. He wants levels. Literature delights in violating levels while calling the violation subtle. S.: Tarski would forbid it. G.: Tarski would at least mistrust it. A novel that contains its own commentary on novelhood is already behaving badly by semantic standards. S.: Yet by literary standards it may be excellent. G.: Yes, because literature tolerates the very confusions logic exists to prevent. It thrives on them, indeed. S.: Then what should one say. That the romanzo is not quite an object-language and the metaromanzo not quite a metalanguage. G.: Exactly. The pair is only analogical. Meta- here names reflexivity, not hierarchy. Perniola’s meta is not Tarski’s meta. It is an aesthetic turn-back, not a semantic over-language. S.: One might say that the metaromanzo takes the ordinary novel as object, but does so from within the very practice it reflects. G.: Very good. Which is why oggetto-romanzo remains nonsense. There is no object-novel waiting behind the meta-novel as object-language waits behind metalanguage. S.: Unless one were stupid enough to invent one. G.: Italy could, but fortunately did not. Meta-romanzo at least sounds as if it belongs to a culture. Object-novel would sound as if it belonged to an inventory. S.: And Russell’s collocations, by then, had already entered the language. G.: Entered enough that one could make jokes with them. “Metalanguage” by 1966 is something an educated reader can hear without fainting. Which is perhaps why literature could steal meta- and leave the rest behind. S.: Because prefixes are easier to steal than distinctions. G.: Much easier. A distinction demands work; a prefix only demands nerve. S.: Then perhaps G. and S. should reconstruct the line. Carnap 1934: Objektsprache and Syntaxsprache. G.: Good. Then Stebbing in 1935 importing object-language into English through Carnap. Then Grelling in 1936 with metalanguage. Then Carnap in English in 1937 consolidating object-language and still using syntax-language, which is much cleaner than what came later. S.: Then Tarski making the hierarchy serious. G.: And Russell in 1940 giving object-language a chapter title and treating metalanguage as a going concern in English prose. After which the terms are respectable enough to leave philosophy and embarrass the arts. S.: Leading, by 1966, to Il metaromanzo. G.: Exactly. The history of a prefix’s decline. S.: You are too harsh. Perhaps its emancipation. G.: I will allow emancipation if you allow trivialisation. Every emancipated prefix travels badly. S.: Does Quine enter this story. G.: Only as a warning. Quine later makes object sound ontological in a way Carnap’s original distinction did not require. Once Word and Object has done its work, every object-language begins to sound as if it carries a census of entities. S.: And that makes Carnap retroactively more Ding-like than he was. G.: Precisely. Translation first misleads, then later ontology makes the old translation look prophetic. S.: Which is unfair to Carnap. G.: Fairness to Carnap has never been an English priority. S.: Let us bring in the Piroten again, if only to keep formalism from feeling neglected. G.: Very well. Suppose Carnap says something like: “a is a Pirot” and “All Pirots karulize elatically” then “a karulizes elatically.” S.: You want it in Peano-Russell dress. G.: Yes, because that is the route by which Oxford actually learned to write modern logic: PaPaPa (x)(Px⊃Cx)(x)(Px \supset Cx)(x)(Px⊃Cx) therefore CaCaCa S.: Universality by default. G.: Exactly. That is the old line. No inverted A yet. (x)(x)(x) for “for all x.” Existence marked separately by the inverted E. Peano helps Russell with the notation, Frege with the deeper conception, and Oxford inherits the hybrid without admitting the genealogy. S.: A noble muddle. G.: Oxford is built on them. Which is why, by the time of Strawson’s 1952 book, the revolt against formal vacuity is already under way. S.: Ah yes, the books in the room. G.: The perfect case. “There is not a single book in his room which is not by an English author.” Formally one is tempted to say: ¬(∃x)(Fx∧¬Gx)\neg (\exists x)(Fx \land \neg Gx)¬(∃x)(Fx∧¬Gx) S.: Where F is “x is a book in his room” and G is “x is by an English author.” G.: Exactly. And yet ordinary language objects. If there are no books in the room, the formal sentence may still come out in a way that leaves the speaker blameless by the extensional lights, but ordinary speech cries outrage. S.: Not falsehood, but outrage. G.: Strawson’s word, and a good one. The speaker has not lied exactly, but he has made one the victim of a linguistic impropriety. S.: Because one presupposes there are books in the room. G.: Or, if one is me, because the speaker’s choice of the weaker-looking but more elaborate form suggests that there are books there to be so classified. Why bother with the stronger-looking “not a single ... which is not ...” if the room is empty. S.: Which leads to the Grice footnote. G.: Yes, the rule that one does not make the logically lesser claim when one could truthfully and economically make the greater. A nice bit of later Grice hiding in Strawson’s presuppositionism. S.: And that rule first occurred, Strawson says, in a different connection. G.: Which I still suspect was perception. “That pillar box seems red” versus “That pillar box is red.” The same structure: if you choose the weaker or more guarded form when the stronger would do, you invite the hearer to infer a reason for the guard. S.: So from pillar boxes to books in rooms. G.: And from there, if one is too literary, to novels that talk about their own novelhood. S.: That is a handsome arc. G.: Handsome and slightly illicit. But philosophy lives by slightly illicit arcs. S.: Let us then place Perniola at the end of it. Not caring about the technical lineage, but benefiting from the cultural availability of meta-. G.: Yes. By 1966 meta- is already in the air. A cultivated Italian reader can hear metalinguaggio, metalogica, perhaps even metateatro, and not mistake them for typos. Perniola simply applies the prefix where its logic becomes metaphorical. S.: And then the metaromanzo is the novel that reflects on the novel. G.: Precisely, but from within. Not an external syntax-language about a novel, but a novel making its own novelhood part of its point. Which is why the Tarskian analogy breaks down just where the literary interest begins. S.: Because self-reference, dangerous in logic, is often the whole pleasure in art. G.: Exactly. What Tarski avoids, Perniola courts. S.: Then a Gricean might say that the metaromanzo is a machine for generating implicatures about authorship, sincerity, fictionality, and point. G.: Very good. It invites the reader to recover not just what happens, but what it means that the novel knows it is a novel. That is not metalanguage in the Russell-Tarski sense, but it is meta in a culturally available, reflexive sense. S.: So if one were to clean the matter up, one would say: Objektsprache in Carnap 1934 means the language under analysis. Thing-language in Carnap after Paris 1935 means something quite different, a language of publicly identifiable things for science. Meta-language in Grelling and then in Tarski means the language used to talk about another language. Meta-romanzo in Perniola means an aesthetic operation of self-reference. G.: Admirably put. You may dine at High Table on that alone. S.: Thank you. And Russell? G.: Russell gets the English dignity of “object-language” in 1940, but not the glory of firstness. Which is probably just as well, because he would only have made object sound more comfortable than it deserved. S.: And Quine? G.: Quine is the aftertaste. Once he arrives, object begins to smell of ontology, and retroactively everyone starts hearing Carnap as if he had already been half-Quinean. Which is a historical slander, but a fertile one. S.: This leaves only one question. G.: Which is? S.: Whether Perniola would have cared for any of it. G.: Not at all. Which is why he is useful. He shows that by 1966 the prefix has escaped the logicians and found a new career among the aesthetes. Meta no longer means “higher-order semantic hygiene.” It means “reflexive self-consciousness with ambitions.” S.: In that case, the title Il metaromanzo is both clever and irresponsible. G.: Precisely. That is why it works. S.: So what shall we say when asked whether the romanzo is the object and the meta-romanzo the metalanguage. G.: We shall say: only if one is willing to misuse Tarski for the sake of literature, which is often worth doing but should never be done innocently. S.: And if asked whether oggetto-romanzo would be possible. G.: We shall say: only in a warehouse. S.: And if asked whether Carnap’s shift from object to thing is philosophically sad. G.: We shall say: sad if you dislike reification, understandable if you want intersubjective science, and in any case distinct from the fate of meta- in the humanities, where all terms eventually become costumes. S.: Then Perniola’s title is not a logical distinction but a cultural symptom. G.: Exactly. The symptom of an age in which one can no longer merely write a novel. One must also write the novel’s consciousness of being a novel, and then call the whole enterprise serious because the prefix once passed through Tarski on its way to Einaudi. S.: That is very good. G.: It is also, I fear, true.Grice: Caro Perniola, ho sempre pensato che il meta-romanzo fosse come una conversazione tra specchi: ognuno riflette l’altro, ma nessuno sa chi ha iniziato a parlare. Tu, che sei maestro dell’autoreferenzialità, hai mai perso il filo tra romanzo e realtà? Perniola: Grice, se dovessi cercare il filo tra romanzo e realtà, finirei sicuramente impigliato nella trama di uno dei miei saggi! Ma non temere: in Piemonte diciamo che “chi perde il filo, almeno trova la lana”. E poi, un po’ di alienazione rende la conversazione più interessante, no? Grice: Ah, Perniola, tu sei l’unico filosofo che può alienarsi e ritrovare se stesso tra le pagine di Clinamen! Mi chiedo se l’implicatura conversazionale, in fondo, non sia solo un meta-romanzo scritto a voce... Come dire: tutto è conversazione, persino la pausa caffè in Agalma! Perniola: Grice, la pausa caffè è il mio laboratorio filosofico preferito! Tra una tazzina e l’altra, si può scoprire che la borghesia è più amara dell’espresso, e che la vera avanguardia è quando il barista ti domanda: “Lo vuole corto o lungo?” La filosofia, come il caffè, va gustata senza zucchero! Perniola, Mario (1966). Il meta-romanzo. Torino: Einaudi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Perone. interrotta”. Il tema è ripreso proprio in apertura di Modernità e Memoria, dove individua nella modernità l'epoca della cesura. Il moderno è dunque chiamato a essere il tempo della memoria. La memoria è sempre memoria della cesura.  Ugo Perone (Torino, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers recover what a speaker means (often more than is explicitly said) by presuming rational cooperation and inferring implicatures from what is said plus context plus recognisable intentions; the governing norms are those that make an exchange intelligible as a shared project of giving information, reasons, and guidance. Perone’s work, emerging from the Pareyson milieu and shaped by phenomenology and a historically self-conscious metaphysics, approaches meaning less through the micro-economy of conversational inference and more through the experience of discontinuity, threshold, and memory: modernity is read as a cesura, and understanding as an attempt to rescue sense from fragments, not by “calculating” what someone meant from a cooperative maxim, but by interpreting how meaning is given, withheld, and reconstituted across ruptured historical and existential horizons. The comparison is thus a difference of explanatory target: Grice offers a model of how communicative intention and shared rational expectations structure everyday understanding here and now, while Perone offers a hermeneutic account of how sense persists (or fails) across temporal breaks, where what matters is not only what is implicated in a single utterance but what is remembered, lost, and re-figured as the present becomes a boundary between what can still be said and what can only be recalled. From a Gricean perspective, Perone’s “memory of the cut” would appear as a background condition that shapes what conversational participants can presuppose and so what they can implicate; from a Peronean perspective, Grice’s maxims look like a local rational grammar operating within a deeper historical drama in which the very possibility of common ground is itself precarious and must be continually rebuilt. Il tema è ripreso proprio in apertura di Modernità e Memoria, dove individua nella modernità l'epoca della cesura. Il moderno è dunque chiamato a essere il tempo della memoria. La memoria è sempre memoria della cesura. L’uso della categoria d’illuminismo non simpatizza per quella interpretazione del moderno, dimentiche della tensione. Semplicemente pone l'umano in luogo del divino come fonte di legittimazione -- puntando tutto sul continuio, anziché sul dis-continuo della storia. Per un approfondimento a tutto tondo del significato dell'ateismo, contro l'essere, ciò che è forte, è lecito essere forti, perché la minaccia non lo vince, ma lo lascia stagliarsi in tutta la sua maestà e incommensurabile grandezza. Per una trattazione sistematica del concetto di "soglia”, che svolge con particolare attenzione cfr. Il presente possibile -- il presente come soglia.  Se una totalità è interrotta, non possiamo ricordare se non frammenti, e quasi istantanee del tempo. Tuttavia, se la memoria afferra brandelli e frammenti, è perché in essi vi legge il tutto, perché li pensa capaci di dar *senso* e di riscattare, perché in essi vi scorge l'essenziale. La memoria sa che non tutto può essere salvato. Ma osiamo credere che nella memoria salvata vi possa essere un senso anche per ciò che è andato perduto. Implicature, peiron/apeiron, Velia, Grice on ‘other’; finito/ infinito, Velia, Elea, I veliani, Guardini. Total temporary state, Israele, etimologia, la ferita di Giaccobe dopo la lotta coll’angelo, nella Vulgata. Israele, la lotta di Giacobbe e il angelo, la ferita, Giacobbe zoppo, iconografia, controversia sull’etimologia di israele, ei combatte, la tradizione di VELIA, l’infinito di Velia – il continuo e il discontinuo, l’infinito della scuola di Crotone, Cicerone, l’infinito di Giordano Bruno. Infinitum, indefinititum, dal verbo, finire, finio in romano, -- I due rappresentanti della scuola di Velia, Melisso, peras, pars. Guardini, il sacro, il divino, I dei, uomo e dio, opposizione, -- la storia della filosofia di Perone, il presente possible, la totalita interrota, I soggeti, trascendentale e immanente. Secrétan.Grice: “St John’s. 1967. The Senior Common Room exposes one to more than one needs to know. So Perone has just defended a thesis in Turin, under Pareyson, on Secrétan—who sounds secretive enough, even before one looks at the spelling. The title reads: La filosofia della libertà in Secrétan. Naturally I now want to know everything about Secrétan, if only because that acute accent on the second e makes him sound improbably nouvelle vague. One imagines freedom being discussed not in the manner of Oxford—tidy distinctions and an embarrassed avoidance of metaphysics—but in a smoky café idiom, all thresholds and ruptures, where what matters is less the conclusion than the cut that makes a conclusion necessary. Editorial note: Charles Secrétan (1815–1895) was a Swiss Protestant philosopher born and based in Lausanne, trained in law, and formed philosophically by German idealism (notably Schelling, whom he heard in Munich in 1835–36 and again in 1839). His major work, La philosophie de la liberté (2 vols., 1848–1849; commonly cited as 1849), presents a systematic moral-metaphysical programme in which freedom is not a derivative human faculty but the absolute principle itself: the first principle is conceived as free rather than merely necessary, and the world is read as the product of a free act, with moral obligation and religious ideas (creation, fall, restoration) treated as philosophically central rather than merely confessional add-ons. This makes Secrétan a natural choice for Perone’s 1967 Turin thesis under Luigi Pareyson (La filosofia della libertà in Charles Secrétan): Secrétan offers a way of thinking “freedom” that is simultaneously metaphysical, ethical, and historically alert to rupture—an approach congenial to Perone’s later concerns with modernity as cesura and with the present as a “threshold.” Grice’s interest in the same neighbourhood is of a different temper: rather than beginning from an absolute principle, he reconstructs the conceptual geography of “free” across its ordinary-language applications (from free fall to free will, to the comic sobriety of alcohol-free), treating the family of uses as data for a theory of rational agency and action; the juxtaposition usefully marks two routes to the topic—Secrétan’s principled metaphysics of freedom and Grice’s analytic reconstruction of the concept as it functions in explanation, justification, and choice.Grice: Caro Perone, ho letto che la modernità è la grande cesura della memoria. Ma dimmi, hai mai dimenticato dove hai messo le chiavi? Forse anche tu sei vittima della cesura moderna! Perone: Grice, se la memoria è fatta di frammenti, le mie chiavi sono sicuramente uno di quei frammenti perduti! E se davvero il presente è una soglia, forse le troverò... appena varcata la porta di casa. Grice: Hai ragione, Perone! Ma ricordati: anche Giacobbe, dopo la lotta, rimase zoppo... Io, dopo la lotta con il telecomando, rimango senza il canale giusto. È la memoria che salva o ci fa inciampare? Perone: Grice, tu filosofeggi persino davanti alla TV! Ma in fondo, tra il continuo e il discontinuo, c’è sempre spazio per una buona battuta. E se non ricordo tutto, almeno non dimentico di ridere! In this passage we have a reminiscence by G. in the SCR on Perone and la filosofia della liberta. So please provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. on that, with if you can you giving the OED first citations for -free, as per alcohol-free, sugar-free -- which is the type of thing G. is interested. cf. Berlin, Isaiah, free to, free from -- with G. providing a scale from FREE FALL -- physical, a stone, FREE GROWING of a plant, phototropic, say -- as free as it gets -- FREE ANIMAL who can wonder anywhere, and FREE MEANS-END ANALYSYS f rationality, where the ultra-free agent is the one that is FREE to chose the ends -- extrinsically -- as this connects to Kant, and Prichard, and back to the alcohol-free and lingusitic botanising, and sugar-free -- Speranza suggests thiese are older formations that G. may have heard from the New World, but see if you can check something LIKE alcohol-free or sugar-free as old as the OED did locate them -- thanks -- just the thing, no preamble or ps -- thankts G.: Perone’s title has been nagging at me: La filosofia della libertà. S.: Better nagged by liberty than by necessity. G.: Perhaps, though necessity at least often wears plainer clothes. S.: You prefer plain clothes. G.: I prefer words that do not arrive trailed by incense. S.: Libertà arrives trailed by Europe. G.: And by metaphysics, theology, cafés, revolutions, and footnotes. S.: Secrétan deserves some of that. G.: Secrétan deserves his accent, at any rate. It makes him sound as though freedom were being discussed under dim lamps. S.: And Perone, under Pareyson, picks exactly that figure. G.: Which is what amused the Senior Common Room. Someone says “La filosofia della libertà in Secrétan,” and suddenly liberty becomes a thesis-topic rather than a political inconvenience. S.: You would start with the word free. G.: Naturally. One must begin where the trousers are. S.: You mean “real” wears the trousers. G.: “Real” does, in one line of inquiry. Here “free” may wear them, though less steadily. S.: Because it is all over the place. G.: Exactly. Free fall, free man, free act, free country, free hand, free love, free trade, free verse, free school, free gift, and, to modern shame, alcohol-free. S.: You dislike the later compounds. G.: I dislike them as a moralist dislikes new upholstery. Still, they are useful. S.: I brought you the OED trail, such as one can glean from the public edge of it. G.: Ah yes. Tell me when sugar-free and alcohol-free first emerge respectably. S.: The exact OED entry dates are behind the paywall, but the broad indication is that these -free compounds are well established in modern commercial and descriptive English, and not merely yesterday’s American barbarisms. [oed.com] G.: That is cautious to the point of Englishness. S.: I can be firmer only in a limited way. The -free suffix itself is much older, of course, and productive for centuries. The specifically consumer compounds, things like alcohol-free and sugar-free, are modern enough to belong to the world of labels and dietetics, but not so new as to be post-war inventions pure and simple. [oed.com] G.: So Speranza’s suspicion that I may have heard them from the New World is plausible, but not necessary. S.: Exactly. The New World may have accelerated the vulgarity, but not invented the morphology. G.: Good. Then free as suffix deserves a place in the family. S.: Especially because Isaiah Berlin complicates the matter: free to, free from. G.: Yes. He gave a lecture and acquired an entire century’s textbook distinction. S.: Positive and negative liberty. G.: Quite. Though I prefer to begin not with Berlin’s categories but with the uses from which the categories were abstracted. S.: Hence your scale. G.: Exactly. Let us start at the bottom, or perhaps the top, with free fall. S.: A stone. G.: Yes. A stone in free fall. Here “free” means roughly unconstrained by supporting contact, not exempt from gravity, still less self-legislating. S.: So physical freedom is not liberty in the moral sense at all. G.: No. It is release from one kind of impediment within a causal order. S.: Then free-growing. G.: A plant. One says a plant is free-growing when it is not stunted, not pot-bound, not clipped into topiary by a sentimental gardener. S.: Though phototropic still. G.: Precisely. Even free-growing ivy still crawls after light like a provincial after preferment. S.: So its freedom is flourishing under natural tendency, not election. G.: Excellent. That is why the scale matters. Free-growing is already more organic than free fall, but still not deliberative. S.: Then the animal. G.: Yes. The free animal can wander, forage, turn, flee, approach, choose among proximities, perhaps even hesitate. Freedom there includes locomotion and appetite under perception. S.: But not yet means-end analysis. G.: Not in the strict philosophical sense. A dog may deliberate a little, but not usually under a maxim. S.: Then the human agent. G.: Or at least the rational agent. There freedom enters through the possibility of action guided by reasons, not merely causes. S.: Means-end reasoning. G.: Exactly. One is free, at minimum, if one may select means to an end without relevant external coercion. S.: That is already a limited liberty. G.: Quite. It is instrumental freedom. Free to get the thing done, assuming the end is already fixed. S.: And the ultra-free agent. G.: Ah yes. The ultra-free agent is free not merely in the means but in the ends. He is free to choose what shall count as his end, at least within some intelligible range. S.: Extrinsically, you said. G.: Yes. Free in relation to pressures that would otherwise fix the end from outside—custom, appetite, authority, compulsion, perhaps even natural teleology if one is arguing with Aristotle before breakfast. S.: Then Kant enters. G.: Naturally. For Kant, autonomy means not merely selecting means cleverly but giving oneself the law under which action counts as rationally one’s own. S.: So freedom is not caprice. G.: Heaven no. Caprice is the undergraduate parody of autonomy. S.: And Prichard. G.: Prichard reminds one, in his own way, that obligation and action are not to be dissolved into psychology or mere desire. The free act has to be thought in relation to what one takes oneself to have reason to do. S.: Which returns us to means and ends. G.: Yes. One may be very “free” in the vulgar sense and yet entirely unfree in the evaluative structure of one’s action if one never questions the ends that have colonised one. S.: Such as. G.: Fashion, ambition, appetite, ideology, dietetics, and sugar-free biscuits. S.: You do not trust sugar-free biscuits. G.: No sane man should. They are a perfect linguistic case, though. S.: Because the suffix -free there means free from. G.: Yes, free from sugar, not free to sugar. S.: That would be a different and happier packet. G.: Exactly. Which gives us Berlin’s two great heads of freedom in a grotesque supermarket miniature. S.: Negative liberty on the label. G.: And usually positive disappointment in the mouth. S.: Let us linger on the morphology. You said “free” may wear the trousers less steadily than “real.” G.: Yes, because “free” does not merely contrast with one sort of sham. It radiates across many fields: physical release, legal status, political independence, moral agency, costlessness, exemption, absence of ingredient, looseness of style, generosity of access. S.: Free verse. G.: A good case. Free verse is not verse with no constraints whatever; it is verse not bound by certain traditional metrical regularities. S.: So “free” rarely means absolutely unconstrained. G.: Precisely. It means unconstrained relative to some salient bond. S.: Which makes it contrastive in an Austinian way after all. G.: Very much so. Perhaps “free” wears a jacket where “real” wears trousers, but both are contrastive workers. S.: Free from what. G.: Exactly. Or free to do what. The preposition is half the philosophy. S.: Berlin would approve. G.: Berlin approved of prepositions more than many metaphysicians do. S.: Then alcohol-free. G.: Yes. There the thing is free from alcohol. Negative liberty with a bottle-neck. S.: Sugar-free likewise. G.: Quite. Not sovereign sugar, but sugar excluded. S.: The OED first citations, then, if not exact, at least conceptually belong to the rise of labelling, commercial reassurance, and the language of regulated abstention. G.: Excellent phrase. Regulated abstention. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep it, though it may improve diets more than prose. S.: Then what interests you in the suffix. G.: That it reveals how freedom-talk slides from moral and political dignity into ingredient management without ceasing to be the same morphological family. S.: So the family resemblance can mislead. G.: Often. One begins with free will and ends with caffeine-free as though one had travelled no philosophical distance. S.: But one has travelled a great deal. G.: Indeed. From autonomy to absence of stimulant in four syllables. S.: Let us map the scale more neatly. G.: Very well. First, free fall: absence of support, not absence of law. Second, free-growing: absence of stunting, presence of natural directedness. Third, free animal movement: locomotor and appetitive latitude. Fourth, instrumental rational freedom: selection of means to fixed ends. Fifth, fuller agency: reflection on ends. Sixth, autonomy in something like the Kantian sense: self-legislation under reason. S.: And where is Berlin. G.: Berlin cuts across the scale. Negative liberty concerns impediments and exclusions. Positive liberty concerns agency, self-direction, mastery, perhaps rational self-rule. S.: Which is why free from and free to matter. G.: Exactly. A slave may become free from his master before he becomes free to direct a life. A drunkard may become alcohol-free without becoming free in any enviable sense. S.: Or may become less cheerful. G.: That too. S.: Then Perone’s liberty in Secrétan is nowhere near supermarket suffixes. G.: No, but the suffixes help remind us how wide the family is, and how dangerous it is to assume one unified metaphysical essence under every use. S.: Austin would approve of beginning with the uses. G.: He would, though he might grow impatient if one then insisted on returning to metaphysics. S.: And you do insist. G.: I insist only that after lexical therapy some pressure remains. Freedom is not exhausted by the dictionary, any more than reality was exhausted by the adjective “real.” S.: Solved or resolved. G.: Resolved again, please. S.: So “the problem of freedom” is like “the problem of reality.” G.: In one sense, yes. Pseudo if it ignores the uses. Genuine if, after sorting the uses, it still asks what kind of agency, causation, normativity, and self-direction the uses presuppose or distort. S.: Secrétan wants the first principle itself to be free. G.: Yes, which is a splendidly continental way of refusing to let freedom remain a local human property. S.: Freedom as absolute principle. G.: Exactly. Not merely my faculty, but the very character of first principle, world-production, moral obligation, perhaps even divine act. S.: Which is very far from free fall. G.: Yet not wholly unrelated. The metaphor of release, spontaneity, non-necessitation, self-originating activity lurks behind both, though transformed beyond recognition. S.: So there is a history of deepening. G.: Or inflating, depending on one’s mood. S.: Today you are only moderately severe. G.: Perone softens me a little. S.: That is dangerous. G.: Yes. Now let us ask whether “free” wears the trousers. S.: Does it. G.: Sometimes. In many phrases the contrastive burden does rest on “free”: sugar-free, duty-free, care-free, smoke-free, free-range. S.: Free-range is another fine case. G.: Indeed. A hen free-range is free from cages, though not free from being eventually deplumed. S.: So negative liberty with agricultural irony. G.: Very much so. S.: Then “free” in these compounds behaves almost like a privative suffix. G.: Yes, though the privation is always relative to some previously expected or potentially confining element. S.: Hence the botanical interest. G.: Precisely. One must classify the species: free from x, free to y, free with z, free in manner, free by status, free by costlessness. S.: Free with one’s money is not free of one’s money. G.: No, though the result may converge. S.: And cost-free. G.: Another vulgar modernity. Yet again the same morphology. S.: Then do you think alcohol-free and sugar-free are philosophically unserious. G.: Not at all. They are linguistically instructive precisely because they force the contrastive question into a narrow, concrete form. Free from what? Not metaphysics, but ingredient. S.: Which reminds one that the “from” construction may be older and perhaps more basic than the “to.” G.: Perhaps older in some practical uses, yes. One is first released from chains before one is capable of legislating ends. S.: Yet politically the “to” is often the nobler aspiration. G.: True. Berlin’s distinction matters because negative liberty alone can leave one formally unimpeded and substantively adrift. S.: Or manipulated. G.: Quite. One may be “free” in the legal-negative sense and still have one’s ends manufactured by appetite, ideology, or advertisement. S.: Sugar-free advertisement. G.: Exactly. S.: Then the Kantian move is to say that true freedom lies not in following inclination but in giving oneself the rational law. G.: Yes. Which is why so much ordinary freedom-talk looks thin beside autonomy. S.: And Prichard. G.: Prichard’s severity helps because he does not let moral thought collapse into descriptive psychology. If one asks what one ought to do, one is already in a space where freedom cannot be merely the capacity to satisfy whatever impulse happened to arise. S.: So the ultra-free agent is not the capricious one, but the one whose ends are critically examinable and, ideally, self-endorsed. G.: Precisely. S.: Which is not how supermarkets use the suffix. G.: No, but supermarkets rarely improve upon Kant. S.: A pity. G.: A continental pity, yes. S.: Let us return to the OED. If the exact first citations are not to hand, can we still say something about the history of -free. G.: Certainly. The suffix is ancient and productive, and modern commerce exploits an old pattern rather than inventing it. The novelty lies not in -free itself but in the consumer compounds and their regime of reassurance. [oed.com] S.: So sugar-free and alcohol-free are modern in application, old in morphological right. G.: Exactly. Which is enough for philosophical purposes unless one is trying to terrorise lexicographers. S.: You are often trying to terrorise lexicographers. G.: Only to improve them. S.: Then would you say “free” is one word or a family of related uses. G.: A family, certainly, though not an accidental heap. There is enough continuity of contrastive structure to justify one entry, but not enough essence to justify careless metaphysics from the dictionary alone. S.: Which is your usual doctrine. G.: It has served me well. S.: Then Perone’s “philosophy of liberty” and your “conceptual geography of free” are not enemies, merely non-identical enterprises. G.: Precisely. He begins with liberty as a philosophically central principle under a history of rupture and memory. I begin with the uses of free and ask what conceptual and rational structure they disclose. S.: One smoky café, one Oxford pantry. G.: A little unfair to Oxford pantries, but yes. S.: And where does free will go on your scale. G.: Somewhere between instrumental and autonomous agency, depending on what one means by it. The phrase is notoriously unstable. S.: “Free will” may mean absence of external coercion, or absence of internal compulsion, or capacity for genuine alternatives, or rational self-determination. G.: Very good. Which is why philosophers should distrust it slightly until the surrounding machinery is specified. S.: Whereas “free fall” is much easier. G.: Yes. Stones are cooperative philosophers. S.: Plants less so. G.: Plants merely incline. S.: Animals wander. G.: Humans justify. S.: Or fail to. G.: Which is where philosophy begins. S.: Then perhaps the final scale should be put almost proverbially: free fall obeys law without support; free-growing obeys life without pruning; the free animal obeys appetite without a leash; the rational agent may govern means without governing ends; the autonomous agent governs even the end under reason. G.: Splendidly done. S.: And the sugar-free biscuit. G.: Governs nothing but appetite by label. S.: Dry enough. G.: Sufficiently Turinese, with a little New-World packaging around the edges.Perone, Ugo (1967). La filosofia della liberta, Torino.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Persio: la ragione conversazionale e la filosofia nel principato di Nerone – TREASEA CONTRO LA TIRANNIA – Roma –  Persio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e la filosofia nel principato di Nerone – TREASEA CONTRO LA TIRANNIA –He is best known as a satirical poet, but he studies philosophy under Luccio Anneo Cornuto, to whom he wrote a tribute and to whom he leaves his works on his death. A strong belief in the value of the ethics of the PORTICO lies beneath much of his satire. He is a friend of Trasea Peto (vide RENSI – TRASEA CONTRO LA TIRANNIA), and is related to him by marriage. Through this connection, Persio becomes associated with the PORTICO opposition to Nerone – but he dies before Nerone can take action against him. Ed. Broad, Loeb. Flacco Aulo Persio. GRICEVS: salve, PERSI; audio te sub CORNVTO porticum colere, sed satiras scribere: nonne periculosum est sub NERONE ridere cum virtute? PERSIVS: salve, GRICE; ridere liceat, dum non nomino: satira mea telum est sine nomine, et CORNVTVS me docuit iram in mores, non in homines, iactari. GRICEVS: bene; sed quaeso, cum dicis “sic vivitur Romae,” visne intellegi plus quam dicis, ut TRASEAE partes tuearis sine clamore? PERSIVS: prorsus; si lector sapiens est, accipit quod taceo: ego moriar citius quam NERO me puniat, sed verba mea—CORNVTO relicta—diutius vivent et tyrannum, vel invito eo, rubere iubebunt. what was the gens of this poet, if he had one? Yes. If you mean the satiric poet Aulus Persius Flaccus, then the gens is the Persia gens, and Persius is the nomen. [en.wikipedia.org], [romaninscr...ritain.org] So in strict Roman-name terms: Aulus = praenomen. [wikidata.org] Persius = nomen gentilicium, therefore gens Persia. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikidata.org] Flaccus = cognomen. [romaninscr...ritain.org] And yes, the family is generally treated as an Etruscan-origin Roman family, associated especially with Volaterrae in Etruria. So if Speranza is ordering by gens, this poet belongs under P, for Persia. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] If you want the driest archival formula, I would put it as: Persius, Aulus Flaccus: gens Persia, cognomen Flaccus. [en.wikipedia.org], [romaninscr...ritain.org] And what is the likelihood that this Persius is cognate with these two PERSIOS from Matera, Basilicata we discussed earlier -- I mean, Etrurian is chinese to Grice and Speranza -- so the root may be very mysterious. It is likely, though, that the Persios from Basilicata had a different etymology for THEIR surnames? I suppose or Speranza supposes that Persia, qua country, has nothing to do with the latter Persios? Yes, that is the prudent assumption. The Roman poet Aulus Persius Flaccus belongs to the ancient gens Persia, which is an old Roman gentilicial formation, probably of Etruscan background. That does not give you a safe bridge to early modern southern Italian surnames Persio from Matera. In other words: Persius in the Roman case is a nomen gentilicium. Persio in the Basilicata cases is a later Italian family surname. The formal resemblance is real, but the genealogical or etymological continuity is not something one should assume without evidence. The likeliest view is that the Persios of Matera inherited a humanistic or late-Latin surname form, very possibly mediated through medieval and Renaissance naming practices, and not by direct consciousness of the ancient gens Persia as such. That is, they may well preserve the old name-shape in some historical way, but not as a living Roman gentilicial identity. And yes, Persia the country is almost certainly irrelevant here. Speranza’s suspicion is sound. The surname Persio in these Italian cases is not likely to mean “from Persia” or to derive from the geographic name of the eastern empire. The ancient Roman Persius itself is already a fixed Roman name-form, and the southern Italian Persio is far more plausibly connected to the Latin onomastic tradition than to any direct Oriental ethnonym. So the safest formulation is: The resemblance between the Roman Persius and the Materan Persio is probably formal and historically mediated through Latin naming traditions, but not something that licenses a direct claim of shared gens. And no, one should not derive the Basilicatan Persio from Persia the country unless there is some separate documentary reason, which at present there is not. If Speranza wants the driest archival line, I would give him this: Persius the poet belongs to the gens Persia; Persio of Matera is a later Italian surname that may preserve the ancient name-form, but should not be treated as evidence of direct gentilicial continuity, and has nothing securely to do with Persia as a country.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Persio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale nella storia della dialettica: CICERONE, BOEZIO, e TELESIO Antonio Persio (Matera, Basilicata): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale nella storia della dialettica: Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers recover what a speaker means beyond what is explicitly said by presuming rational cooperation and then reasoning from shared norms of relevance, informativeness, and perspicuity to implicatures that are defeasible and publicly accountable. Antonio Persio, working in the late Renaissance at the intersection of Ciceronian dialogue, Boethian logic, and the new natural-philosophical temper associated with Telesio, treats “dialectic” less as a micro-theory of inferential uptake between interlocutors and more as a historically layered art of disputation and intellectual formation: a cultivated method for conducting argument, reconciling authorities, and educating judgment across disciplines. The comparison, then, is between Grice’s pragmatic rationalism—where the basic unit is a conversational move whose point is fixed by intentions and cooperative expectations—and Persio’s humanist dialectical rationalism—where the basic unit is the disputational exchange shaped by rhetorical tradition and by the transmission (and contest) of doctrines. From a Gricean angle, Persio’s Ciceronian sensibility already presupposes something like implicature (the tactful use of allusion, concession, and indirection in dialogue), but Persio would see those effects as belonging to the broader civic and pedagogical norms of eloquent disputation rather than to an abstract “calculus” of cooperative inference; Grice systematizes what Persio practices, while Persio historicizes and moralizes the conversational space that Grice analyzes. CICERONE, BOEZIO, e TELESIO. Grice: “Some like A. P., but A. P. is MY man!” -- “I was so happy when the Logic Institute was founded on St. Giles, Oxford. It meant it was never again part of the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy!” -- Matera, Basilicata. Nacque da Altobello P., scultore, e da Beatrice Goffredo. È il primo di cinque fratelli. Trascorse un’infanzia difficile a causa di una grave malattia che gli provoca una temporanea paralisi degl’arti superiori e inferiori. A occuparsi della sua prima istruzione e di quella dei suoi fratelli è lo zio, l’umanista Goffredo. L’ambiente familiare è dunque assai stimolante e da ciò trassero profitto i P. che, a eccezione del secondogenito, Giovanni Battista – Grice, “Only we never asked HIM!”, divennero personaggi di rilievo in varie discipline: Antonio si distinse in ambito filosofico, Giulio proseguì l’attività paterna di scultore, Domizio prese gl’ordini e si dedica alla pittura e Ascanio risalta in campo umanistico-filologico.  Dopo aver proseguito gli studi nel monastero francescano della sua città natale, P. scelge di abbandonare Matera, forse anche per il suo temperamento forte, che lo spinge a porsi continuamente in contrasto coll’autorità paterna. Si reca a Napoli, dove ha l’incarico di precettore di L. e P. Orsini, fratelli minori di Orsini, duca di Gravina e conte di Matera. Entra in contatto con TELESIO , del quale divenne discepolo e intimo amico, tanto che il filosofo volle discutere proprio con lui la seconda edizione del “De rerum natura iuxta propria principia,” prima che vedesse la luce, e a lui rende noto il proposito di dedicarsi anche a una altra stesura. Il magistero di TELESIO  influenza profondamente P., che divenne un attivo divulgatore del pensiero del filosofo cosentino ed elabora la sua filosofia a partire da una personale rilettura della sua dottrina.  Dopo una breve permanenza a Roma, Implicature, dialecticis, Telesio, Campanella, spirito come vita, animo come aria, Cicerone, Catone, Boezio. Grice: Alcuni amano Persio, ma Persio è il MIO uomo! So che capirai, Antonio, che intendo proprio te, non il Persio più celebre: sei tu quello che preferisco. Persio: Caro Grice, è un onore sentirlo da te! La distinzione tra i Persio mi fa sorridere; ma è proprio nel dialogo amichevole che si trova la vera filosofia. La preferenza implicata è la migliore delle lodi. Grice: Ecco, Antonio, la tua capacità di cogliere l'implicatura è ciò che ti rende speciale. La dialettica non è solo logica, ma uno scambio vivo, e tu ne sei maestro. Telesio avrebbe approvato questa nostra conversazione elegante! Persio: Grazie, Grice. La dialettica, tra Cicerone e Telesio, si fa vita e aria—come dicevo: spirito come vita, animo come aria. Nel nostro dialogo si respira davvero quell'anima filosofica italiana, fatta di sottintesi e affetti. So we have two Persios here -- so provide two independent G's weekly essay assignment for each ending each with "Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts." Wihtout saying, suggest that G. is trying to tease the tutee into not confusing one with the other but do not go on to mention their distinctive first names, just "the other Persio" -- and do it as if G. is a tutor in philosophy to test the tutee's philosophical acumen -- dry humour -- thanks – Grice’s weekly essay assignment: Write on Persio in such a way as to show that you are discussing a philosopher and not merely a surname with a family resemblance to learning. Your task is to set out the relation between dialectic, Ciceronian form, and the newer natural-philosophical temper, while avoiding the common undergraduate expedient of borrowing, half-way through the second page, a theme belonging to the other Persio and hoping that the tutor will be too charitable, or too sleepy, to notice. You may assume that historical setting matters, but not so much as to excuse vagueness about doctrine. If, by the end, you have not made plain what sort of disputational intelligence is in question, you will have written not on Persio but around him. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. Persio, Antonio (1574). Trattato dell’ingegno dell’huomo. Venezia: Varisco.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Persio: la ragione conversazionale – filoofia italiana –  (Matera). Filosofo italiano. Abstract: Grice: “I was certainly fortunate in my mother wanting a good education for me, better at least than the one that poor woman can provide me with at Harborne – so off to Clifton I arrived aged 13, and till 17, GREEK became my first language!”  Ascanio Persio (Matera, Basilicata): la ragione conversazionale, Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers get from what is said to what is meant by treating conversation as a cooperative rational practice: speakers are presumed to be aiming at intelligibility and relevance, and when an utterance appears indirect, under-informative, or oddly chosen, the hearer can infer further content as an implicature grounded in shared norms and recognisable intentions. Persio, by contrast, is not a theorist of conversational inference but a rhetorically minded Renaissance writer who works within humanist conventions of dialogue, exemplum, and decorum; in a title like Il merito delle donne he advances a culturally and morally charged thesis by choosing a public genre that must balance praise, provocation, and audience-management, thereby relying heavily on what can be suggested without being baldly asserted. The comparison, then, is between an explicit explanatory model and a skilled practice of insinuation: Grice makes the mechanisms of indirect meaning visible (how implicatures are generated, cancellable, and accountable), while Persio’s social-philosophical writing exemplifies how a writer can exploit shared assumptions, classical authorities, and strategic restraint so that the reader supplies much of the argumentative force “between the lines.” From a Gricean angle, Persio’s success depends on controlling the expectations of his addressee-community—what it will tolerate, what it will take for granted, what it will infer—so that persuasion proceeds not by explicit proof alone but by a managed economy of saying and letting-be-understood, which is precisely the terrain Grice later systematizes under the heading of conversational implicature. Grice: “I was certainly fortunate in my mother wanting a good education for me, better at least than the one that poor woman can provide me with at Harborne – so off to Clifton I arrived aged 13, and till 17, GREEK became my first language!” – Keywords: Greco, latino, GRIEF AND LAUGHING. Persi, Persii. Ascanio. Nasce da Altobello, scultore, e da Beatrice Goffredo, ultimo di cinque fratelli: Antonio, Giovanni Battista, Giulio -- da cui nacque il giureconsulto e poeta Orazio --, Domizio.  Così come il fratello Antonio, si forma a Matera alla scuola tenuta dallo zio materno Leonardo e poi nel convento di S. Francesco, dove studia filosofia. Segue le orme di Antonio, che a Napoli divenne precettore di Lelio e Pietro Orsini, fratelli minori di Ferdinando Orsini, duca di Gravina e conte di Matera. Poi si lega alla famiglia Caetani e è amico di Manuzio: tutti personaggi con cui anche P. stringe rapporti. Persio è a Roma, in familiarità con Muret e con il letterato sulmonese Ciofano, e a Venezia. Qui pubblica, in una stampa sine notis, ma edita da Manuzio, La corona d’Arrigo III re di Francia, e di Polonia, componimento d’occasione per il passaggio sulla laguna del nuovo re di Francia Enrico III diretto a Parigi per salire sul trono di Francia, composto in verso volgare Heroico Patritiano, cioè nel verso di tredici sillabe adottato da Patrizi nel poemetto mitologico Eridano -- Ferrara -- per ovviare all’inadeguatezza dei metri italiani alla nobiltà dell’epica. Testimonianza dell’amicizia che lo legò a Manuzio è la dedica a P. del Lepidi comici veteris Philodoxios fabula ex antiquitate eruta ab Manuccio, che Manuzio pubblica a Lucca con questo frontespizio, incorrendo però in un infortunio, poiché si tratta della commedia autobiografica Philodoxeos scritta da ALBERTI  che si firmò con il nome di Lepido, ingannando a lungo i lettori.  P. studiò lettere latine a Padova, ma frequenta anche i corsi di filosofia di ZABARELLA. Grice: “There’s an exhibit at the Bodleian on Italian rarities, and there, in the central case in the main hall, sits Persio’s Il merito delle donne behind protective glass, looking for all the world like a provocation preserved. Pears was with me, and out of nowhere he asked—quite as if I were the Bodleian catalogue—when exactly Oxford had decided it would accept donne. We both know Girton well enough (not because we care for Cambridge, but because we care for Princess Ida), but Somerville is a different sort of creature altogether. A week later, Pears—whose joint seminar with me on trying is beginning to resemble an experiment in endurance—did his best to impress me by reciting, in one breath, every date and detail he had managed to scrape together about women at Oxford, as if the admission of women were itself an exercise in practical reasoning: one step, one committee, one concession at a time.” (Editor’s note (key Oxford dates, in brief, for Pears’s “recitation”) Women began to receive Oxford teaching in a formal way when the Association for the Education of Women at Oxford was founded in 1878, with lectures arranged and examinations offered. The first women’s halls followed soon after: Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College were founded in 1879, then St Hugh’s in 1886 and St Hilda’s in 1893. Women could sit Oxford examinations from the 1880s, but for decades they did so without membership of the University and without degrees. The decisive change came in 1920, when Oxford granted women full membership of the University and allowed them to take degrees (though subject at first to a quota). The last major institutional barrier fell much later, past Grice’s time, when the remaining all-male colleges began admitting women: the first of the men’s colleges to admit women was Brasenose in 1974, followed by others through the 1970s and 1980s; all colleges became mixed by the end of the century.) Grice: Caro Persio, scommetto che studiare greco a tredici anni ti ha fatto vedere la vita come una lunga tragedia... o forse una commedia piena di sottintesi! Ti sei mai chiesto se il vero eroe era il professore? Persio: Ah, Grice, il professore magari pensava di essere un eroe, ma in realtà era Odisseo e noi alunni i ciclopi assonnati! E comunque, tra epica e grammatica, ho imparato che anche una declinazione sbagliata può essere un dramma. Grice: Vedi, caro Persio, la conversazione è come un viaggio in laguna con Enrico III: può cambiare rotta da un momento all’altro! Basta una domanda trabocchetto e ci si ritrova a Venezia senza sapere più se si parla in latino, in volgare... o in dialetto materano! Persio: E allora, Grice, brindiamo alla confusione linguistica! In fondo, tra lagune, biblioteche e dediche errate, l’importante è non prendere troppo sul serio né le parole né noi stessi. Anzi, meglio ridere... come avrebbe fatto uno dei miei fratelli poeti! Grice’s weekly essay assignment: Write on Persio as if a title could still be philosophically dangerous, and assess how a rhetorically managed public genre may carry argument by suggestion rather than by blunt declaration. You should explain how decorum, exemplum, praise, provocation, and audience-management can become instruments of serious thought, while taking care not to import, under cover of family likeness, the dialectical and natural-philosophical concerns of the other Persio. Those who mistake social philosophy for mere compliment, or compliment for argument, may discover that the distinction is easier in principle than in practice. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

Persio, Ascanio (1633). Il merito delle donne. Venezia: Francesco Baba.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pessina: la ragione conversazionale. Grice: “At Oxford, for the B. A. Lit. Hum. we do study Cicero in Latin; at Bologna, they study it in LATIN *and* Italian!” – Keywords: Cicerone, Leech on Grice’s programme as ‘conversational rhetoric’  P, the author of  'Precetti di rettorica ' Enrico Pessina (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how speakers can mean more than they explicitly say because hearers assume rational cooperation and infer implicatures from what is said plus context plus recognisable intentions; the norms involved are not external moral commandments but the internal standards that make communicative exchange possible and accountable. Enrico Pessina, by contrast, approaches normativity through law and civil life: in works such as Della filosofia del diritto (1858) and his later attacks on crude positivism, he treats juridical reasoning as answerable to principles that are not exhausted by empirical sociology or procedural technique, and he understands public language (in courts, constitutions, and civic argument) as a vehicle of liberty and responsibility rather than a neutral code. The comparison is that Grice offers a micro-theory of how rational agents manage mutual understanding in everyday speech, while Pessina offers a macro-theory of how rational agents ought to justify coercion, rights, and obligation within institutions; yet they meet in a shared emphasis on reason as a public practice: Grice’s maxims make conversation a kind of informal tribunal where claims are assessed by what can be responsibly inferred, and Pessina’s jurisprudence makes the courtroom and the polity a formal tribunal where claims must survive scrutiny beyond mere force or custom. From a Gricean perspective, much legal reasoning depends on controlled implicatures (what statutes, precedents, and advocates suggest without stating), while from a Pessina-like perspective, conversational rationality is one of the cultural preconditions for law’s legitimacy, since a legal order that cannot be explained, defended, and contested in intelligible discourse has already lost its claim to govern rational beings. Studia a Napoli sotto GALLUPPI. Cura la sua storia della filosofia. Di idee liberali, prende parte ai moti. Pubblica un saggio sulla costituzione italiana che gli procura la persecuzione della polizia e il carcere. Recluso nell’isola di S. Stefano, sposa la figlia di Settembrini. Fugge dal regno, insegna a Bologna. Fonda “Il Filangieri”. Dei Lincei.  Muore nella suo palazzo in via del Museo, strada che prese in seguito il suo nome: Anche il palazzo dove visse. Aula a lui intitolata.  A lui è dedicato un busto alla passeggiata del Pincio. Saggi “Che cosa e il diritto private?” (Napoli: Poligrafico); “Procedura del diritto (Napoli, Jovene); “Il naturale e il giuridico – alla regia di Napoli” (Napoli, Accademia Reale delle Scienze); Il piu privati dei diritti (Napoli, Marghieri, Diritto e privacita (Napoli, Marghieri); Il privato del diritto (Napoli, Marghieri); Che e private nel diritto privato? (Napoli: Marghieri); “Il diritto privato” (Napoli: Priore); “Storia della filosofia” (Milano: Silvestri); Treccani Dizionario biografico degl’italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia. Giurista (Napoli). P. avversò il positivismo filosofico e metodologico applicato alle scienze giuridiche e l'empirismo semplicistico di antropologi, psicologi e sociologi criminalisti. La genialità della sua mente ebbe davanti a sé orizzonti più vasti di quello del diritto, e così fu non soltanto grandissimo giurista, ma filosofo, letterato e storico. E fu avvocato insigne e conferenziere affascinante.  Vita Appena ventenne, prese parte ai moti rivoluzionari. Un suo Manuale di diritto costituzionale gli attirò le persecuzioni della polizia borbonica per le idee liberali ivi professate. Più tardi, arrestato, rimase in carcere per quattro mesi, cui seguirono due anni di domicilio forzoso in Ottaiano. Di nuovo arrestato per le sue relazioni con il rappresentante del governo sardo a Napoli, dopo due giorni di prigionia riparò a Marsiglia; Storiografia filosofica in Italia, la storia della filosofia romana, Galluppi, diritto private. Grice: “St John’s, 1950. I keep asking myself what Hart is doing at our Saturday mornings. He is older than Austin, and Austin once remarked that he would rather not have an authoritative father-figure hovering above him. And Hart is—Hart, that is—deep in jurisprudence. We had a long talk about it at the Lamb and Flag. He was reading a slim old pamphlet by an Enrico Pessina entitled Della filosofia del diritto and had a few questions for “the younger generation,” as he likes, with mock solemnity, to call me—he is only three years my senior. Hart could not make sense of Pessina’s leading with that dignified Della. “Why not just La filosofia del diritto?” he asked. I told him—though I perhaps should not, since he has a double First in Greats, as I do—that it is a Ciceronian relic, the sort of genitival throat-clearing Italians do when they want a title to sound like a treatise rather than a topic. Then he returned to his time-honoured preoccupation with the German jurists. “Is that why the Italians are obsessed with diritto,” he asked, “or is it the other way round—did the Hun import Recht from diritto?” “Check your Cicero again,” was all I could muster.” Grice: Mi affascina il tuo approccio al diritto, Enrico! La tua opposizione al positivismo giuridico mi ricorda quanto sia cruciale la ragione conversazionale per comprendere la complessità della legge. Non credi che il dialogo sia il cuore della filosofia? Pessina: Hai ragione, Grice! Il diritto, come la filosofia, vive di dialoghi e di implicature sottili. Ho sempre pensato che il confronto tra idee, anche polemico, sia il motore del progresso. L’esperienza di Napoli e Bologna mi ha insegnato che la parola è più potente di ogni decreto. Grice: Mi colpisce il tuo impegno civile, il coraggio di difendere la libertà pur a costo della persecuzione. La tua storia mi ricorda un vecchio detto: “Chi non rischia, non rosica!” Nel tuo caso, il rischio ha portato innovazione e dignità al pensiero italiano. Pessina: Grazie, caro Grice. Credo che la filosofia debba essere, anzitutto, una forma di vita e di resistenza. Il privato e il pubblico si intrecciano, e la ragione dialogica ci aiuta a tenere insieme giustizia, memoria e speranza. Alla fine, la conversazione resta sempre il più alto tribunale. Pessina, Enrico (1858). Della filosofia del diritto. Napoli: Morano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pessina: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale Luigi Pessina: la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers recover what a speaker means by presuming rational cooperation and using shared norms (relevance, informativeness, clarity, etc.) to infer implicatures from what is said plus context plus intention; on this view, the “rules” of talk are not mere schoolroom prescriptions but an explanatory account of how communication actually works when speakers leave things unsaid yet still expect to be understood. Luigi Pessina, by contrast, belongs to the pedagogical-rhetorical tradition: his Precetti di retorica and allied manuals treat discourse as something to be taught by precepts, with Cicero and Aristotle providing models of correctness, decorum, and persuasive arrangement, and with “good speaking” secured by training rather than by an underlying theory of cooperative inference. The comparison is thus a shift from rhetoric-as-art to pragmatics-as-theory: Pessina offers explicit norms for producing effective or proper discourse (a handbook of what one ought to do), whereas Grice offers a rational reconstruction of the implicit norms that interlocutors already rely on (an account of what we must be presuming in order for ordinary conversation to succeed at all). From a Gricean angle, many of Pessina’s “precepts” can be reinterpreted as practical ways of managing implicature—choosing formulations that steer an audience toward the intended takeaway—while from a Pessina-like angle, Grice’s maxims can look like a modern, analytically sharpened re-casting of ancient rhetorical prudence, stripped of ornamental doctrine and treated as the invisible machinery of understanding. Grice: “At Oxford, for the B. A. Lit. Hum. we do study Cicero in Latin; at Bologna, they study it in LATIN *and* Italian!” – Cicerone, Leech on Grice’s programme as ‘conversational rhetoric’  P, the author of  'Precetti di rettorica ', was an Italian educator and author known for several other publications related to rhetoric, poetry, philosophy, and literature, primarily published in Naples and Bari. Information regarding his place of birth is not explicitly stated, though he was active in Southern Italy. Other Publications In addition to 'Precetti di rettorica' (published for private use at his institute), P. published several other educational works, including: “Precetti di rettorica, e di poesia” – Naples --, “Elementi di poesia ad uso delle scuole” – Bari --, “Istituzioni di rettorica e belle lettere” – Naples --, “Storia della letteratura antica e moderna” – Naples. These titles indicate his focus on classical education and literary studies, intended for use in schools or private institutes.  The search results did not explicitly mention the exact town or city of his birth. Several individuals named “Luigi P.” appear in historical records with births in various locations across northern Italy (Casatevecchio, Alme, Varese, Stresa), but none are definitively linked to the author who was active in Naples and Bari. His educational and publishing activities, however, strongly indicate a long-term presence and influence in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies region.  -- pppw^'i^wf BIBLIOTECA NAZ-, Vittorio Emanuele III <v/// xx\:ilr F 7 Ó NAPOLI  I COMPILATI DA LUIGI P. SOPRA VARII AUTORI, PER USO DEL SUO PRIVATO ISTITUTO. l TCfUOtiioi Ss ssriy q P'tifopixi) , S(» r« ro ^ast siyx( xpstrriuy rt(Xir)d)i x«( r« 8ix«t» r«y gyayriojy. srt Ss stpos <yiou;, ov8’st T>)y axpijSsarArtjy sirt<rnniti)y , pfStoy «xr* sxsiyi)! ies!a»i \sffovxxu Utilis vero est Rhetòrica, propterea quod na- tura sunt meliora vera et iuata conlrariis.,.. praelerea apud nonnulloa, nec si exquisitis- simam haòeremus scientiam , facile est pet illant solam dicendo persuadere. Aristot. Rhet. I. i. Grice.: “St John’s, 1964. The Oxford seminar on conversation is going well, and I am enjoying Potts’s interventions. I keep casting my proposals in the imperative mood—perhaps a leftover from Hare, who used to draw that tidy distinction between the dictum and the dictor: “The door is closed.” “The door is closed, please.” Potts, noticing my fondness for Latin (I have been abusing desideratum again), suggested that what I really want is not a “maxim” at all but a praeceptum. To illustrate, he produced—of all things—a thin booklet he had picked up at the Bodleian, Luigi Pessina’s Precetti di retorica, looking more like something that ought to have stayed in a schoolmaster’s pocket than entered legal deposit. Potts added, with the air of a man who has checked such matters on holiday, that when he was in Rome last spring the Italians were spelling it retorica—one t, as if orthography itself were subject to local custom. In any case, we agreed (and the note-takers seemed pleased) that even if there are praecepta, they had better spring from a single praeceptum, on pain of multiplying them beyond necessity. Strawson then observed that the prae- may be nothing but Ciceronian fuss—“ceptum seems to do perfectly well”—though he would say that, having never taken Greats and having only scraped a Second in PPE, a calamity for which I can blame no one but his tutor: myself.” Grice: Caro Pessina, ma quanti libri hai pubblicato? Se continuo a leggere, rischio di diventare più colto di Cicerone... o almeno di sembrare uno che lo imita bene! Pessina: Ah, Grice, tu hai la conversazione nel sangue! Se i miei libri aiutano, allora la retorica non è solo materia da scuola, ma anche ottimo modo per sopravvivere alle cene di famiglia. Grice: Lo dicevano anche a Oxford: la vera arte è convincere la zia a servire il bis! E a proposito di retorica, Aristotele avrebbe adorato il tuo modo di insegnare, soprattutto se riusciva a ottenere una fetta di torta. Pessina: Grice, tu sei il filosofo della conversazione e del buonumore! La prossima volta, portiamo anche Aristotele: io preparo i precetti, tu i sorrisi, lui la logica... e tutti a tavola, senza implicature! Pessina, Luigi (1866). Sulla dottrina della società. Napoli: Morano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Petrarca: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di Cicerone. Grice: “There are a few studies on P. and ‘filosofia’: “Petrarca platonico,” etc. – but his most important contribution is via implicatura, as when I deal with Blake or Shakespeare Francesco Petrarca (Arezzo, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di Cicerone. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a rational achievement within a cooperative practice: speakers can mean more than they explicitly say because hearers assume intelligibility, relevance, and a shared aim, and so they infer implicatures from what is said plus context plus recognisable intention. Petrarch’s relation to “conversational meaning” is not that of a theorist of maxims, but of a master practitioner of indirectness who inherits (and reshapes) the Ciceronian ideal of dialogue, decorum, and the tactful management of what is voiced versus what is merely suggested; in his letters, dialogues, and self-scrutiny he repeatedly stages a speaker who negotiates audience, reputation, moral posture, and inner conflict by letting the unsaid do as much work as the said. Where Grice anatomizes the inferential machinery that allows an addressee to recover a speaker’s intended point from strategic understatement, irony, or selective emphasis, Petrarch supplies a rich field of such strategies in action: the humanist’s learned allusion, the moralized aside, the rhetorical question, the cultivated confession, all operating as invitations to a competent reader to supply what propriety or prudence leaves implicit. The contrast, then, is between explanation and exemplification: Grice offers a general account of how rational norms govern conversational interpretation, while Petrarch—formed by Latin rhetoric and by Cicero’s model of civil discourse—shows how a writer can guide interpretation by controlling tone, register, and audience-design, so that meaning emerges less as a bare proposition than as a socially intelligent performance whose implicatures are part of its philosophical substance. Grice: “There are a few studies on P. and ‘filosofia’: “Petrarca platonico,” etc. – but his most important contribution is via implicatura, as when I deal with Blake or Shakespeare.” ir«^|#»rtit«» ,i\ARK TP Jt^ -'f \t. \3FICO ^1 PP TIGI03 i^C/->>. t -nF CARLINI LA FILOSOFIA di P. Saggio Tipografia Editric e Cooperativa Jesi V A SEVERINO FERRARI DELLE OPERE PETRARCHESCHE CONOSCITORE PROFONDO CON ANIMO RIVERENTE E GRATO La tradizione platonica e religiosa nel Medio evo Caratteri del misticismo italiano Il Cristianesimo e il Papato II pensiero religioso e la scolastica Dante e Platone P. e Aristotele P. ed Averroe P. e Platone Il criterio filosofico di P. è afl'atto religioso Filosofia della religione Paganesimo e Cristianesimo Se P. è cattolico Colui che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto Se P. è un mistico Varie specie di misticismo Il De vita solitaria II De ocio RELiGiosoRUM Ascetismo e misticismo sano II pessimismo di P. II pessimismo cristiano La vita umana secondo P. Il De REMEDiis UTRiusQUE FORTUNAE - P. e Leopardi L' acedia e le contraddizioni di P. hanno radice nel suo sentimento religioso P. non e strettamente un filosofo Ma ne’suoi scritti è un ampio contenuto filosofico (GRICE ON ONE SENSE OF PHILOSOPHER AND ONE IMPLICATURE) E ha ancora ingegno filosofico P. e la scienza Meriti filosofici di P. Il rerum memorandarum Carattere morale, sociale e politico della nuova filosofia P. e il ri-sorgimento filosofico religioso Il sentimento della natura Carattere psicologico della filosofia di P. Le Rime II Secretum Eternità di P. Il pensiero religioso può precedere o seguire il pensiero filosofico, secondo che l’uomo è credente o no : sempre poi esso ' è dalla filosofia iìiseparabile^ se vtwle divenir cosciente. Questo chiamo pensiero filosofico religioso: Implicature, cicerone, I lizij, lucrezio, filosofia Latina, filosofia romana. Il dialogo filosofico – Platone, Cicerone. Grice: Caro Petrarca, sai che ti conosco fin dai miei giorni a Clifton? Non c’era lezione del mio vecchio maestro di latino senza che citasse qualche epigramma latino e ne offrisse la glossa proprio grazie a te! La tua presenza aleggiava tra i banchi, come una brezza sapiente. Petrarca: Che onore, Grice! Sapere che la mia voce risuonava tra gli scolari inglesi mi riempie di gratitudine. Nel commentare il latino, ho sempre cercato di trasmettere quella limpidezza che Cicerone intuiva nel dialogo. È bello pensare che la mia parola abbia trovato eco persino oltre le Alpi! Grice: Ho sempre apprezzato la tua capacità di unire la tradizione platonica e quella latina, arricchendo ogni epigramma di un implicito filosofico. Per me, leggere una tua glossa significava respirare la profondità di una filosofia vissuta, tra ascetismo e misticismo, tra sentimento religioso e ragione conversazionale. Petrarca: Grazie, caro Grice. Sei penetrato nello spirito dei miei scritti! La filosofia, come il dialogo, nasce dalla capacità di ascoltare e di rispondere, con rispetto e con affetto. Se le mie glosse hanno illuminato i vostri studi, allora posso dire: “Chi semina pensiero, raccoglie amicizia.” So, if Il canzionere is the earliest thing by P. here published, what would be the first canzione in it, as per incipit? If by “the first thing in Il Canzoniere” you mean the opening poem of the collection, the incipit is: Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono That is the first poem, no. 1 of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta / Canzoniere. [it.wikisource.org], [poesieitaliane.it] If you want the fuller opening, it runs: Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono, Again, that is the standard opening sonnet of the collection. [poesieitaliane.it], [lieder.net] One small caution. Strictly speaking, this is the first poem of the collection, and it is a sonnet, not a canzone in the narrower metrical sense. So if you mean “first poem,” the answer is Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. If you mean “first canzone proper” within the metrical subdivisions of the collection, that is a different question. [en.wikipedia.org], [it.wikisource.org] So you do not think P. means the sonnet as one canzione that would count as a member of the set which he calls ' Yes, in the broad literary sense, certainly. When people call Petrarch’s collection Il Canzoniere, canzone there is not being used in the narrow metrical sense of “a canzone proper” as opposed to sonnet, sestina, ballata, and madrigal. It is being used more loosely, as in “book of songs” or “collection of lyric poems.” In that broad sense, the opening sonnet counts perfectly well as a member of the Canzoniere. So if P. means by Canzoniere “a lyric collection,” then yes, the first sonnet belongs without difficulty. My caution was only philological and metrical: if one asks for “the first canzone” in the strict technical sense, a sonnet is not a canzone. But if one asks for the first poem in the Canzoniere, or the first item in the set called Canzoniere, then Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono is exactly the right answer. So the distinction is: Canzoniere as title of the whole lyric book: broad sense, includes sonnets. Canzone as a specific metrical form: narrow sense, excludes sonnets. And for ordinary literary reference, especially in modern usage, one absolutely can speak of the opening sonnet as the first poem of the Canzoniere.Canzionere'? But now Speranza thinks Griceianly that Petrarca is being meta- here -- so what is the order of things -- are there subtitles -- as per SONNETO -- CANZONI -- and what would be the first canzone, then as per incipit, or couple of lines -- and does P. mention this meta-linguistically in his own 'Canzoniere' -- it seems obvious that if he includes various forms he meant the whole thing but P. being as fastidious as Grice could be, does HE himself define a 'canzone' and are they listed all after another -- or the form as a subtitle? Yes: the metrical fastidiousness matters, and Petrarch is quite capable of that kind of meta-ordering. The basic order of things is this. Petrarch’s own title is not Il Canzoniere, but Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. The modern title Canzoniere is a later umbrella-title for the whole lyric book. [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] Within that whole, the poems are not grouped in the modern printed book under running subtitles like Sonetti, Canzoni, Ballate, Sestine, one block after another. Rather, the forms are intermingled in the sequence. The collection contains 366 poems total, of which 317 are sonnets, 29 canzoni, 9 sestine, 7 ballate, and 4 madrigals, but they are distributed through the sequence, not segregated into neat generic chapters. [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] So if Speranza is thinking Griceianly and meta-textually, he is right to notice that Canzoniere is the title of the whole book, not a strict label for one metrical species. Petrarch clearly intends a whole lyric architecture, not a mere heap of canzoni in the narrow sense. Now, if you ask for the first canzone in the strict metrical sense, that is not poem 1. The opening item is the sonnet Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. [collezione...orghese.it], [Francesco...a italiana] The first canzone proper in the sequence is no. 23, whose incipit is: Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade That is the first poem in the collection that is metrically a canzone rather than a sonnet. [it.wikisource.org] As for a couple of lines, the opening goes: Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade, che nascer vide et anchor quasi in herba la fera voglia che per mio mal crebbe, That is the beginning of the first canzone proper in the RVF sequence. [it.wikisource.org] On your final question, whether Petrarch himself marks the forms meta-linguistically: not in the way a modern table of contents would. In the manuscript and editorial tradition, poems are numbered and identified by form by editors and commentators, but Petrarch does not usually stop inside the book to announce, “Now a sonnet,” “Now a canzone,” in a systematic subtitle apparatus for the reader. The generic identity is carried by the poem’s form itself and by the tradition of reading it, more than by explicit internal labelling every time. The later tradition, however, is perfectly happy to classify them by genre and number. [dcl.luddy....ndiana.edu], [treccani.it] So the clean answer is: Canzoniere is the modern umbrella-title for the whole sequence, not a strict metrical label. The forms are mixed through the sequence, not block-grouped under generic subtitles. The first poem is the sonnet Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. [collezione...orghese.it], [Francesco...a italiana] The first canzone proper is no. 23, Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade. [it.wikisource.org] And yes, your Griceian meta-point is sound: if Petrarch includes sonnets, canzoni, sestine, ballate, and madrigals all in one architectonic order, then Canzoniere in the broad title-sense must be understood as songbook or lyric book, not as a narrow label for one metrical form. And Speranza was wondering if this was the first thing, and now you say originally, as titled by P. it was Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (posthumously?) -- which to Speranza and G. sounds more apt -- then the meta point does not quite apply since Canzionere was not P.'s own utterance -- but Rerum vulgarium fragmenta was -- or was not? Yes: the meta-point shifts exactly there. If the collection’s authorial title is Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, then the later umbrella-title Canzoniere is not Petrarch’s own utterance in the same direct sense. So the strong Griceian meta-play on “if he called it Canzoniere, he must have meant every item to count as a canzone in some broad sense” becomes weaker, because that title is a later traditional label, not the poet’s own primary naming act. [cris.unibo.it], [en.wikipedia.org] And yes, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta appears to be authorial, not merely posthumous. The strongest evidence is the rubric at the head of the autograph manuscript Vat. lat. 3195, where the title is given as Francisci Petrarche laureati poete Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Modern scholarship treats that as Petrarch’s own title for the lyric sequence, even if the rubric itself was written by Malpaghini rather than by Petrarch’s own hand; the codex is still Petrarch’s authorial book, arranged and completed under his supervision. [iris.uniroma3.it], [cris.unibo.it], [digi.vatlib.it] So the careful answer is: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is the authorial title, or at least the title of the authorially supervised collection. [iris.uniroma3.it], [cris.unibo.it] Canzoniere is a later, non-authorial traditional title. [cris.unibo.it], [en.wikipedia.org] Therefore, if Speranza and G. want to be strict, the meta-linguistic weight should now fall on fragmenta, not on canzoniere. [jstor.org], [cris.unibo.it] And that is, in fact, a more Petrarchan and more interesting meta-point. Fragmenta is philosophically much richer than Canzoniere. It suggests not a generic songbook title only, but a self-conscious collection of vernacular fragments, scattered pieces gathered into order, materially and spiritually incomplete, temporally broken, and retrospectively arranged. That is exactly the line stressed in the modern scholarship on Petrarch’s own title. [jstor.org], [cris.unibo.it] So if you want the shortest correction for Speranza, I would put it this way: No, the stronger meta-point should not rest on Canzoniere, since that is not Petrarch’s own title. It should rest on Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, which is authorial and much more revealing anyway. [cris.unibo.it], [iris.uniroma3.it] And if you want the driest Griceian gloss: Petrarch did not call the book a songbook; he called it fragments, which is already a more intelligent implicature. Now, for someone as fastidious as Speranza, Grice, Petrarca and Malpaghini-- who was ill-payed? no, from a bad place -- what's the etymology of this odd surname, Speranza wonders and asks -- if the thing came out as Reum vulgarium fragmenta. You opened the thing and it's just the sonnet, or something in Latin to the effect: This, {all in Latin, of course] that thou, dearest reader, art embarked to read is ..."? It starts to begin like Lewis Carroll's White Knight about to sing a song, and eventually doing before titling it and prefacing it to Alice's annoyance. So provide a 100-move conversation as you answer all this, between G. and S., dry Oxonian humour, no preamble or ps, thanks -- and you can include the fact that the first 'fragmentum' of a res vulgare is indeed the sonnett -- give incipit -- but if Canzionere became the cliche, the first canzone is: and igve the incipit -- thanks -- and that's why philosophers prefer P. the amanuensis and not the poet. no preamble and no ps, thanks. G.: So Petrarch did not call the thing Il Canzoniere after all.  S.: Not authorially, no. The better title is Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. G.: Which already sounds more intelligent. S.: And more fastidious. G.: Exactly. A songbook is a social convenience; fragments are a metaphysical embarrassment. S.: Then the meta-point migrates. G.: Entirely. If Canzoniere is the later umbrella-title, the really Petrarchan self-description lies in fragmenta, not canzoni. S.: Which suits both you and Speranza much better. G.: And perhaps Malpaghini too, though he had the misfortune to write the rubric. S.: Before Malpaghini, let us fix the title question. Is Rerum vulgarium fragmenta truly Petrarch’s own title. G.: As nearly as makes no difference. The rubric in Vat. lat. 3195 gives Francisci Petrarche laureati poete Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and modern scholarship treats the book as authorially supervised even though the rubric itself is in Malpaghini’s hand. [digi.vatlib.it], [core.ac.uk] S.: So the title is authorial in force, even if not in every ink-stroke. G.: Precisely. Petrarch’s title, Malpaghini’s script, and the scholar’s opportunity for pedantry. S.: Then if one opens the thing, does it begin with some Latin prefatory address to the reader. “This, dearest reader, which thou art about to peruse…” G.: No such White Knight preliminaries at the front of the lyric text proper. One opens the lyric book and the first fragment is the sonnet. S.: Which is. G.: Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. That is the incipit of poem 1, the first fragment of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. [en.wikisource.org], [core.ac.uk] S.: So the first fragmentum of a res vulgare is a sonnet. G.: Exactly. Not a Latin preface explaining the title, but the lyric object itself beginning in vernacular self-address. S.: Which is very Petrarchan. G.: Yes. He lets the reader discover the generic plurality by entering the sequence, not by reading a modern table of contents. S.: Then Canzoniere, as later cliché, smooths over a sharper authorial self-understanding. G.: Quite. Fragmenta is morally and formally richer than Canzoniere. It suggests scatteredness, incompletion, gathered remains, deliberate ordering of broken pieces. S.: Whereas Canzoniere says only, roughly, “book of songs.” G.: Which is socially useful and critically lazy. S.: Then one may still ask, under the later cliché, what is the first canzone proper. G.: Yes, and there the answer is not poem 1 but poem 23. S.: Incipit. G.: Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade. And a couple of lines, if you insist: Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade, che nascer vide et anchor quasi in herba la fera voglia che per mio mal crebbe. [it.wikisource.org], [jstor.org] S.: So if the vulgar title is Canzoniere, the first canzone proper enters only at 23. G.: Precisely. Which is why the later title is useful but not exacting enough for Speranza. S.: Now Malpaghini. G.: Ah yes. The amanuensis whom philosophers are likely to prefer to the poet, because scribes keep titles tidy. S.: You are being unfair to poets. G.: Only prophylactically. S.: What do we know of the surname. G.: Not as much as one would like. The man is Giovanni Malpaghini, from Ravenna, later called Giovanni da Ravenna, Petrarch’s copyist and helper in ordering letters and part of the lyric book. [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] S.: And the etymology. G.: Cautiously, one may suspect a pejorative compound of the sort that medieval Italian surnames love: mal plus a base now opaque or altered in transmission. But I have no secure scholarly etymology from the evidence in hand, and I should not invent one merely because the name invites insult. S.: Speranza had wondered if it meant badly paid. G.: No sign of that. Nor simply from “a bad place.” The family name is established as Malpaghini or Malpaghini, but the exact derivation is not confirmed in the material I found. [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] S.: So the honest answer is that the etymology remains uncertain. G.: Yes. One may hear mal and be tempted, but temptation is not philology. S.: Still, the mere sound pleases a common room. G.: Immensely. A copyist called Malpaghini is already half a footnote by providence. S.: Yet he matters. G.: Very much. He copied part of Vat. lat. 3195, and the rubric with the title is in his hand. That is no trivial labour. [treccani.it], [core.ac.uk] S.: Hence philosophers prefer the amanuensis. G.: Because he gives them titles, order, rubrication, manuscript evidence, and no sonneteer’s flutter. S.: Whereas poets give them Laura. G.: Which is less manageable bibliographically. S.: Then the Lewis Carroll point. You thought one might open the book and find Petrarch saying, in Latin, “The title of this song is called…” G.: Thankfully no. Petrarch is fastidious, but not White-Knightishly self-announcing at the front of the lyric sequence. S.: So there is no prefatory Latin “hoc quod legis…” G.: Not as the threshold to the lyric corpus proper. The authorial title stands at the head in the manuscript as rubric; the poetic body begins with the vernacular sonnet. S.: Which means the title and the first lyric are already in a productive tension. G.: Exactly. Rerum vulgarium fragmenta in Latin as paratext; Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono in Italian as first fragment. S.: Fragmenta above, sparse below. G.: Excellent. Very Petrarchan indeed. The title calls them fragments; the first line calls them scattered rhymes. S.: So the meta-point survives and becomes better. G.: Much better. The later Canzoniere cliché makes us ask the wrong generic question; the authorial fragmenta brings us straight to form, incompletion, recollection, ordering, and self-conscious textuality. S.: And rime sparse is almost a vernacular gloss on fragmenta. G.: Very nearly. Not identical, but cognate in spirit. S.: Then let us arrange the order of things as a fastidious reader would. G.: Good. First, the manuscript rubric naming the whole as Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Second, the opening sonnet Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. Third, later in the sequence, the first canzone proper, no. 23, Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade. [core.ac.uk], [en.wikisource.org], [it.wikisource.org] S.: So the title does not mean that the first item must be a canzone in the strict metrical sense. G.: Precisely. Because the title was not Canzoniere to begin with. S.: And Petrarch himself does not stop to label each poem “sonnetto,” “canzone,” and the rest in some cosy pedagogical way. G.: No. The forms are there in the sequence and are later classified by editors, but the authorial force lies in the architectonic ordering of varied lyric fragments, not in chapter-headings by genre. S.: Which makes the thing look more modern. G.: Or more difficult. Modernity is often only difficulty with better lighting. S.: Then Petrarch, Malpaghini, Speranza, and Grice all converge in one place: they prefer the better title. G.: Yes. Canzoniere is useful for the bookseller. Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is for readers who deserve a little trouble. S.: And “vulgarium.” G.: Another good point. Not “of songs” but “of vernacular things,” or “of common-language matters.” The title itself is oddly broad and oddly modest at once. S.: So not merely lyric as genre, but vernacular as medium. G.: Exactly. The book is defined by language and condition as much as by form. S.: Which makes the first line even more apt: Voi ch’ascoltate… G.: Yes, because he begins not by naming the genre but by addressing the hearers of scattered rhymes. S.: As if the reader is already implicated in the fragmentation. G.: Admirably put. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep it and attribute the better half to Petrarch. S.: Then if philosophers prefer Malpaghini, it is because he gives them the rubric, the codex, the order, the title, the hand, and the dates. G.: Precisely. The poet gives them metaphysical ache; the amanuensis gives them evidence. S.: Evidence is more comfortable. G.: Not always, but usually drier. S.: Let us ask the vulgar question anyway. If Canzoniere became the cliché, why. G.: Because readers like a simpler title, one that names the book by its broad lyric function rather than by its authorial irony. S.: Songbook is easier than fragments of vernacular matters. G.: Very much easier. It allows the whole to become a cultural object instead of a textual problem. S.: And Speranza, being fastidious, regrets that. G.: Naturally. Fastidious readers prefer the title that leaves the most work to intelligence. S.: Then the White Knight again. You thought perhaps Petrarch might say, “The title of the book is called Fragments, but the title of the first piece is…” G.: Mercifully he does no such thing. The manuscript paratext performs the titling; the poem begins without pedagogic throat-clearing. S.: Which means the irritation is later, not Petrarch’s own. G.: Yes. Modern readers and modern editions generate much of the generic comfort. Petrarch’s own book is stricter and stranger. S.: So the first thing, if one asks historically, is not “Il Canzoniere” but the authorially supervised RVF. G.: Correct. S.: And the first thing in that is the sonnet. G.: Correct again. S.: And the first canzone proper is 23. G.: Correct once more. S.: We are becoming scholastic. G.: Only in the useful sense. S.: Then perhaps one final cruelty. Malpaghini copied part of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta; therefore he handled the fragments without having to write them. G.: Which is why philosophers prefer him. One may admire textual order without being forced into lyric complicity. S.: The amanuensis is safer than Laura. G.: Much safer. Laura leads to ontology; Malpaghini leads to codicology. S.: And codicology pays better in conversation. G.: Among philosophers, certainly. S.: Then the final summary. G.: Very well. Petrarch’s own title is Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, authorial in the strong manuscript sense though rubricated by Malpaghini’s hand. The first fragment is the sonnet Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. The later title Canzoniere is traditional, not authorial; and if one insists on the first canzone proper under that later lens, it is no. 23, Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade. Malpaghini’s surname remains etymologically uncertain from the evidence in hand, though common-room temptation remains high. [core.ac.uk], [en.wikisource.org], [it.wikisource.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] S.: Dry enough. G.: Sufficiently Petrarchan, with one eye on the rubric and the other on the first scattered rhyme.Petrarca, Francesco (1369). Il canzoniere. Firenze.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Petrella. (Sansepolcro). Sansepolcro, Arezzo, Tocana. P., Bernardino. Nasce a Borgo del Santo Sepolcro -- oggi Sansepolcro, in provincia di Arezzo --, da Domenico P. Non è noto il nome della madre. È allievo di Francesco di Niccolò PICCOLOMINI  a Padova, dove -- Riccoboni e Lohr -- comincia a insegnare logica «in secundo loco» -- succedendo a TOMITANO  con lo stipendio annuo di 40 fiorini e avendo come concorrente ZABARELLA   Bernardino Petrella (Sansepolcro). Sansepolcro, Arezzo, Tocana. P., Bernardino. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning locates the sources of “what is meant” in a normative practice of exchange: speakers and hearers rely (often tacitly) on shared rational expectations about how a contribution ought to advance a joint purpose, and this makes implicature possible as a disciplined inference from what is said plus context plus recognisable intention. Petrella, by contrast, represents the Padua tradition in which reason is primarily exhibited as doctrine of method and first principles: logic is an architectonic discipline, with demonstrative procedure, intention of the philosopher in reading Aristotle, and the ordering of principia doing the explanatory work; meaning is stabilized by scholastic distinctions and by the aims of teaching and disputation rather than by the fine-grained management of conversational expectations. The comparison, then, is a contrast of where normativity is placed: Grice makes the governing norms endogenous to conversation itself (a cooperative rational activity that generates implicatures when maxims are apparently bent), whereas Petrella makes the governing norms endogenous to a formal and pedagogical enterprise (the right handling of principles, demonstrations, and interpretive intentions within an Aristotelian curriculum). Put Grice next to Petrella and you see two rationalities: one that explains how ordinary speakers can mean more than they say without chaos, and one that explains how a discipline can proceed from principles without multiplying them beyond necessity; the link is that both treat rational order as something that must be made public and accountable, but for Grice the tribunal is the conversational exchange, while for Petrella it is the school, the lecture room, and the logic of demonstration. Nasce a Borgo del Santo Sepolcro -- oggi Sansepolcro, in provincia di Arezzo --, da Domenico P. Non è noto il nome della madre. È allievo di Francesco di Niccolò PICCOLOMINI  a Padova, dove -- Riccoboni e Lohr -- comincia a insegnare logica «in secundo loco» -- succedendo a TOMITANO  con lo stipendio annuo di 40 fiorini e avendo come concorrente ZABARELLA  -- e poi filosofia, sempre «in secundo loco», quale collega di MERCENARIO . Torna sulla cattedra di logica, questa volta «in primo loco», avendo come concorrente AMALTEO  e succedendo a ZABARELLA  con uno stipendio annuo di 140 fiorini – ZABARELLA  in precedenza ne prendeva solo 60 -- che, con progressivi aumenti, giunse alla cifra assai elevata di 500 fiorini, a condizione che non fosse richiesto un ulteriore aumento. A differenza delle altre università italiane ed a Oxford, dove la logica è solo una disciplina propedeutica e come tale venne affidata a docenti all’inizio della loro carriera, a Padova questa disciplina gode di grande attenzione -- anche sul piano delle retribuzioni -- presso i riformatori dello studio, che ricorrevano a professori di provata fama ed esperienza, incrementando così il numero degli studenti. Una riforma sul modello padovano, intesa a valorizzare di più l’insegnamento della logica, è proposta invano ai maggiorenti dello Studio di Pisa da VERINO  il Secondo che, oltre a TOMITANO , cita a mo’ di esempio il caso di P.  e la sua lunga esperienza nell’insegnamento di una disciplina frequentata d’una infinità d’anni con gran sua reputazione et utilità et con gran frutto degli scholari -- Grendler. Dopo aver collaborato a una raccolta encomiastica in versi dedicata a Geronima Colonna d’Aragona -- Tempio, Padova --, pubblica a Padova, apud J. Jordanum, L. Pasquatus excudebat, le Quaestiones logicae de intentione Philosophi in II libro Posteriorum, de medio demonstrationis potissimae, de speciebus demonstrationis, dirette, sia pure in maniera non esplicita, CONTRO i testi di ZABARELLA. Grice: “St John’s, 1962. I have been lecturing “for any member of the university”—a formula which still makes it sound as if my tutorials at St John’s were too private a luxury for a state-chartered institution to tolerate—and in the course of talking about conversation I have found myself with not one principle but two: a principle of conversational benevolence and a principle of conversational self-love. Two principles, however, already feels like one principle too many, and I am tempted to fold them into a single principle of conversational helpfulness, full stop. Then Potts, who has been attending, remarks that Kneale was lecturing the other day on Bernardino Petrella’s De principiis rerum naturalium, and that all Kneale could muster by way of sympathy for poor Bernardino was that he was misusing principium in the plural—“Cicero,” Kneale said, “would never have allowed it: Aristotle can have all the archai he wants, but we are Roman.” I wanted to dismiss Potts as a mere tattler, but he is uncomfortably right: if I want to ground my own “principle” in anything like the tone of a Kantian categorical imperative, I had better not be caught multiplying principles without necessity. I begin to think the safest course is to formulate the whole business as an imperative in grammatical form—without the exclamation mark, out of politeness—and then let the rest follow, as naturally as Bernardino never dreamed, from the one imperative (or the one family of imperatives) that Kant, when he was feeling expansive, managed to give in five different “forms.” It is, at least, a very good thing an Oxonian once had the patience to write an entire book on that.” (The “Oxonian” Grice is quietly pointing to is H. J. Paton, the Scottish Kantian who, by a happy turn of Oxford patronage, held a Fellowship at Corpus Christi, Grice’s own old college, and later occupied the White’s Chair of Moral Philosophy (1937–1952). Paton’s The Categorical Imperative (1947), published by Hutchinson in the immediate post-war years, was precisely the sort of book an Oxford philosopher could admire without having to say so aloud: learned, severe, and institutionally fluent in the five “forms” of Kant’s single commandment. Grice would certainly have met him in the ordinary Corpus way—over lunch, in hall, or on one of those visits that begin as nostalgia and end as professional reconnaissance—by which time Grice had already moved on through Merton and into St John’s. The one institutional nicety to keep in mind is that Oxford chairs are tied to specific fellowships: the White’s Professor is, by statute, anchored to a college (in Paton’s case Corpus), so the “Chair” and the “college man” are meant to coincide rather than to wander. In any case, for Grice the point is not administrative but tonal: it mattered that the very Oxford that produces talk of “principles” also produced, in Paton, someone patient enough to catalogue the imperative’s disguises—and thereby to make Grice’s own impulse to cast conversational demands in imperative form sound less like an affectation and more like a home truth.). Grice: Caro Petrella, a Padova la logica sembra valere più dell’oro! Dimmi, quanto pesa un argomento, quando lo porti in aula: più di un fiorino o meno di una lezione di filosofia? Petrella: Ah Grice, ti confesso che un buon argomento vale almeno quanto una cena in compagnia! Ma se lo studi a Padova, magari ti arriva pure un aumento… peccato che la logica non si possa mangiare. Grice: Beh, tra logica e fiorini, forse dovremmo proporre una dimostrazione sul brodo padovano: se è buono, lo studente resta; se è debole, fugge a Pisa! Petrella: Ottima idea! E se mai la logica diventasse una pietanza, prometto di invitarti a Sansepolcro per una cena filosofica… con argomenti al dente e stipendio ben cotto! Petrella, Bernardino (1552). De principiis rerum naturalium. Venezia: Comin da Trino.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Petrone: la ragione conversazionale dei sanniti e la setta d’Imera  – il megliore dei mundi attuali – CLXXXIII, LX LX LX I Igino Petrone (Limosano, Campobasso, Molise): la ragione conversazionale dei sanniti e la setta d’Imera. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers move from what is said to what is meant by assuming that speakers are trying to be rational and cooperative, so that even apparently thin utterances like “It looks real” or “It seems red” can carry systematic, cancellable implications (for instance, that the speaker is unsure), generated by expectations about relevance, informativeness, and candour rather than by the literal meanings alone. Petrone, by contrast, approaches “reality” and “spirit” in the idiom of early twentieth-century Italian idealism and moral psychology: his Il problema della realtà (1914) treats the real not as a conversationally managed commitment but as a philosophical problem bound up with the structure of spirit, freedom, and the limits of determinism, and his rhetoric readily turns on grand explanatory contrasts (heroism, will, inertia, moral genesis) rather than on the fine-grained pragmatics of everyday assertions. The comparison, then, is that Grice diagnoses how talk about reality works in practice—how our ordinary locutions about seeming, appearing, and knowing express (and sometimes merely suggest) epistemic stances within a shared inferential economy—whereas Petrone treats reality as something to be secured (or reinterpreted) by a substantive metaphysical-ethical account of human agency and spiritual causation. From a Gricean perspective, Petrone’s “problem of reality” would invite a further question about what conversational pressures make it feel like a problem at all—what we are trying to guarantee, to reassure, or to withhold when we speak of reality and appearance—while from Petrone’s perspective Grice’s maxims would look like a local logic of civil discourse that presupposes a deeper account of mind, will, and the moral life that Petrone thought philosophy must supply. --- il megliore dei mundi attuali – CLXXXIII, LX LX LX I -- Roma –A Pythagorean, who claims that the number of worlds is CLXXXIII -- arranged in the form of a triangle: determinismo, l’eroe, Ennea, eroe stoico, l’eroe sannita, il sannio, la lega sannitica, spirito, inerza della volonta, due direzioni dell’inerzia della volonta, contro Gentile, contro Nietzsche, umano, non sovrumano, filosofia del diritto, lo spirito, liberta dello spirito, il limite della pscogenesi della morale, il principio dell’amore proprio, il principio della benevolenza, amore proprio conversazionale, benevolenza conversazionale, il sentimento morale, filosofia del diritto, communismo giuridico, la simplificazione di labriola, contro labriola, criticismo, idealism critico, meditazioni di un idealista, GENTILE contro Petrone., Croce contro Petrone; l’identita sannia, psicologia del sannita, i romani contro i sannita, la prima guerra sannita, la seconda guerra sannita, la terza guerra sannita; la repubblica romana, l’espansionismo dei romani nell’Italia, I romani contro i sanniti; bassorilievo dei sanniti, i liguri e i sanniti, le popolazione italiche, economia e psicologia del Molise, il sannio, la complessità dello spirito della filosofia italiana; il linguaggio sannita; il linguaggio umbro, il linguaggio osco; il linguaggio falisco, limosano, musanum, limosanum; un stato mercantile chiuse, Fichte contro Marx, Nietzsche, il valore della vita, il problema morale, la filosofia del diritto, diritto positivo, diritto naturale, la filosofia politica nel criticismo, azione, l’etica e l’ascetica, l’etica dell’eroe come azione, l’energia dello spirito contro l’inerza della volonta – l’inerza della volonta nell’elezione dei fini; l’inerza della volonta nell’elezione dei mezzi; il spirito contro la volonta, i limiti dei determinismo, l’indeterminismo dello spirito, la causa dello spirito, causa spirituale dell’agire umano, lo spirito umano. Grice:” St John’s, 1950. These Saturday mornings are becoming funnier than I had any right to expect. Yesterday Austin was on about “reality.” He blamed the Italians for it—Igino Petrone in particular—and produced, with a kind of show-and-tell flourish, a yellowing copy of Petrone’s 1914 Il problema della realtà: “See, look, behold,” he said, as if the three verbs were a philosophical argument. “At least in Oxford,” he added, “Bradley had the decency to call it mere appearance.” I could not decide what was odder: that a book could be made to stand in for a problem, or that “reality” should be treated as though it were a foreign import, like vermouth. But Austin was clearly pleased with his exhibit, and the rest of us were expected to nod—as if the discovery that one can say “it looks real” were already half-way to metaphysics.” Grice: Caro Petrone, mi incuriosisce il tuo pensiero sulla “ragione conversazionale” dei sanniti e soprattutto la teoria dei CLXXXIII mondi! Come si intrecciano, secondo te, la libertà dello spirito e la complessità del nostro agire morale? Petrone: Grice, la libertà dello spirito è proprio ciò che permette all’uomo di superare l’inerzia della volontà e scegliere tra i fini e i mezzi — un vero problema morale! Nei miei studi sull’eroe sannita, ho sempre pensato che la benevolenza conversazionale sia il punto di partenza per ogni vera filosofia del diritto. Grice: Che interessante, Petrone! Mi piace l’idea che la benevolenza non sia solo un principio astratto, ma si manifesti concretamente nel dialogo. Forse, come dice il vecchio adagio: “Volere è potere, ma conversare è conoscere!” E tu, come vedi il rapporto tra la psicologia del sannita e quella del romano? Petrone: Ah, Grice, la differenza è sottile ma profonda! Il sannita agisce per energia dello spirito, il romano spesso per determinismo storico. Io credo che la filosofia italiana abbia sempre saputo tenere insieme queste due direzioni — tra spirito libero e inerzia della volontà, in un continuo confronto tra umano e sovrumano. Ecco perché la conversazione resta il miglior tribunale per la morale! In passage beow there is a reminiscence -- turn it into a 100-move conversation between G. and S. as they dicuss il, problema, della, realta, analytically dry Oxonian humour -- no preamble or ps --re Petrone, Il problema della realta --and why 'real' is the word that wears the trousers -- or not -- etc -- as per Austin on 'real' in Sense and sensibilia -- and whether it is a pseudo-problem or whether, as G. thinks it is a ReAL problem that has been resolved many times. S: solved or resolved? and back to ens realissimum, entia realissima, ratio essendi, ratio cognosendi etc thanks G.: Il problema della realtà, then, or, if one prefers less drama and more grammar, il problema della parola “reale.” S.: You mean the word wears the trousers. G.: If any word in the vicinity does, it is real, yes. S.: Not realtà. G.: No. Realtà is what happens when a language decides that one trouble is not enough and gives it an abstract noun. S.: Like speranza, only less cheering. G.: Exactly. Though speranza has the advantage of not pretending to settle ontology. S.: Petrone, however, writes Il problema della realtà and expects one to feel the capital without printing it. G.: Italians do that very well. They inflate by article. S.: Il problema, then. G.: Ah yes. Why il problema and not a problem among others. That is already half the rhetoric. One says il problema della realtà and the undergraduate imagines that all previous evenings were naïve. S.: Austin would have said that if you find yourself saying “the problem of reality,” you have probably missed the use of “real.” G.: Very likely, yes. Or at least you have allowed a modifier to become a metaphysical throne. S.: You are thinking of Sense and Sensibilia. G.: Inevitably. Austin had the excellent instinct that real is often a trouser-word, as he liked to put it: not splendid in itself, but serviceable, and usually worn only in company. S.: Meaning that “real” typically contrasts with sham, toy, painted, dream, pretend, artificial, mock, wax, model, and the rest. G.: Exactly. One does not normally ask, in the abstract, “Is this real?” One asks: is this a real duck, a real gun, a real diamond, a real headache, a real tiger, a real friend. S.: And the contrast class does the work. G.: Most of it, yes. “Real” is semantically lazy but contextually muscular. S.: Then Petrone’s title may be a pseudo-problem. G.: Not so fast. I am not willing to give Austin the whole field. It may be a pseudo-problem in one use and a real problem in another. S.: Solved or resolved. G.: Resolved, perhaps. Solved sounds mathematical and therefore overconfident. S.: You think the problem of reality is a real problem that has been resolved many times. G.: In a sense, yes. Philosophy keeps rediscovering that appearances may deceive, that seeming and being may part company, that what counts as real depends on what contrast is in play, and then proudly announces a new crisis. S.: So every generation reinvents waxworks. G.: Very nearly. With improved lighting. S.: Then what exactly is the real problem. G.: There are at least three. First, the ordinary-language one: how “real” actually functions in discourse. Second, the epistemological one: under what conditions we are entitled to deny reality to an appearance. Third, the metaphysical one: whether “reality” names some ultimate inventory or grade of being. S.: Petrone seems to want the third with strong help from the second. G.: Yes. Early idealists and their neighbours often want reality not merely as predicate but as destination. S.: Whereas Austin wants to send it back to the shops. G.: Quite. Back to ordinary use, where it belongs, beside “genuine,” “proper,” “actual,” and a host of contrastive companions. S.: But you do not wholly side with Austin. G.: I side with him against inflation, not against metaphysics altogether. S.: That sounds almost balanced. G.: It is accidental. S.: Let us do the phrase analytically, then. Il problema della realtà. G.: Good. Il, problema, della, realtà. “Il” elevates. “Problema” dignifies perplexity. “Della” is the old genitive troublemaker. “Realtà” abstracts. S.: Della may be objective or explanatory or merely titular. G.: Yes. The problem of reality may mean the problem concerning what is real, or the problem constituted by reality, or the problem raised by our talk of reality. S.: Which one would Austin choose. G.: The third, if he were feeling charitable. More often he would say that philosophers invented the phrase by neglecting the actual occasions for “real.” S.: And you. G.: I would say that such neglect is a mistake, but not the only mistake. Once one has done the lexical work, there may still remain a philosophical pressure. S.: For example. G.: For example, when we ask whether an hallucination can have all the ordinary marks of reality for the subject and yet fail to be real in the public, corrective sense. S.: Then “real” is not merely contrastive but norm-governed. G.: Exactly. It belongs to practices of correction, checking, reidentification, and public adjudication. S.: That already sounds like ratio cognoscendi. G.: Indeed. The ratio cognoscendi of the real is one thing: the way reality becomes known, tested, warranted. The ratio essendi is another: what makes a thing the kind of thing it is, or grants it its mode of being. S.: So one may know reality under one ratio and seek its being under another. G.: Precisely. Much confusion comes from sliding from epistemic criteria to ontological constitution. S.: And ens realissimum. G.: Ah yes, the old schoolman’s heavyweight champion. The most real being. S.: God, usually. G.: Usually, yes. Ens realissimum is what happens when reality ceases to be a local contrast term and becomes a superlative of being. S.: So from “real gun” to “most real being” by a series of academic sins. G.: Very neat. And not wholly false. S.: Then entia realissima. G.: The plural makes things worse and better. Better, because one sees that “more real” and “most real” are not meaningless in certain metaphysical schemes. Worse, because one is tempted to believe one has discovered a scale where perhaps one has only altered the grammar. S.: Austin would dislike “more real.” G.: He would ask “more real than what?” and usually be right to do so. S.: Yet Plato gives one something like grades of reality. G.: Yes. Sensibles, mathematical objects, Forms, and so on, depending on how one reads the furniture. S.: So the problem is not wholly invented by modern bad English. G.: No. The pressure is old. The lexical confusion is local. S.: Petrone then belongs to the tradition that asks not merely how we use “real” but what sort of thing reality itself is. G.: Exactly. He wants reality as philosophical quarry, not as adjective under discipline. S.: And Austin thinks that quarry is a painted backdrop. G.: Often, yes. S.: You said “real” wears the trousers. G.: In many ordinary cases it does. “Reality” tends to preen in the mirror while “real” does the household labour. S.: So “reality” is the overdressed abstraction of a hard-working adjective. G.: Admirably put. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become abstract. S.: Never intentionally. Then perhaps Petrone’s title already offends because it lets the abstract noun take over the economy of the adjective. G.: Yes. Once “realtà” enters, the temptation is to forget the contrastive uses from which the philosophical anxiety originally rose. S.: But perhaps the anxiety rose elsewhere too, from dream, error, illusion, spirit, freedom, causation. G.: Certainly. Which is why I refuse the simple pseudo-problem verdict. S.: Then give me your graded answer. G.: Very well. “The problem of reality” is pseudo when it ignores the ordinary uses of “real” and asks for an essence of reality in the void. It is genuine when it asks how distinctions between appearance and reality function, how they may fail, and what ontological commitments they presuppose. S.: So Austin cures one pathology, not all pathology. G.: Exactly. Philosophical therapy is not universal medicine. S.: Let us bring in ens realissimum again. G.: With reluctance. The ens realissimum is a perfect example of reality leaving the shops and joining the clergy. S.: Because “real” there no longer contrasts with toy, sham, painted, artificial. G.: No. It has been recruited into an ontological ranking. The most real being is the fullest, most perfect, most independent, most self-sufficient. S.: Ratio essendi, then, not ratio cognoscendi. G.: Principally, yes. It belongs to what it is to be, not how we tell. S.: But knowledge of it depends on another ratio. G.: Naturally. One must not confuse the reason of being with the reason of knowing, though philosophers do so with touching frequency. S.: Then Petrone’s problem may concern both: what reality is, and how spirit or experience secures it. G.: Exactly. Idealists tend to want reality not merely catalogued but justified by relation to spirit, act, freedom, consciousness, or some other metaphysical favourite. S.: Which you distrust. G.: I distrust grand favourites, yes. S.: Yet you said the problem is real and has been resolved many times. G.: Yes. The history is one of repeated resolutions, none permanently sovereign. Aristotle resolves it one way, scholastics another, Descartes another, Kant another, idealists another, Austin by partial deflation, and so on. S.: So the problem persists because each resolution leaves a residue. G.: Precisely. Philosophy is mostly residues with footnotes. S.: And trousers. G.: Occasionally. S.: Let us talk about “real” again in Austin’s manner. A real duck, a real pain, a real friend, a real issue. G.: Good. Notice how the contrast class changes. “Real duck” contrasts with decoy, stuffed specimen, toy, picture, perhaps imitation roast in a bad college hall. “Real pain” may contrast with imagined pain, pretended pain, merely slight discomfort. “Real friend” with fair-weather acquaintance or ceremonial ally. S.: So “real” is semantically opportunistic. G.: Very much so. It borrows its work from the local false claimant. S.: Then “reality” strips away the false claimant and pretends to stand alone. G.: Exactly. That is why the abstraction is dangerous. S.: But not always empty. G.: No. Once philosophers ask about the common thread among these uses, or about the authority of correction among them, they may be doing something legitimate. S.: Such as. G.: Such as asking what it is for a public world to have priority over private seeming in the assignment of “real.” S.: That sounds anti-sceptical. G.: In part. Scepticism presses precisely where “real” and “seems” begin to part company under pressure. S.: So the problem of reality is tied to the problem of appearance. G.: Inevitably. And Bradley, whom Austin mentions, at least had the decency to call appearance appearance. S.: While Petrone calls the other side realtà. G.: Yes, and so invites the whole idealist parade. S.: You say that almost fondly. G.: One may be amused without enlistment. S.: Then where does Grice enter. G.: In at least two places. First, by asking what conversational pressures make speakers say “it is real” or “it only seems so.” Second, by noting that such utterances often carry implicatures about certainty, caution, correction, or authority. S.: For example, “it looks real.” G.: Yes. “It looks real” often implicates doubt or at least suspension. If I say “the diamond looks real,” I imply that some contrast class—paste, imitation, stage jewellery—is alive. S.: So reality-talk is pragmatically loaded. G.: Always. Reality is never merely named; it is usually staked. S.: Staked by whom. G.: By a speaker situating himself with respect to evidence, appearance, challenge, or reassurance. S.: Then Petrone’s “problem” may partly arise from a failure to notice the pragmatic side. G.: Or from a decision to subordinate it to the metaphysical side. S.: Which is still a choice. G.: Quite. One may choose to ask after spirit, freedom, and the real structure of the world. But one should not pretend the adjective’s common life never existed. S.: Then the right procedure would be. G.: First, examine the ordinary use of “real.” Second, sort the contrast classes. Third, ask what explanatory pressure remains once the lexical confusions are cleared. Fourth, only then allow metaphysics to speak. S.: That sounds too sensible to be idealist. G.: There are intervals of sensibleness even there. S.: And what of “solved” versus “resolved.” G.: Ah yes. “Solved” suggests finality, as in arithmetic. “Resolved” suggests ordered treatment, perhaps temporary settlement, perhaps decomposition into parts. S.: So the problem of reality is repeatedly resolved, never once and for all solved. G.: That is my view. Resolutions may be better or worse, but the pressure can reappear under altered vocabularies. S.: As from ens realissimum to empirical realism to idealism to ordinary language. G.: Precisely. The scenery changes, the anxiety returns. S.: You mentioned ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi. Could we also say ratio loquendi. G.: Very good. Yes. Often what is needed is a ratio loquendi: an account of why we talk this way at all. S.: Austin supplies that. G.: In large part, yes. He reminds us that “real” has a life in language before it acquires a life in systems. S.: Petrone supplies ratio essendi. G.: Or tries to. He wants a substantive account of what the real is in relation to spirit and action. S.: And you. G.: I occupy myself with a little ratio loquendi and a little ratio intelligendi. S.: You mean how we mean what we say when we say “real.” G.: Exactly. S.: Then perhaps “Il problema della realtà” should be translated not as “the problem of reality” but as “the trouble we get into once ‘real’ becomes a noun.” G.: That would be excellent and very unfair. S.: Which is often the best sort of summary. G.: Sometimes. S.: Let us try ens realissimum once more. Would you say that such a notion is merely the superlative misuse of “real.” G.: Not merely. It belongs to a metaphysical programme in which degrees of perfection and degrees of being are tied. If being admits of more and less under some description, then “most real” is not nonsense within that programme. S.: But it is far from ordinary use. G.: Entirely. One must not smuggle school metaphysics back into the fishmonger by way of adjectives. S.: So ordinary “real” and scholastic “realissimum” are cousins who should not share clothes. G.: Very good indeed. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep that too. S.: Then if Petrone writes Il problema della realtà in 1914, he stands much closer to the latter cousin. G.: Yes. He writes in a climate where reality is not merely checked against appearance but installed in a larger moral-metaphysical architecture. S.: Spirit, freedom, anti-determinism, heroic action, all the rest. G.: Exactly. Reality becomes what must be secured for a philosophy of spirit to have room. S.: Which is why the problem may feel so grand. G.: Yes. Once reality is tied to freedom, causation, spirit, or moral world-order, it ceases to be merely an adjective in need of contrast and becomes a whole philosophical theatre. S.: Austin closes the theatre. G.: He closes part of it and turns on the lights. S.: You reopen one door. G.: Perhaps two. One for ordinary language, one for whatever remains philosophically pressing after ordinary language has had its say. S.: Then the true enemy is not metaphysics, but premature metaphysics. G.: That is very well put. S.: I am having a good morning. G.: Do not let it spread. S.: Then what would you say to Petrone directly. G.: I should say: before announcing il problema della realtà, tell me how “reale” actually works, what it contrasts with, who is anxious, and why. S.: And if he replied that the problem is deeper than usage. G.: I should agree, but ask him not to dive before checking the depth markers. S.: Very Oxonian. G.: Thankfully. S.: Then perhaps the final summary is this. “Real” wears the trousers because it does the contrastive work in ordinary discourse. “Reality” borrows its dignity from that labour and then tends to overreach. The problem is pseudo if it ignores this. It is genuine if, after acknowledging it, it still asks what appearance, correction, and being amount to. G.: Splendid. S.: And the scholastic coda. G.: Very well. Ratio loquendi first, ratio cognoscendi next, ratio essendi only when earned; and ens realissimum only if one has brought better shoes. S.: Dry enough. G.: Sufficiently Molisan, with Austin’s trousers and Petrone’s theatre both left standing.Petrone, Igino (1914). Il problema della realtà. Torino: Bocca.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pezzarossa: la ragione conversazionale della fisica, la geografia e l'astronomia, sposate insieme, fanno sì che un italiano discopra il nuovo continente, ed un altro italiano gl’imponga il nome -- l’eloquenza lombarda – l’implicature conversazionali Giuseppe Pezza-Rossa (Mantova, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale della fisica, la geografia e l'astronomia, sposate insieme, fanno sì che un italiano discopra il nuovo continente, ed un altro italiano gl’imponga il nome -- l’eloquenza lombarda – l’implicature conversazionali. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a practical exercise of rationality: in ordinary talk we presume cooperative purposefulness, and we recover what a speaker means (often beyond what is strictly said) by reasoning from shared norms of relevance, informativeness, and sincerity, so that implicatures are not decorative but disciplined inferences licensed by a speaker’s recognisable intentions. Pezza-Rossa, by contrast, belongs to a nineteenth-century Italian setting in which the battle-line is not pragmatics but scepticism, moral philosophy, and the public authority of reason (often in explicit dialogue with Rosmini), and his ambition for a “sola confutazione possibile” of scepticism is characteristic of that climate: it seeks a principled, once-for-all refutation rather than a conversational diagnosis of how sceptical challenges trade on ordinary commitments. Still, the comparison is illuminating: Grice would say that many sceptical manoeuvres depend on the very conversational practices they affect to doubt, since the sceptic must rely on shared standards of assertion, evidence, and intelligibility in order to communicate his doubt at all; Pezza-Rossa tries to defeat scepticism by philosophical argument about knowledge and its grounds, while Grice reframes the terrain by showing that scepticism cannot get its grip without already presupposing a rationally governed practice of giving and asking for reasons in conversation. In short, Pezza-Rossa aims to kill scepticism with a single decisive proof, whereas Grice explains why the sceptic keeps reappearing: the sceptical posture is parasitic on the rational norms that make conversation and inquiry possible, and those norms, once made explicit, expose the sceptic’s dependence even when they do not silence him. Grice: “He wrote a LOT! Including a study (or ‘ragionamento,’ as the Italians call it) on the spirit (spirito) of Italian philosophy, which reminded me of Warnock, the irishman, and his search for the soul of English philosophy!” -- Giuseppe Pezzarossa (o Pezza-Rossa – Grice: “In which case, he is in the “R”s”). Studia a Mantova. Insegna a Mantova. Co-involto nella repressione che porta al martirio di Belfiore. D’idee tendenzialmente liberali e  preoccupato sulle condizioni sociali disagiate create dalla sorgente rivoluzione industriale che pure ai suoi occhi rappresenta un'occasione di progresso. La pubblicazione del suo saggio di filosofia gli procura guai con la congregazione dell'indice. Partecipa attivamente ai moti. Condanato al carcere. Pezza-Rossa e uno dei XX che partecipano alla riunione costitutiva del comitato rivoluzionario. Saggi: “Critica della filosofia morale” (Milano, Stamperia Reale); “Lo spirito della nazione italiana” (Mantova, Elmucci); “Saggi di filosofia” (Mantova, Caranenti). C. Cipolla, Belfiore I comitati insurrezionali del Lombardo-Veneto ed il loro processo a Mantova” (Milano, Angeli); Pavesi, Il confronto fra don Tazzoli e don Pezza-Rossa in una prospettiva filosofica, in Tazzoli e il socialismo Lombardo” (Milano, Angeli). La prova sull’esistenza esteriore. Confutazione dello scessi. ALIGHIERI e la filosofia. Lo spirito della filosofia italiana. Sistema di psicologia empirica. Il fondamento, il processo e il sistema della umana esistenza. Il sistema politico e sociale della nazione italiana; il sucidio, il sacrifizio della vita e il duello, supra il suicidio; “La grammatica ideo-logica; ossia, la legge comune d’ogni parlare dedotta da quella del pensare” il martirio di Belfiore; lo spirito della nazione italiana; eloquenza lombarda. Grice: “St John’s, 1946. Back from the Admiralty, and now lecturing to the whole university, I find myself hunting for material for what I grandly call my “universal” seminars—so different from the tête-à-tête tutorials with those fortunate enough to call St John’s their alma mater. Woozley wants to run a joint seminar with me on scepticism, and I have said yes. He arrived armed with the usual suspects; I arrived armed with what I rather complacently call a fatal objection to the sceptic. Whereupon he says, “Yes, yes—but what about Pezza-Rossa?” “Who?” “An Italian—almost pre-Risorgimento—and you know how your father loves that stretch of peninsular history. Pezza-Rossa wrote in La Biblioteca Italiana, if you’ve heard of it, about what he calls Rosmini-Serbati’s ‘the only possible refutation’ of scepticism.” I said, “But that’s neither here nor there; I shan’t be claiming in our seminar that my objection is the only possible one.” “But how many times,” he muttered—almost under his breath—“can you kill the same sceptic?”” Grice: Caro Pezzarossa, dicono che la filosofia lombarda sia come il risotto: serve pazienza, un buon brodo e, magari, una spruzzata di eloquenza! Dimmi, tra fisica, geografia e astronomia, preferisci la luna di Mantova o il sole dell’Italia? Pezzarossa: Grice, ti confesso che a Mantova la luna spesso si specchia nei fossi, mentre il sole, se arriva, è sempre benvenuto! Ma tra implicature e continenti da battezzare, io scelgo il brodo: almeno quello non finisce nell’indice! Grice: Ah, allora la ragione conversazionale nasce tra i mestoli e le carte geografiche! E pensare che un italiano ha scoperto il continente, e un altro l’ha chiamato… forse dovremmo proporre a Oxford una nuova materia: “Filosofia della pentola e della bussola!” Pezzarossa: Grice, ottima idea! Basta che non ci mandino all’Indice per troppa saggezza. Se l’eloquenza lombarda si sposa con la ragione conversazionale, forse la prossima rivoluzione nascerà… in cucina! This objection is most clearly propounded by Malcolm.' The Skeptic, when he claims that neither he nor anyone else knows, for example, that there is cheese on the table, is in a very odd position. He is not suggesting that what appears to be cheese might just possibly turn out to be soap, nor that we have not looked to see whether the appearance might not be the effect of a conjuring trick performed with mirrors, nor even that though we have been quite careful to eliminate the possibility of error, we have not been quite careful enough, and if we went on a bit (or a lot) longer with our tests we should be better off and should be able finally to say  "Now I know:" The Skeptic will still refuse to admit that we can say correctly "I know" however long we continue with our test (and this goes not only for there is cheese on the table but for every other empirical proposition as well). Since, therefore, the accumulation of further evidence is irrelevant to the dispute between the Skeptic and his opponent, the Skeptic's thesis must be an a priori one, namely that to say that, for example "I know that there is cheese on the table" is to assert (or try to assert) something self-contradictory or logically ab-surd.  But this contention on the part of the Skeptic, says Malcolm, itself involves a self-contradiction or logical absurdity (when taken in conjunction with something else which the Skeptic will have to admit).  For the Skeptic will have to admit that "I know there is cheese on the table" is an ordinary expression, where by "ordinary expression" Malcolm means an expression that has an ordinary use, i.e. an expression that is ordinarily used to describe a certain sort of situa-tion" (an "ordinary expression" need not in fact ever be used-  "there is a mermaid on the table" is an ordinary expression —but it must be such that it would be used to describe a certain sort of situation if that situation existed or were believed to exist). The Skeptic then will have to admit that "I know that there is cheese on the table" is in this sense an ordinary expression, and so, to remain a Skeptic, he will have to maintain that some ordinary expressions are self-con-tradictory or absurd. But this is itself an absurdity, since a self-contra-dictory expression is by definition one which would never be used to describe any situation whatever. If that is so, it is absurd to suggest that any expression is both self-contradictory and an ordinary expres-sion. But this is just what the Skeptic is maintaining as regards l know that there is cheese on the table."  (Some philosophers, paying a charitable tribute to the perspicacity of their Skeptical colleagues, have suggested that in view of the argument just stated, the latter cannot have been intending to deny the correctness of the "ordinary" use of the word "know," but must (very misleadingly) have been either (a) insisting on using the word "know" in a way of their own, or (b) suggesting a change in the existing usage. 1 do not think Skeptics would be very happy about either of these interpretations of their intentions.)  I shall now turn my attention to an attempt to construct a line of defense for the Skeptic against this very serious objection. I may at this point say, in order to forestall the possibility of snorts of disapproval from my audience that I am not myself a Skeptic; but I do think that the Skeptical position is liable to be somewhat cavalierly treated as hopeless.  The Skeptic might admit that in his view it is always an incorrect use of language to say "I know that there is cheese on the table," and he might also admit that it was the kind of incorrect use of language which is self-contradictory (plainly not all incorrect use of language involves a self-contradiction). He might also admit that in some sense of "ordinary usc" no self-contradictory expression has an ordinary use and that in some sense of ordinary use such expressions as "l know that there is cheese on the table" do have an ordinary use. But he might go on to pose the question whether the senses of "ordinary use" just mentioned are the same sense.  Consider what I take to be Malcolm's definition of a self-contradic-tory expression, namely "an expression which would never be used to describe any situation" (he does not actually say that this is a complete definition of "self-contradictory expression," but equally he does not say that it is not, and I strongly suspect that he intends it as such, as indeed his manner of expression suggests). Is it really satisfactory as it stands? Take the expression "I'm not copperbottoming  'em, ma'am, I'm aluminiuming 'em, ma'am." 1 doubt very much if this expression would ever be used to describe any situation; it is too difficult to enunciate, and certainly no one would think of using it as a written symbol with a descriptive use (I of course am not using it descriptively). It would no doubt be possible to fill in the gaps in  "The-  -archbishop fell down the  -stairs and bumped-  -like-  -," with such a combination of indecencies and blas-  phemies that no one would ever use such an expression. But in neither of these cases would we be tempted to describe the expressions as self-contradictory. Indeed, the number of possible reasons why an expression would in fact never be used might be, as far as 1 can see, in principle unlimited. Should we not then have to amend Malcolm's definition by adding a specification of the particular reason which would preclude the use of a self-contradictory expression? But if we did that should we not have to say "because to use it would be to say something self-contradictory"? But we are now defining "self-contradictory" in terms of itself.  But is it even true that self-contradictory expressions are never in fact used to describe any situation? No doubt if they are used to describe a situation, they do not succeed in describing that situation, but that is another matter. Might I not, as a result of miscalculation, say "there are eight lots here, each containing eight eggs; so there are sixty-two eggs." Malcolm perhaps would say that I would be, in this case, employing the expression "sixty-two" to mean what is normally meant by "sixty-four"; but such a suggestion would surely be most counterintuitive, and a well-constructed "catch-question," such as a vocal utterance of the words "can you write down there are two ways of spelling-  _'?" where the actual utterer substitutes for  -a sound represented by "throo," may elicit from a large number of persons the absurd answer "Yes."  If, then, the Skeptic is admitting that expressions such as "I know that there is cheese on the table" have in a sense an ordinary use (in that they are sometimes used descriptively), he might claim to be admitting nothing inconsistent with their being self-contradictory (i.e. having no ordinary use in some other sense of "ordinary use"). But he would have to admit not merely that such expressions are sometimes used to describe certain kinds of situations but that they are very frequently indeed used to describe such situations. The question remains then "Is it logically possible for it to be true that most people would usually, or more often than not, use an expression "p' to describe a certain kind of situation, and yet be false that 'p' is a correct description of that situation (or perhaps of any situation, in which case it would be self-contradictory)?" The Skeptic would have to maintain that it is. An imaginary illustration may illuminate the path we might take.  Suppose a state of society in which our linguistic behavior were such that all of us, on most occasions when we wished to describe a situation involving a rose, used expressions such as "that is a cau-liflower" (or other suitable expressions containing the word "cau-liflower"); and all of us on all occasions also used expressions containing the word "cauliflower" to describe cauliflower situations.  Suppose, however, also that on all those occasions when we had before our minds the thought both of a rose and a cauliflower (for ex-ample, when our attention was drawn to our practice of using the word "cauliflower" in descriptions both of rose situations and cauliflower situations), we then called a rose "a rose" and refused to call it "a cauliflower" and insisted that on all the occasions when we had called "a rose" "a cauliflower" we had been wrong. In such a state of society would the word "cauliflower" be a correct expression to use to refer to a rose? Should we say, confronted with such linguistic be-havior, (1) that "cauliflower" would be a correct expression to use to refer to a rose (that is, that "cauliflower" would be ambiguous and would in one sense apply to roses and in another apply to cauliflow-ers; or (2) that the question is undecidable, that we would not know whether to say that it would be correct or to say that it would be incorrect to apply the expression "cauliflower" to roses (that is, that the situation would fall within the margin of vagueness between "being correct" and "being incorrect"); or (3) that we are uncertain abour this question, but are somewhat inclined to alternative (2)?  Now the Skeptic, 1 think, may be maintaining that something like this is the case with regard to the common use of the word "know:" We all frequently do apply the word "know" to empirical propositions (just as in the imaginary example we in fact call roses "cauli-flowers"); but the Skeptic would claim that for every situation to describe which we are inclined to use the expression "I know p" (where p is an empirical proposition) he could produce some proposition q (in his notorious arguments for example, q might be I may be dream-ing) such that (1) we should admit that q is logically incompatible with I know p, and (2) we should deny 1 know p rather than deny q.  In other words he could produce arguments to show that if we reflected adequately, we should always correct our application of the word "know" to empirical propositions.  Assume for the moment that the Skeptic is right in his ability to produce arguments to show that we should so correct our use of the word "know:" How in that case do we stand? (1) If answer (1) to the  "cauliflower" problem is right (namely that "cauliflower" would be a correct expression to use to refer to a rose, then, presumably, however good the Skeptic's arguments to show that on reflection we should abandon our application of the word "know" to empirical propositions, the Skeptic will be entirely wrong and his opponent entirely right. (2) If answer (2) to the "cauliflower" problem is right (namely the question is undecidable), then presumably the Skeptic will be right insofar as he denies his opponent's thesis that it is defi-mitely correct to apply the word "know" to empirical propositions, and will be wrong insofar as he himself asserts that it is definitely incorrect to do so. (3) If answer (3) to the "cauliflower" problem is right (namely that "cauliflower" would not be a correct expression to apply to roses), then presumably the Skeptic would be entirely right and his opponent entirely wrong.  I shall conclude by just listing some possible arguments which the Skeptic might use in defense of this thesis (which I have put into his mouth) that we should on reflection abandon our use of expressions such as "I know p" (where p is an empirical proposition). I am doubtful if any of them will work (and we should of course remember that the traditional Skeptical arguments turning on the use of the phrase  "it is always possible that" have already been exploded); but 1 do not have time to consider them in detail.  The Skeptic might argue as follows: If it is to be true that I know an empirical proposition p to be true, it must also be true that I have conclusive evidence for p. But we cannot say without self-contradic-tion "I had conclusive evidence for p but p was false," whereas if p is an empirical proposition, we can always say without self-contradic-tion "the evidential propositions which support p are true, but p is falsc." Since therefore (the Skeptic might say) we shall have to admit that the evidence for an empirical proposition is never conclusive, we shall have to correct our use of the word "know:" He might argue: "If it is proper for me to say "I know that there is cheese on the table, I shall have to claim (if I am asked) to know that future observations on the part of myself and of others will not render the proposition there is cheese on the table doubtful." But we are reluctant under pressure to make such claims to knowledge of propositions about the future. He might note that it seems very odd to say "I know p but I might have had better evidence for p than I do in fact have," but if p is an empirical proposition (the Skeptic would say), 1 shall have to admit this odd statement as being true. For it to be true (the Skeptic might say) that 1 know that s is p (where s is p is an empirical proposition), it would have to be true that 1 know that no one has ever had as good evidence for some other proposition, say s, is p as I have for s is p, and yet have been wrong in asserting s, is p. If I cannot claim this, someone may say "What is the difference between your evidence for s is pand some other person's evidence for s, is p which entitles you to claim that you know that s is p and yet admit that he may not have known that s, is p?" 1 think this would be a difficult question to answer (or rather avoid answering). Now take the proposition I have a body (not obviously amenable to Skeptical treatment). Do I know that no disembodied spirit has ever had as good evidence for the proposition that it (or he) has a body as I now have for the proposition that I have a body? To know this, either 1 must claim to know that there are no disembodied spirits, or 1 must claim that even if there are disembodied spirits, none of them has ever been systematically deceived in such a way as to have all the sensations (etc.) which provide evidence for the existence of one's own body, though he (it) in fact has no body. Am I prepared to say that I know one or the other of these things?" re passage below: please provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. on Pezzarossa '' sopra la sola confutazione possible dello scetticismo -- and if you need to formalise do. No preamble or ps --dry oxonian humour. G.'s point is that there is another possible confutazione that trades on utterer's meaning -- so be *p -- reat asterisk p -- an absurd proposition -- that pirots karulise and do not karulise elatically -- by any account of meaning -- reasonable one that relies on the Utterer U intening the addressee A to come to entertain p -- if the sceptical cannot fill the bill here this is a fatal objection --so expand on the final segment of the passage where G. develops this view -- and how then the response to the sceptic feeds onto the theory of meanin and vice versa -- the requirement of reasoablenss -- Addressee's attitude to be achieved via REASON and not just cause -- depends on the reasonability of p itself, not *p, where *p is absurd --passage: G.: Pezza-Rossa’s title is already too ambitious for comfort: Sopra la sola confutazione possibile dello scetticismo. S.: The sole possible refutation. Italians do like the article when they mean to end history. G.: Quite. It is one thing to refute the sceptic; another to announce that there is only one admissible corpse. S.: Yet you have your own objection to the sceptic. G.: I do, but I have never claimed monopolistic burial rights. S.: Woozley thought otherwise. G.: Woozley thinks many things sotto voce, and not all of them deserve publication. S.: Still, the Malcolm line is serious enough. G.: Very serious. If the sceptic says “I know there is cheese on the table” is self-contradictory or absurd, yet admits it is an ordinary expression, he flirts with the impossible. S.: Because Malcolm says an ordinary expression cannot be self-contradictory. G.: More carefully, he says that an expression which would never be used to describe any situation cannot at once be ordinary in the relevant sense. S.: And the sceptic must concede ordinary use. G.: Yes. “I know that there is cheese on the table” is not a private code-word, nor a grammatical hallucination. It belongs to the furniture of discourse. S.: Malcolm’s point then is that the sceptic cannot both admit the furniture and deny that there could be any room in which it is properly used. G.: Exactly. One cannot sensibly say that an expression is ordinary and at the same time logically outlawed from any correct descriptive employment whatever. S.: Unless one plays games with “ordinary use.” G.: Quite. And I did try to give the sceptic that escape route. S.: The “cauliflower” society. G.: Yes. Suppose everyone commonly called roses “cauliflowers,” yet, upon reflection, insisted that these applications were wrong. One then asks whether frequent use suffices for correctness, or whether a whole people may need correction. S.: A nice nightmare for lexicographers. G.: And a more respectable one than most sceptical triumphs. S.: But now you want to go further than Malcolm. G.: I do. My point is that another possible confutazione trades not merely on ordinary use, but on utterer’s meaning itself. S.: That is the asterisk-p line. G.: Precisely. Let *p be an absurd proposition. S.: Give me one. G.: Let *p be: pirots karulise and do not karulise elatically. S.: Already unbearable. G.: It should be. That is the point. If a proposition is absurd in the relevant sense, it cannot be the proper target of a reasonable communicative intention. S.: “Reasonable” being the loaded word. G.: Entirely loaded, and usefully so. S.: Then formulate. G.: If U means by x that p, in the nonnatural sense, U intends A to come to entertain, or perhaps to believe, that p, at least by recognising U’s intention and the grounds for it. S.: Through reason, not mere causation. G.: Exactly. I do not merely want A to produce a reflex. I want A to arrive at p by a recognisable rational route. S.: So if p itself is absurd, the route collapses. G.: That is my suspicion. If *p is not merely false but absurd, then no account of utterer’s meaning that makes reason central can easily permit U to meanNN that *p. S.: Unless U is performing a joke, a reductio, a parody, a linguistic pathology. G.: Quite so. But then what U means is not *p as such, but something else by way of *p. S.: Such as “see how absurd this is.” G.: Precisely. The absurd proposition may be mentioned, brandished, or exhibited, but not straightforwardly meant as what the addressee is to come reasonably to accept. S.: Then how does this hurt the sceptic. G.: Because the sceptic, in many of his grander moods, aims to make us entertain propositions about knowledge that threaten the very reason-governed practice by which he addresses us. S.: More slowly. G.: Very well. If the sceptic says that no one ever knows any empirical proposition, he is not merely proposing an odd thesis about cheese, tables, and doubt. He is threatening to deprive a large stretch of ordinary linguistic practice of rational legitimacy. S.: Which Malcolm says already makes trouble for “ordinary expression.” G.: Yes. But I want to add that the sceptic must also count on our taking his own thesis seriously, that is, as something he means us to understand through reason. S.: Not by hypnosis. G.: Exactly. He must intend us to recognise grounds, infer conclusions, see incompatibilities, feel the pressure of his q against our “I know p.” S.: So he relies on reason-giving discourse while undermining the very credentials of reason-governed knowledge claims. G.: Just so. S.: But that still sounds like a pragmatic transcendental argument, not yet an argument from utterer’s meaning. G.: It becomes one when we ask what it is for the sceptic to mean what he says. S.: Go on. G.: If U meansNN by x that p, then U must intend A to come to entertain p via a rational appreciation of U’s communicative move. S.: Yes. G.: But that demands that p be, at minimum, a reasonable candidate for rational uptake. S.: Not necessarily true, but not absurd. G.: Exactly. One may intelligibly mean something false. One may mislead. One may err. But one cannot straightforwardly meanNN that *p where *p is so absurd that no reasonable addressee could be expected to adopt it by reason. S.: You are building a reasonability constraint into meaning. G.: I am. Or rather drawing it out of the very role of recognition and rational uptake in nonnatural meaning. S.: Then the sceptic’s thesis might fail, not because it is unpopular, but because it cannot be the object of the kind of uptake he needs. G.: That is the shape of it. S.: Give me the formal skeleton. G.: Gladly. Let M(U,x,A,p) abbreviate: U meansNN by x, to A, that p. S.: Good. G.: Then, roughly: M(U,x,A,p) requires that U intend A to entertain p by recognising U’s intention that A entertain p, and by taking x as a reason-bearing move in the circumstances. S.: A Gricean mouthful. G.: All decent theories are. S.: Continue. G.: Add a reasonability condition R(p): p must be such that it is a reasonable candidate for rational entertainment or belief in the given exchange. S.: Not certainty, but reasonability. G.: Exactly. Then for absurd *p, not R(*p). S.: Therefore not M(U,x,A,*p), at least not literally and directly. G.: Correct. Unless the true p is something like “*p is absurd,” in which case the content meant is no longer *p itself. S.: So if the sceptic’s own thesis collapses into absurdity of the relevant kind, he cannot mean it in the very sense required for philosophical assertion. G.: Precisely. The fatal objection would be that he tries to occupy the illocutionary posture of a reason-giver while offering a content unfit for reason-governed uptake. S.: This begins to look like your stronger answer to the sceptic. G.: Stronger, or at least differently targeted. Malcolm attacks the sceptic’s relation to ordinary expressions. I attack his relation to the conditions of meaningNN itself. S.: Yet you will need to show that the sceptical proposition is absurd in your strong sense, not merely distressing. G.: Of course. One must not promote mere discomfort to contradiction. S.: Then where exactly is the absurdity. G.: In the sceptic’s demand that we treat as unintelligible or systematically incorrect a whole range of reason-governed empirical claims, while still expecting us to take his own meta-claim as a serious, reason-directed contribution to inquiry. S.: So the content is parasitic on the very practice it seeks to globally disqualify. G.: Exactly. The sceptic depends on our capacities for recognising evidence, incompatibility, correction, and rational warrant, but then tells us these cannot underwrite knowledge in any empirical case. S.: Many would say that is only surprising, not absurd. G.: True. One must be careful. Not every parasite is a contradiction. S.: Then perhaps your argument works better if one tightens the notion of “knowledge” in the sceptic’s mouth. G.: Yes. If the sceptic insists that “I know p” is always self-contradictory or logically absurd when p is empirical, then he is not merely revising a standard; he is denying the possibility of a central ordinary practice while exploiting that very practice’s rational machinery. S.: Then *p here might be not simply “no one knows anything empirical,” but “the ordinary use of ‘I know p’ for empirical p is both genuine ordinary use and logically absurd.” G.: Excellent. That is much closer. S.: And that may indeed be too much for meaningNN to carry. G.: I think so. Because to meanNN that *p one must intend the addressee to recognise, through reason, the force of a proposition whose very content destabilises the rational standing of the practices relied on in the exchange. S.: The sceptic saws off the branch and invites us to admire the carpentry. G.: Very good. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Then the relation between scepticism and meaning runs both ways. S.: Explain the reciprocity. G.: On the one hand, the response to the sceptic feeds into the theory of meaning because it shows that not any old content can be the object of reasonable communicative intention. S.: So meaningNN is constrained by reasonability of content. G.: Yes. Not every concatenation, nor every absurd pseudo-thesis, is apt for genuine meant content in the strict sense. S.: On the other hand. G.: On the other hand, the theory of meaning feeds back onto the response to the sceptic because it displays the sceptic’s dependence on reason-governed uptake. S.: He must count on us as rational addressees. G.: Precisely. He cannot merely emit noises and hope to produce despair causally. He argues, therefore he presupposes the very commerce of reasons he affects to distrust. S.: Then your objection to causal theories of meaning becomes relevant. G.: Entirely. If meaning were merely a tendency to produce attitudes, the sceptic could perhaps aim simply to induce unease, hesitation, or suspension by whatever means. S.: Like the tail-coat case. G.: Yes. But meaningNN is not secured by mere causal tendency. It requires intention plus rational recognisability. S.: So the addressee’s attitude must be achieved via reason and not merely caused. G.: Exactly. And that brings the requirement of reasonability of p to the centre. S.: Not *p. G.: Not *p. If the only way to induce *p is by confusion, intimidation, semantic vertigo, or sheer philosophical fatigue, then U has not meaningNNly brought A to entertain *p in the relevant way. S.: He has only broken the furniture. G.: Often the sceptic does little else. S.: Yet some sceptical arguments are subtle and not absurd. G.: Certainly. One must not abolish scepticism by bad manners. I am not saying every sceptical challenge is itself *p. S.: Only the strongest global sceptic who says the ordinary empirical “I know” is inherently absurd while still speaking as a reason-giver. G.: Yes. That stronger sceptic invites the fatal objection. S.: Then Pezza-Rossa’s “sola confutazione possibile” may be one route, but not the only one. G.: Exactly. His climate wants a decisive philosophical proof against scepticism. Mine allows a different pressure-point: the sceptic’s dependence on the conditions of meaningful, reason-directed utterance. S.: Which is less a single sword-thrust than a constriction of the breathing apparatus. G.: A pleasingly medical metaphor. S.: Oxford has its uses. G.: Occasionally. S.: Let us formalise once more, more soberly. G.: Very well.  M(U,x,A,p) requires that U intend A to entertain p by recognition of U’s intention and of x as reason-bearing. Therefore M(U,x,A,p) requires p to be fit for rational uptake in the exchange, call this R(p). For absurd *p, not R(*p). Therefore, absent a change of target content, not M(U,x,A,*p). If the sceptic’s thesis is of the form *p, he cannot straightforwardly meanNN it as a serious philosophical claim. But his whole performance presupposes he is so meaning it. Therefore his position collapses at the level of communicative act as well as content.  S.: Nicely brutal. G.: Only moderately. S.: Someone will object that rational uptake need not end in belief; entertainment is enough. G.: Fine. Let R(p) be suitability for rational entertainment rather than acceptance. The point remains. Some contents are unfit even for serious entertainment as live philosophical deliverances, except under a metalevel description. S.: Such as jokes, reductios, examples, nonsense tests. G.: Exactly. One may present *p without meaningNN that *p. One may mean that it is nonsense, absurd, revealing, or instructive. S.: So when you say “pirots karulise and do not karulise elatically,” you do not meanNN that pirots karulise and do not karulise elatically. G.: Mercifully no. S.: You mean that this is an absurd proposition, or rather an absurd-looking one, fit to test the boundaries. G.: Precisely. It is a specimen, not a creed. S.: Then the sceptic may reply that his proposition is not like that at all, because it is grammatically and conceptually well formed. G.: He may. Then the dispute shifts to whether the sceptical content is truly absurd, or only revisionary and uncomfortable. S.: And there the cauliflower society returns. G.: Indeed. We would need to ask whether our actual linguistic behaviour with “know” resembles the rose/cauliflower case: widespread use, but corrigible upon sufficiently clear reflection. S.: If yes, the sceptic may yet survive. G.: In some diminished form, perhaps. He might then force us into saying not that ordinary “I know p” is flatly self-contradictory, but that its correctness is unstable or indeterminate. S.: Your option two or three. G.: Exactly. But the grand sceptic who wants definite incorrectness everywhere while retaining full philosophical seriousness of his own utterance is in deeper trouble. S.: Then your “fatal objection” is really targeted at the maximal sceptic. G.: Precisely. Philosophers often overgeneralise the prey. S.: And Pezza-Rossa. G.: Pezza-Rossa belongs to a climate that wants scepticism killed with one principled blow, perhaps Rosminian in spirit, perhaps more civic-rational in ambition. S.: While you are content with several objections, some semantic, some pragmatic, some ordinary-language, some about meaningNN. G.: Quite. I have no desire to deny colleagues their favourite anti-sceptical weapon provided they do not insist it is the only possible one. S.: How many times, after all, can one kill the same sceptic. G.: As often as he reappears, unfortunately. S.: Then the charming result is that the theory of meaning and the anti-sceptical strategy become mutually supporting. G.: Yes. MeaningNN needs reasonable, reason-governed uptake; scepticism, to be intelligible as a serious position, must inhabit that very space; but radical scepticism about empirical knowledge threatens to undermine it; therefore the sceptic’s own act of meaning becomes suspect. S.: Meaning polices scepticism; scepticism reveals the commitments of meaning. G.: Admirably compressed. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep that too. S.: You are being unusually benevolent. G.: Only because Pezza-Rossa forced me into generosity by his title. S.: Then the final line. G.: Very well. The sceptic may doubt cheese, tables, bodies, futures, and all the rest; but if he wants us to understand him by reason, he cannot ask us to recognise as seriously meant a content that is itself unfit for reasonable uptake. S.: Not *p. G.: Not *p. Absurdity is not a content fit for meantNN belief; it is at best a specimen for diagnosis. S.: So if the sceptic must traffic in *p, he ceases to be a philosopher and becomes an exhibit. G.: Dry enough? S.: Sufficiently Mantuan, with one eye on St John’s and the other on the cheese.Pezza-Rossa, Giuseppe (1837). Sopra la sola confutazione possibile dello scetticismo. Biblioteca italiana.