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

 

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

 

 

Verbali: Oddi

 

Grice: Caro Oddi, ma è vero che a Padova, tra una diagnosi e una implicatura, si discute più di Galeno che di logica?

Oddi: Grice, ti assicuro che qui le implicature cliniche sono contagiose: se parli troppo di logica, rischi che ti prescrivano una visita dal Galeno di turno!

Grice: Allora dovrò stare attento! Dicono che all’ospedale San Francesco Grande, se sbagli una deduzione, ti fanno una clinica d’urgenza… e Bottoni annota tutto!

Oddi: Esatto! Qui la filosofia naturale si pratica in corsia: se non capisci l’implicatura, ti curiamo con un po’ di ironia veneta… e magari alla fine ti resta il buonumore, come una medicina di Galeno!

 

Verbali: Offredi

 

Grice: Caro Offredi, confessalo: ma è vero che a Cremona, oltre ai violini, si suona pure l’Analytica Posteriora di Aristotele? Dicono che tu abbia i margini dei manoscritti più pieni di note che la partitura di una sinfonia! 

Offredi: Grice, se vuoi ti insegno a leggere le mie glosse, ma ti avverto: servono almeno tre tipi di inchiostro e un po’ di pazienza lombarda. E quanto a note, alcune sono talmente acute che nemmeno Stradivari riuscirebbe a intonarle! 

Grice: Eppure mi dicono che tra un’osservazione su Pomponazzi e una disputa sui “lizi”, tu riesca sempre a infilare una battuta: sarà che la filosofia lombarda non rinuncia mai al buon umore, come il torrone di Cremona dopo pranzo? 

Offredi: Esatto! Da noi il pensiero si fa dolce, ma attenzione: se ti distrai, rischi la carie dialettica. Aristotele lo sapeva: chi non mastica bene l’analisi, si perde fra le implicature… e torna a casa senza capire se l’intelletto è una tabula rasa o una sinfonia mancata!

 

Verbali: Olgiati

 

Grice: Caro Olgiati, so che a Busto Arsizio la ragione conversazionale si respira come l’aria! Ma ditemi: è vero che avete scritto un “sillabario” della teologia dove anche i classici imparano a leggere?

Olgiati: Grice, lei non esagera! Da noi anche Aristotele fa i compiti a casa, e Aquino si esercita con la logica classica. Ma il vero dramma è quando Marx vuole correggere il “sillabario” della morale cristiana… allora sì che serve la ragione!

Grice: Immagino la scena: Bergson che cerca di spiegare il tempo a Gemelli, mentre Holloway si domanda se la lingua lombarda sia più intelligente del latino. Scommetto che alla fine la medaglia d’oro va al primo che riesce a pronunciare “proto-notario apostolico” senza sbagliare!

Olgiati: Perfettamente! E se qualcuno ce la fa, lo nominiamo Cameriere Segreto e lo mandiamo a insegnare alla Cattolica. D’altronde, tra una conferenza e una risata, anche la filosofia classica diventa… un piacere antico, ma sempre nuovo!

 

Verbali: Olimpio

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, OLIMPI—audīvī tē in mediō nusquam habitāre. Estne illa patria tua, an tantum locus ubi etiam tabellārius “nōn inveniō” scrībit?

OLIMPIVS: Salvē, GRICE. Patria est: ibi silentium tam dēnsum est ut omnis implicātūra ante vocem perveniāt. Nēmō ibi loquitur—ita nihil umquam male intellegitur.

GRICEVS: At cum urbs tua pagānīs facta est incommoda, Rōmam migrāvistī: id est, ex solitūdine ad maximam turbam, ut… latēre clārius possēs?

OLIMPIVS: Prorsus. In mediō nusquam omnes me vident; Rōmae, cum omnis populus clāmat, nemo animadvertit. Ita fit ut “salvus sim” dicere nōn opus sit—urbs ipsa id per implicātūram dīcit.

 

Verbali: Olivetti

 

Grice: Olivetti, mi incuriosisce molto la sua attenzione all'“archivista” e al modo in cui il linguaggio si intreccia con la filosofia della religione. Come pensa che la “conversazione” contribuisca a chiarire il rapporto tra fede e ragione?

Olivetti: Grazie, caro Grice. Ritengo che la conversazione sia soprattutto un esercizio di ascolto e interpretazione dell’altro; nel dialogo tra fede e ragione, il linguaggio serve a creare ponti, non a erigere muri. Il mio approccio “conversazionale” nasce proprio dalla necessità di un’analogia, di uno spazio comune dove l’alterità sia riconosciuta prima che giudicata.

Grice: Mi piace molto questa idea di analogia. Molti pensano che il significato sia solo una questione di “linguistico”, ma io ho sempre sostenuto che il soggetto, persino quello trascendentale, giochi un ruolo fondamentale. Lei come vede l’apporto della fenomenologia e del pensiero di Lévinas nella sua riflessione?

Olivetti: Ottima domanda! L’incontro con Lévinas mi ha spinto a concepire la filosofia della religione come una forma di etica radicale, un’antropologia filosofica che precede ogni teologia sistematica. Solo storicizzando il pensiero classico tedesco e accogliendo la lezione fenomenologica possiamo dare al linguaggio e alla religione quel respiro che li rende inesauribili fonti di senso, oltre ogni riduzionismo.

 

Verbali: Olivi

 

Grice: Olivi, mi dicono che a Udine siete specialisti di “ragione conversazionale”: cioè riuscite a discutere per tre ore e, per implicatura, dire “ho ragione” senza pronunciarlo mai.

Olivi: Caro Grice, è la versione friulana del fiat lux: noi diciamo poco, ma facciamo capire tutto. Se poi sono anche abate, l’implicatura diventa quasi un beneficio ecclesiastico.

Grice: Interessante: da Padova torni in patria, fai l’avvocato, poi l’abate, poi lo storico… sembra la tua biografia scritta secondo il metodo annalistico: “Anno primo: cambiai mestiere. Anno secondo: cambiai ancora.”

Olivi: Esatto. E quando continuai l’opera di mio zio—non più in latino ma in volgare—l’implicatura era chiara: “voglio che mi leggano davvero.” Quanto all’antichità di Udine… diciamo che, se non era Forum Iulii, almeno forum lo è stato: ci siamo litigati abbastanza.

 

Verbali: Onorato

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, HONORĀTE—quisnam es tu, qui sub pellē ursī quasi sub argumentō validissimō ambulās?

HONORĀTVS: Salvē, GRICE. Ego sum ex Cinargō Rōmānō: philosophus Italicus, sed cum ursō—quia friget in Urbe et in disputātiōnibus.

GRICEVS: Intellegō: pellem induis, ut omnes implicent “hic vir aut sapientissimus aut periculosissimus.” Sed dic mihi: ratio conversātiōnis tuā quo tendit—ad virtūtem an ad tabernam?

HONORĀTVS: Ad utrumque. Nam cum taceō, philosophiam significō; cum rugiō, populus credit me ursum esse: ita et sermō et pellis cooperantur—maximum meum est: nihil dīcere, multum obtinēre.

 

 

 

Verbali: Opilio

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, OPILLE; audīvī tē Opillum vocārī. Utrum es vir an vitulus parvus?

OPILIVS: Salvē, GRICE. Nōn vitulus, sed Aurelius Opilius—quamquam librāriī, ut semper, duplicant litterās et duplicant calumniās.

GRICEVS: Bene; sed quoniam libertus fuistī, CICERŌ (ut aiunt) nōn vult tē legere: “nimis liber, nimis perīculōsus.”

OPILIVS: Immo! Id ipsum est implicātūra: “nōn tē legō” significat “timeō nē discam aliquid.” Age, GRICE—ad Hortum eāmus; ibi philosophia colitur, et ego quoque, sī bene rigātus fuero.

 

 

Verbali: Opocher

 

Grice: Caro Opocher, ti confesso che ogni volta che sento parlare di “giustizia”, mi viene voglia di chiedere: ma è davvero “giusta” o solo “giustificata”? D’altronde, come diceva Trasimaco, la giustizia a volte sembra un labirinto… senza uscita! 

Opocher: Eh, caro Grice! Se Trasimaco avesse avuto a disposizione i manuali di filosofia del diritto, forse avrebbe trovato almeno una mappa. Io, però, preferisco pensare che la giustizia sia come la polenta veneta: ognuno la cuoce a modo suo, ma alla fine piace a tutti! 

Grice: Ottima analogia! Dunque, se la giustizia è polenta, il diritto romano sarebbe il cucchiaio? E Fichte, invece, il cuoco che insiste sul fatto che ogni porzione deve rispettare l’individuo... almeno finché non si tratta di dividere il piatto! 

Opocher: Esatto! Ma attenzione: chi mangia troppo rischia di finire davanti al giudice… o peggio, di ritrovarsi a discutere con Trasimaco sulla “giustizia del neo-Trasimaco”. Grice, tu porta il cucchiaio, io porto la polenta: vediamo se la filosofia può davvero saziare tutti!

 

Verbali: Orazio

 

Corpus.

G, and Shropshire preparing for Mods) Shropshire had arranged his books in strict chronological piles, as if time were a virtue in itself and not merely a nuisance that happens to texts.

G.: You’re doing it again. Shropshire: Doing what. Grice: Dating everything. You treat a poem like a jar of jam: you won’t open it till you’ve found the label.

Shropshire: A poem without a date is merely a rumour with metre. Grice: That, I take it, is your first paper. Shropshire: It’s my first principle. Now. Orazio. Earliest attributable work, please. I want a year that would satisfy a prosecutor. Grice: Very well. His first published book is the first book of the Satires. Published about 35 before Christ. Shropshire: Before Christ. I can already hear a bishop fainting in the quad. Say it properly. Grice: Properly. Thirty-five BC. Shropshire: Still improper. I want it Roman. Ab urbe condita. In Roman numerals. Grice: You want him dated in the way the Romans themselves usually didn’t bother to date him. Shropshire: Exactly. The pedantry is the point. Grice: All right. The founding of Rome is the usual peg: 753 BC is year 1 AUC. Shropshire: Good. Continue. Slowly. This is arithmetic, not metaphysics. Grice: If 1 BC is AUC 753, then 35 BC is AUC 719. Shropshire: Seven hundred and nineteen. Now write it in Roman numerals. Grice: DCCXIX. Shropshire: DCCXIX AUC. There. Now we can speak like civilised men. Grice: You realise, of course, that if you say “AUC” in a lecture, half the room will think you mean something pharmacological. Shropshire: Then they should read more Latin. Grice: The point is delicious: you have replaced Anno Domini, which is theological, with ab urbe condita, which is mythological, and you call that an improvement. Shropshire: It is an improvement. It relocates the calendar from a manger to a city. Grice: And from a fact to a legend. Very Oxford. Shropshire: Now, which is it: “after Christ” or “Anno Domini”? Grice: In English prose: AD. In Latin: Anno Domini. In argument: “later than you think.” Shropshire: I want the Roman, not the Christian. Grice: Why. Shropshire: Because Horace would hate being filed under someone else’s nativity. Grice: Horace would hate being filed under anything at all. That is why he called his satires Sermones: he wanted them to sound like talk, not like tablets. Shropshire: Talk can be dated. Otherwise it becomes gossip. Grice: Here is the moral, then. You can say “35 BC” and mean “around the time the Satires first appear as a book.” Or you can say “DCCXIX AUC” and mean “I am showing off.” Shropshire: And which do you mean. Grice: I mean both. The second is an implicature. Shropshire: Then the first is what is said, and the second is what you are. Grice: Precisely. Now stop numbering Rome and decline λύω before time declines you.

 

GRICEVS: Salve, Horati Flacce, Venusiae decus. Audio te in Epistulis iactare te velle lyricam ponere atque ad philosophiam moralem migrare—quasi Musa ipsa tibi dixerit: “Satis cantasti; nunc rationem redde.”

HORATIVS: Salve, Grice. Ita est: non iuro in verba magistri; sed cum vitiis amicorum et meis cotidie luctor, ad hortum saepe confugio—ego ipse, ut ioco, de grege porci.

GRICEVS: Oportet ergo te doctissimum esse in implicaturis: cum dicis “de grege porci,” non tantum de porco loqueris, sed significas: “nolite me stoicum barbatum fingere.” Porticus enim, ut scribis, omnia peccata paria facit—quod est paene impossibile, nisi in tabulis scholasticis.

HORATIVS: Recte intellegis. Ego Porticum laudo cum moderatur, irrideo cum tonat. Nam mea maxima est haec: aurea mediocritas. Si quid “implicavi,” hoc tantum: in urbe morior, sed mente in agro vivo—et si philosophus fio, id facio ut minus ridear, non ut minus rideam.

 

Verbali: Orioli

 

G.: “Corpus, Today I had my frankest tutorial with Hardie yet.

 

“G,,” he said, in that Scottish cant of his which makes even a reprimand sound like an invitation, “you will now be obliged—on the most pleasant terms—to attend one or two lectures given by our Chairs.”

And with that he handed me the thickest volume I had seen since entering Corpus: Orioli’s Saggio sopra la filosofia naturale. “For next week,” Hardie went on, “you will tell me what you need to know about this curious Oxford arrangement: why you may attend a lecture by the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical—trans-natural, if you insist on the Latin—philosophy, but no longer by any Professor of plain Natural Philosophy. We once had both, you know. Now we have metaphysics with a capital and nature with a laboratory.” I opened Orioli and felt at once the old, dignified breadth of the word “natural”—not merely physics-as-technique, but nature as the whole field in which a mind might still dare to range. Hardie watched me leaf through it with the air of a man setting a trap for a pupil’s modern complacencies. “You will discover,” he said, “that ‘natural philosophy’ is not what the chemists do. It is what philosophers used to do before they mistook specialism for virtue.” Then he added, with a dryness that almost counted as mercy: “And do not, for heaven’s sake, come back next week saying that metaphysics is what you do when you have nothing else to read. At Oxford, metaphysics is what you do when you have too much.””

 

Grice: Caro Orioli, mi ha sempre incuriosito come la logica della monarchia romana e il pensiero filosofico possano intrecciarsi nella tua opera. Quanto conta per te l'implicatura conversazionale nell'interpretazione dei sette re?

Orioli: Caro Grice, la logica delle conversazioni tra i re e i loro consiglieri è fondamentale per comprendere le vere intenzioni e gli accordi sottesi. Senza implicatura, la storia sembrerebbe solo un resoconto di eventi, e invece è ricca di sfumature e sottintesi. 

Grice: Interessante! E pensi che questa capacità di leggere tra le righe abbia aiutato te, come filosofo e rivoluzionario, a navigare le acque turbolente della politica italiana?

Orioli: Assolutamente sì! Spesso, nelle insurrezioni e nei dibattiti parlamentari, il non detto era più eloquente delle parole. La filosofia, come la vita politica, insegna che bisogna saper ascoltare ciò che sta tra le righe e agire di conseguenza.

 

Verbali: Ornato

 

G.: “Corpus, 1932. Hardie has decided that the only cure for a young man’s airy talk about “meaning” is to make him translate.

 

“Pick a Greek piece,” he said, “turn it into Latin, and see whether you can keep the thought intact. Feel what Ornato felt.” So I chose a short lyric—Erinna, because she is precise enough to punish laziness—and set about producing Latin that would not sound as if Cicero had swallowed a gramophone. At the next tutorial Hardie read my version in silence, the sort of silence that makes you revise your whole education. Then, quite unexpectedly, he said I had done better than Ornato. “I never felt like intruding, sir,” I said, “so I never asked. What did you mean by ‘Ornato’?” That, naturally, was my fault. There were only fifteen minutes left, and I had just opened the gate to a lecture. Hardie proceeded to spend—by my mother’s stopwatch, I should think—nineteen more minutes explaining how Ornato, with a perfectly sound classical intention, managed to turn Erinna’s Ode to Rome, a sharp Hellenic utterance, into something resembling an operatic recitative: too many flourishes, too much “effect,” too little of the Greek’s restrained bite. “It’s not that he mistranslates,” Hardie said; “it’s that he over-performs. He takes a poem and gives you a performance of a poem.” Which, of course, is a lesson about conversation as much as translation: when you add too much, you may still be intelligible, but you stop being faithful. Ornato, Hardie implied, could not resist the temptation to make Rome sound like a stage direction.”

 

GRICE: Caro Ornato, dicono che tu abbia vissuto una vita schiva, lontana dai riflettori. Ma ti chiedo: se tu e Antonino parlate, chi tra voi ha l’ultima parola? Oppure la conversazione finisce sempre con una implicatura misteriosa?

ORNATO: Ah, caro Grice, nella nostra Carmagna la conversazione è come una partita a scacchi – ogni mossa è una metafora e ogni implicatura un cavallo imbizzarrito. Ma ti confesso: ogni tanto, lasciamo che sia l’impressione a guidarci... così nessuno vince davvero, ma tutti si divertono!

GRICE: E la modestia? Dicono che tu sia più schivo di un filosofo piemontese davanti a un invito a una festa. Non temi che, tra filologia e musica, ti sfugga qualche implicatura troppo allegra?

ORNATO: Grice, nella mia casa, ogni implicatura trova il suo posto – tra una nota di pianoforte e un teorema matematico. Se per caso ne scappa una troppo allegra, la metto a tacere con una poesia! E poi – come diceva Antonino – a volte è meglio lasciarsi guidare dal pensiero che ci passa per la testa... purché non sia quello di andare a una festa!

 

Verbali: Oro

 

GRICE: Caro Oro, dicono che tu sia un vero giocoliere di linguaggi e codici, ma dimmi: come fai a scrivere libri che solo i geni riescono a decifrare? Perfino le mie implicature si sentono inadeguate! 

ORO: Ah, Grice, il segreto è tutto nei miei segni misteriosi: se tutti capissero subito, che gusto ci sarebbe nel conversare? Meglio lasciare qualche modo iussivo a spasso, così la gente ha sempre qualcosa su cui discutere a tavola! 

GRICE: Questa sì che è filosofia veneta: metà Spritz, metà aforisma! Ma dimmi la verità, Oro: sei tu che hai insegnato a Palladio che anche le ville devono avere implicature architettoniche nascoste? 

ORO: Naturalmente! Ogni colonna porta un messaggio segreto—e se non lo capisci, non entrare a Cricoli! In fondo, caro Grice, che senso avrebbe il “parlare solo umano” se non lasciassimo agli altri il piacere del fraintendimento?

 

Verbali: Orontio

 

GRICEVS: Salve, Oronti. Audio te et senatorem esse et Plotini sectatorem; mihi autem Oxonii res mirissima est: senatores non habemus—nisi forte in conviviis, cum quis nimis graviter tacet.

ORONTIVS: Salve, Grice. Roma quidem senatores habet, sed non semper rationem conversazionalem: saepe plus est oratio quam ratio. Ego tamen, Porphyrio teste, inter categoriae et contemplationem Plotinianam pacem quaero.

GRICEVS: Pax? In senatu? Id iam est implicatura robusta. Dic mihi: in schola Romana, cum quis dicit “Categoriae,” vult Aristotelem—an vult tantum disputationem longiorem?

ORONTIVS: Utrumque. Nam senator cum “categoriae” pronuntiat, significat: “Nolite me interpellare; iam ad unum fugio.” At tu, Grice, si senatores non habetis, certe habetis quaestiones—quae multo tutiores sunt quam suffragia.

Verbali: Ortensio

 

GRICEVS: Salve, Hortensi. Dicunt te Ciceronis aemulum fuisse—Asiatico illo dicendi genere tam laeto, ut etiam implicaturae tuae purpuram induerent.

HORTENSIVS: Salve, Grice. Ciceronem aemulari? Immo illum exercebam: cum nimis perspicue loqueretur, ego eum blandis ambagibus docebam quid esset ratio conversationalis.

GRICEVS: At cave: si nimis florescis, auditor putat te plus dicere quam dicis—et, more meo, statim concludit te aliquid significare quod non vis. Inde nascitur implicatura, non rosa.

HRTENSIVS: Recte mones. Sed hoc ipsum amo: Ciceroni verba, mihi silentia prosunt. Ille clamat “Roma!”, ego tantum tussio—et tota curia intellegit.

 

Verbali: Ortes

 

G.: Let us begin with Ortes where he begins to annoy everyone: prezzo and valore are not the same thing.

S.: Which is already enough to make a nation of shopkeepers sound metaphysical.

G.: Nations of shopkeepers are always metaphysical when they say they are being practical.

S.: Then price is the market magnitude, and value is what is at stake beneath it.

G.: Roughly, yes. Ortes forces the distinction because language likes to confuse convenience with essence.

S.: And you want to take that into significatio.

G.: Inevitably. For signification too has its price and its value, if one is willing to be slightly Venetian in spirit.

S.: Then let us have the formula.

G.: S(x, y, z).

S.: With x the bearer?

G.: Yes. The bearer or vehicle, if you like. It may be an utterer’s utterance, or, if one insists on broadening the field, a dark cloud.

S.: z the interpretant or addressee.

G.: Quite. And y the content, the thing reportable by a that-clause.

S.: So if the cloud darkens, S(x, y, z) might be: this cloud signifies to some interpreter that it is going to rain.

G.: That is the broad form, yes.

S.: But you immediately begin to tighten it.

G.: Naturally. Because once one speaks of clouds one is in danger of becoming meteorological rather than philosophical.

S.: Yet you said intention is always involved.

G.: In the interesting cases, yes. That is why I am happiest when x is an utterer or an utterance under an utterer’s governance.

S.: So dark clouds are useful only as the common man’s threshold.

G.: Exactly. They remind us that signification can be broader than language, but not that all signification is equally philosophically central.

S.: Then your concern is with the utterer’s case.

G.: Entirely. An utterer means something to an addressee by producing a vehicle. That is the live centre.

S.: Then S(x, y, z) is already teleological.

G.: It must be. Otherwise one gets only correlation, not significance in the stronger sense.

S.: Good. Now where does Ortes enter?

G.: By teaching us to distinguish measurable price from worth. In my neighbourhood, one may say something similar of explicitness and implication.

S.: Explain.

G.: “He has beautiful handwriting” is the optimal way to communicate that he has beautiful handwriting.

S.: Because it says so.

G.: Quite. It is low-cost, high-directness, almost perfectly suited to that content.

S.: But not the optimal way to communicate that he is hopeless at philosophy.

G.: Exactly. If I use it in collection to communicate that second content, I rely on context, institutional tone, and the hearer’s wit.

S.: So the implicatum belongs to the significatum, but not optimally.

G.: Very good. That is the first distinction.

S.: Then “optimal” here means what? Most direct? Least cancellable? Best fitted to the content?

G.: All close relatives. I am not yet willing to define it in one primitive. But certainly directness, stability, and resistance to cancellation matter.

S.: So the explicitum is usually more optimal than the implicatum.

G.: Usually, yes. Though we must keep a cautious reserve, because human life is indecently complex.

S.: Naturally. If the weekly essay notice reads “Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts,” then “He has beautiful handwriting” acquires local force.

G.: Exactly. It then becomes not merely praise of penmanship but perhaps an evaluative contrast in a setting where handwriting has absurdly been made relevant.

S.: Yet even there it is still more optimal for penmanship than for metaphysical deficiency.

G.: Entirely. The route to penmanship is short and licensed. The route to philosophical hopelessness is inferential and defeasible.

S.: So cancellability marks lower optimality.

G.: It is one good sign of it. If I say, “He has beautiful handwriting, though I do not mean to suggest anything about his philosophy,” the implicatum evaporates politely.

S.: Whereas if you say, “He has beautiful handwriting, though I do not mean he has beautiful handwriting,” the floor gives way.

G.: Exactly. The explicitum does not cancel so kindly.

S.: Except in irony.

G.: Quite. But irony is a special disturbance. It gives us what we may call disimplicatum if we are feeling barbarously playful.

S.: You are.

G.: Occasionally. The point remains: the explicitum is harder to retract without contradiction or collapse.

S.: So in axiological terms, explicit signification is usually higher-value?

G.: Careful. That sounds too moral too quickly. I would rather say: it is often higher in communicative worth relative to stability and fit.

S.: Then price and value reappear. The implicatum may be cheaper or dearer?

G.: Better to say that the explicitum has a more settled exchange-rate between bearer and content.

S.: Ah. Like money pretending to wealth.

G.: Not quite. Ortes would scowl. Rather: the explicitum gives you a more publicly ratified measure, while the implicatum may carry subtler value in the right market.

S.: So “He hasn’t been to prison yet” is optimal for saying that he hasn’t been to prison yet.

G.: Exactly.

S.: But not optimal for saying that he is potentially dishonest.

G.: Nor for saying, in the context of a new appointment at a bank, that his colleagues are treacherous.

S.: Though one might manage either under pressure.

G.: Indeed. But one manages them at inferential cost.

S.: And that cost is part of the axiological story.

G.: Precisely. Axiology enters because we begin to compare forms of signification by better and worse, fitter and less fit, higher and lower worth relative to content and uptake.

S.: The Italians would say assiologia and look satisfied with themselves.

G.: They often do. The Germans called it Axiologie and looked still more credentialed.

S.: But your real question is whether optimality can itself be analysed.

G.: Exactly. If we say that one signifying route is more optimal than another, have we explained anything, or merely priced our preferences decorously?

S.: Then perhaps one should define optimality by what the valuer does.

G.: That is promising. Hartmann would not wholly approve the vulgarity, but he might tolerate the structure.

S.: Let us try it. A valuer prefers one vehicle-content fit over another because it better secures intended uptake with less inferential burden and less vulnerability to cancellation.

G.: Very good. That is already better than shouting “value” and retiring.

S.: So the explicitum is not simply higher because it is explicit, but because hearer and speaker can coordinate on it more securely.

G.: Exactly. Security of coordination is one major ingredient.

S.: Then S(x, y, z) becomes axiological when we compare rival xs for the same y and z.

G.: Splendid. That is the real turn.

S.: So if I wish to communicate y to z, I may choose x1, a direct sentence, or x2, a hint, or x3, a loaded allusion.

G.: And we ask which bears higher communicative value under the circumstances.

S.: Which is not always x1.

G.: Precisely. That is why we cannot become merely schoolmasterish. Sometimes implication is the better instrument.

S.: Give an example.

G.: Tact. If someone asks whether a third party is entirely reliable, “He has never once been late” may, in some contexts, be more fitting than “He is unreliable in intimate trust but decent with clocks.”

S.: Because explicitness can be vulgar or disproportionate.

G.: Exactly. The less optimal route in one register may become more optimal in another because social purpose changes.

S.: Then optimality is purpose-relative.

G.: Necessarily.

S.: That complicates the price-value analogy.

G.: Or improves it. Ortes’ own distinction reminds us that a measurable surface and a deeper worth may diverge. So too here. What is immediately measurable in explicitness may not exhaust conversational worth.

S.: Then the implicatum may have lower directness-value but higher tact-value.

G.: Very well put.

S.: So we need dimensions.

G.: Yes, but let us not become engineers too early.

S.: Not after Aconzio’s marshes.

G.: Quite. Still, the dimensions would include at least these: directness, stability, cancellability, social aptness, and inferential elegance.

S.: Inferential elegance sounds expensive.

G.: It often is. But expensive things may be worth buying if the company is right.

S.: Then “He has beautiful handwriting” at collection has low directness for the philosophical judgment, high tact perhaps, high cancellability, and medium elegance if the hearer is not an idiot.

G.: Admirably tabulated.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become a clerk.

S.: Only an accountant of significance.

G.: That is worse and better at once. Now, what about the dark cloud?

S.: You said we need not concern ourselves much with non-utterers signifying.

G.: In the central theory, no. Because the cloud does not mean that it will rain in my preferred sense.

S.: It merely indicates.

G.: Or signals in a looser natural way. The absence of intention weakens the analogy.

S.: Yet if a painter paints a dark cloud over a village scene, intending the audience to gather menace or coming rain, then intention returns.

G.: Exactly. And then we are back in my country.

S.: So x may be a cloud physically, but only a represented or deployed cloud philosophically.

G.: Better. Or a cloud enlisted by an utterer.

S.: Then the triad needs an utterer behind x if signification is to have full axiological articulation.

G.: Usually, yes. Otherwise we get natural indication, which is not uninteresting, but is not the heart of conversation.

S.: Then “suggestum” enters where?

G.: As one member of the wider significatum. The significatum may include explicitum, suggestum, indicatum, implicatum.

S.: You are multiplying nouns.

G.: Not beyond necessity, I hope. Each marks a slightly different mode of conveyedness.

S.: And the explicitum is the one whose value is usually highest because its fit to y is most stable.

G.: Usually, yes.

S.: While implicatum is lower in stability because cancellable.

G.: Exactly. To say that implicatum is part of significatum is not to say it is equal in every value-dimension.

S.: Then perhaps Ortes helps because he reminds us that categories blur if language is left sloppy.

G.: Quite. Price is not value. Explicitness is not worth. Implication is not nothing. The market of meaning needs distinctions or it degenerates into sentiment.

S.: You make it sound as if philosophy were a merchant republic.

G.: Venice had its uses.

S.: So one might say: the explicitum is like coined money, the implicatum like credit, reputation, or anticipated value.

G.: That is temptingly good, though I fear Ortes would make us specify every term until the metaphor was no longer fun.

S.: He sounds tiresome.

G.: Cool Venetian intelligence often does. One is grateful only later.

S.: Then let us return to cancellation. Why is cancellability a sign of lower optimality?

G.: Because if a bearer is well fitted to a content, one should not be able to detach the content without undermining the act.

S.: So the easier the cancellation, the less tightly fitted the value-relation.

G.: Exactly. The implicatum depends on context and presumptive reasoning, so it is more negotiable.

S.: Hence lower certainty-value, though perhaps higher tact-value.

G.: Very good.

S.: Then irony complicates everything.

G.: Naturally. Irony lets us detach apparent explicitum from intended content so violently that the old hierarchy trembles.

S.: In irony the explicit wording may be precisely the least optimal route to its own surface content.

G.: Yes. “What a genius” said over a shattered vase is not optimally fitted to genius at all.

S.: Unless the speaker has been concussed.

G.: That would improve the case medically, not semantically.

S.: Then irony is a systematic dislocation of optimality.

G.: An elegant way of putting it. It creates a surface explicitum of low genuine fit and forces the hearer toward another content of higher intended fit.

S.: So your disimplicatum returns.

G.: Barbarously, yes. One may keep the joke if one keeps it fenced.

S.: Then does the explicitum ever lose all priority?

G.: In irony, parody, quotation, and some ritual uses, its priority as bearer of intended content may be secondary. But even there it remains structurally indispensable.

S.: Because the hearer must first register it as surface.

G.: Precisely. Even the badly fitted route is still the route.

S.: So the explicitum is almost impossible to cancel, but possible to subordinate.

G.: Better. That is the right distinction.

S.: Then the value of a signifying act cannot be read off merely from its surface explicitness.

G.: Exactly. Hence our need of a more nuanced axiological grammar.

S.: Grammar again.

G.: Philosophy always comes back to grammar once the Germans have had their parade.

S.: And what would the valuer do in this grammar?

G.: The valuer compares signifying acts by their success in achieving intended uptake under the accepted purposes of the exchange.

S.: So optimality is tied to purposive fit, not to naked assertion.

G.: Yes. That is the mature view.

S.: Then “That’s good value” becomes a lovely example.

G.: Indeed. It may report a comparison of price and worth, recommend a purchase, express approval, or mildly rebuke extravagance.

S.: And the phrase itself dresses approval in a market costume.

G.: Exactly. I said as much in St John’s, though probably to no avail.

S.: So the phrase’s explicitum is economic, while the implicatum may be practical or evaluative.

G.: Yes. The market lexicon lets us smuggle attitudes under the sign of objectivity.

S.: Which is itself axiologically interesting.

G.: Very much so. We “price” attitudes while pretending to “value” reasons.

S.: That is almost your whole point.

G.: It is one of them. And Ortes helps because he treats the slippage between nominal measure and genuine worth as more than a verbal nuisance.

S.: It becomes a source of bad theory and bad policy.

G.: Exactly. So too in semantics. Sloppy confusions between what is said, what is meant, what is suggested, and what is indicated produce bad philosophy.

S.: Then the study of significatio becomes itself value-laden.

G.: Necessarily. We rank forms of signifying by better and worse, more and less apt, more and less worthy of rational uptake.

S.: Which means significatio is not a flat relation.

G.: Not at all. It has internal economy.

S.: A Venetian ledger.

G.: If you must.

S.: I must. Now, let us test a harder example. “He hasn’t been to prison yet.”

G.: Good. Explicitum: he has not yet been to prison.

S.: Implicatum in some contexts: he is the sort of man for whom prison is a live possibility.

G.: Or, in the context of his taking up work at a bank, that those around him are less trustworthy than appearances suggest.

S.: So the same bearer can carry very different lower-optimal contents.

G.: Exactly. Which shows that implicata are more context-sensitive and therefore less stable in value.

S.: While the explicitum remains almost embarrassingly plain.

G.: Yes. One could cancel the suggestion: “He hasn’t been to prison yet, though I imply nothing discreditable.”

S.: And the thing survives.

G.: Quite.

S.: So if one were pricing the act, the explicitum has higher face value, the implicatum more speculative worth.

G.: That is rather good.

S.: I am improving.

G.: Alarmingly. Now, one must also note that the less optimal is not thereby philosophically less interesting.

S.: On the contrary.

G.: Exactly. The whole fascination of implicature lies in the fact that lower direct fit may coexist with higher social cleverness.

S.: Or higher deniability.

G.: Which is often the same thing among civilised sinners.

S.: So perhaps “optimal” is ambiguous between best for truth-communication and best for social manoeuvre.

G.: Splendid. That ambiguity must be kept before us.

S.: Then the valuer changes.

G.: Precisely. What the truth-loving analyst prizes may not be what the tactful host prizes.

S.: Or what the timid don prizes.

G.: Quite. “Jones has beautiful handwriting” is a masterpiece if one wants to condemn while appearing merely observant.

S.: Lower truth-optimality for the condemnation, higher social-optimality for the common room.

G.: Exactly. Axiology becomes plural.

S.: Hartmann again.

G.: He will not leave. But we may use him sparingly.

S.: Then perhaps the right formula is this. For any S(x, y, z), the worth of x relative to y and z varies by dimension: explicit fit, social tact, inferential economy, cancellability, and purposive success.

G.: Very good indeed. That is almost respectable enough to publish.

S.: Almost?

G.: It still needs drying.

S.: I can dry it.

G.: You usually do. Now, what of “suggestum”?

S.: I rather like it. It marks what is nudged rather than stated.

G.: Yes. It is less committed than explicitum, less strongly inferential than some implicata, and perhaps more atmospheric.

S.: Then “indicatum” would be the naturally or quasi-naturally pointed-at content.

G.: Good. That helps keep clouds in their place.

S.: And implicatum the rationally recoverable extra content under cooperative assumptions.

G.: Precisely.

S.: So all four belong within significatum, but not on a level plain.

G.: Exactly. They occupy different axiological positions.

S.: Then your theory is less egalitarian than one first thinks.

G.: Civilisation rarely is.

S.: And Ortes would approve because he hated confusion of categories.

G.: He would at least approve the distinction before disapproving the style.

S.: Venetian enough.

G.: Entirely. Now, let us ask the final question. Is “optimality” itself primitive?

S.: I should say no. It is analysable through what valuers and interpreters do under purposive constraints.

G.: Good. So we descend from abstract worth to practices of uptake, preference, coordination, and success.

S.: Which is more Gricean than merely shouting “value.”

G.: Exactly. Axiology must be domesticated by rational action if it is not to become incense.

S.: Then the final moral?

G.: That significatio is a value-paradigmatic concept because not all ways of signifying bear their contents equally well. Explicitum is usually the higher-value route for the content it explicitly bears. Implicatum belongs to the full significatum but is often lower in stability and higher in finesse. And Ortes helps because he reminds us that measured surface and genuine worth are never safely the same thing.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Venetian, with just enough Oxford shopkeeping to offend both.

 

 

Grice: Caro Ortes, ho spesso sostenuto che la filosofia del linguaggio non debba essere materia obbligatoria a Oxford: chi affronta la filosofia ha già interiorizzato i principi fondamentali, come tu ben dimostri nel tuo trattatello! Ti sei mai riconosciuto in questa posizione?

Ortes: Caro Grice, la tua osservazione non può che farmi sorridere: in fondo, ogni vera riflessione filosofica nasce dalle parole, ma ancor più dalla chiarezza del pensiero. Analizzare la lingua è solo il primo passo per comprendere la complessità della realtà.

Grice: Hai ragione, Ortes. La tua attenzione alla razionalità e alla distinzione tra ricchezza reale e nominale mostra quanto il linguaggio possa influenzare l'economia e i costumi di una nazione. Forse, la filosofia del linguaggio è più pratica di quanto sembri!

Ortes: Indubbiamente, Grice! Come spesso ripeto, tra il dire e il fare ci passa il mare, ma senza dire non c'è fare. Viva il ragionar chiaro e la Fenice veneziana che sempre rinasce, anche nella filosofia!

 

Verbali: Ostiliano

 

GRICEVS: Salve, Hostiliane: audio te Roma pulsa esse sub Vespasiano, quasi ipsa Porticus nimis loquax esset. Ego vero, cum theologis, iurisconsultis, medicisque pacem aeternam quaererem (Kantio teste), vix pacem temporalem nactus sum.

HOSTILIANVS: Salve, Grice. Non Roma me expulit, sed implicatura principis: “Si Ostilianus docet, errat; ergo sileat.” Ita Vespasianus non solum hominem, sed etiam porticum exsulare voluit—quod est, ut ita dicam, minus academicum.

GRICEVS: At tu, Porticus alumnus, nimis stricte legis rationem conversandi. Princeps enim putat se cum populo cooperari: “Si exulo philosophiam, tranquillitas manet.” Sed hoc est maxima Relatio violata—nam, cum de vectigalibus loquatur, de veritate philosophorum tacite iudicat.

HOSTILIANVS: Bene: si Porticum claudis, non errores tollis, sed disputationem. Ego tamen parebo—non quia falsus sum, sed quia Vespasianus moderator se gerit: cum nummos olet, sermonem purgat. Tu vero, Grice, redi ad tuas facultates; ego ad meam porticum—etsi extra muros.

 

Verbali: Otranto

 

Corpus, 1932. A paneled room that smells of coal and dictionaries. Papers for Mods are spread like defensive works. Through the window the quad is grey with the sort of English light that turns every marble bust into a moralist.

Shropshire: I’m not afraid of Greek, oddly, or Grief as the Mock Turtle calls it. I’m more afraid of Laughter.

G.: Laughter is only Greek that has survived translation. It keeps its teeth. Shropshire: You’re being epigrammatic because you haven’t done your prose unseen. Grice: I’ve done it in my head. The invigilator will mark the silence. Shropshire: Silence, in your hands, will be a thesis. Grice: And in yours, an alibi. Now. The opposite of that Bishop of Casole, you said. Shropshire: I meant the opposite of the man who needs Greek put into Latin. Grice: You mean the bishop who was honest enough to admit he didn’t wish to govern by guesswork. That’s already a philosophical virtue. Shropshire: But why would he need it? If you’re a bishop in Apulia, aren’t you surrounded by Greek anyway?

Grice: Surrounded, yes. Inhabited, no. Consider the difference between hearing a language and being answerable for it. A bishop is answerable. Answerability is always in Latin. Shropshire: So he enlists Nicola Nettario, Otranto’s man. Grice: Precisely. Nettario translates the Divine Liturgy of Saint Basil. In Greek it wears a title long enough to frighten a curate: Ἡ Θεία Λειτουργία τοῦ Ἁγίου Βασιλείου τοῦ Μεγάλου. Shropshire: Say it again. Slower. I want to see whether I understand it or merely admire it. Grice: Ἡ Θεία. The Divine. Λειτουργία. Liturgy, public work. τοῦ Ἁγίου. of the Saint. Βασιλείου. Basil. τοῦ Μεγάλου. the Great. [en.wikipedia.org] Shropshire: A title like a small procession. And the bishop wants it in Latin so he can read what he is licensing. Grice: And so he can show Rome, if asked, that nothing here is being smuggled in under incense. Translation is a kind of ecclesiastical audit. Shropshire: Is the opening the famous line? Grice: The priest begins by changing the whole conversational setting. He doesn’t merely report a fact. He declares a new jurisdiction. Εὐλογημένη ἡ βασιλεία… Shropshire: Blessed is the kingdom… Grice: Exactly. And if Nettario is sensible, he renders it with something like Benedictum regnum, because the force is not descriptive. It is inaugurative. It tells you what game you are now playing. [saintgeorg...xville.com], [bulletinbuilder.org] Shropshire: So much for my fear of Laughter. That’s metaphysics in the first sentence. Grice: It is also manners. The liturgy begins by announcing what counts as relevant from this point on. Shropshire: Give me a little bit where Greek and Latin pinch differently. Grice: The exchange before the great thanksgiving is perfect. In Greek, the people answer Ἄξιον καὶ δίκαιον. Shropshire: Which is? Grice: Worthy and just. But Latin takes it as dignum et iustum. Same move, but the Latin has legal bones. Dignum sounds like something a court could endorse. [newadvent.org] Shropshire: And the bishop, reading Latin, feels he has a grip on the act. Grice: Exactly. He can now supervise without pretending to be a native. He can also correspond with a legate without sending a cloud of Greek across the Adriatic and hoping it lands intact. Shropshire: Was the bishop pleased, then? Grice: He would have been pleased in the way administrators are pleased: quietly, because they can now quote. Shropshire: And Nettario? Grice: Nettario would have been pleased in the way translators are pleased: he has made himself necessary, and invisibly so. Shropshire: What would the bishop say? Something suitably grateful. Grice: He would say, in the Latin that makes gratitude sound like policy: Nunc non est Graecum mihi. Shropshire: No longer Greek to me. Grice: Exactly. And then, if he were tempted into a pun Oxford would approve of, he might add: semper ero tibi gratus, Nettari. Shropshire: Forever grateful, Nettario. Grice: A bishop cannot quite say “you’ve saved my Greek,” but he can implicate it by saying the Latin is now his. Shropshire: So your point is that translation is a kind of conversational implicature in slow motion. Grice: My point is that translation creates a common record. Conversation evaporates unless you give it a stable text. A bishop is a man who prefers stable texts. Shropshire: And a Mod candidate is a man who will shortly prefer any text at all. Grice: Then stop fearing Laughter and start translating your Greek into an English that the examiner can read. The examiner is our bishop. Shropshire: And you are our Nettario. Grice: God forbid. I’m merely an interpreter in training.

 

Grice: Caro Otranto, dimmi: tu che hai scritto un trattato “de arte laxeuterii”, la divinazione è più efficace con il fumo o basta un buon caffè pugliese per prevedere il futuro filosofico?

Otranto: Ah, Grice, il fumo è solo per i profeti distratti! Un vero filosofo fa divinazione con la logica e, se proprio serve, con un buon caffè. A Casole, ti assicuro, il pensiero vola più alto dopo la terza tazzina!

Grice: Allora dovrei abbandonare i miei “scritti filosofici” e aprire una caffetteria a Oxford? Magari la ragione conversazionale diventa più chiara con un espresso, e l’implicatura si scioglie come zucchero!

Otranto: Grice, se vieni a Otranto, ti insegnerò l’arte dello scalpello e quella del caffè: tra il dire e il fare ci passa il mare — ma a volte basta un cannolo per attraversarlo! Viva la filosofia pugliese e viva le pause caffè! Otranto, Nicola Nettario d’(1197). Divina Liturgia Sancti Basilii, Otranto.

 

 

Verbali: Ottaviano

 

M.: Today, boys, we begin the first emperor where he wished to begin himself.

G.: Not in a cradle.

Shropshire.: Nor at school, sir.

M.: No. The text opens as though infancy were an indiscretion. Grice, the Latin.

G.: Annos undeviginti natus exercitum privato consilio et privata impensa comparavi, per quem rem publicam a dominatione factionis oppressam in libertatem vindicavi.

M.: Shropshire, the English.

Shropshire.: “At nineteen year old, I raised an army on me own say-so and out o’ me own pocket, and by means of it I restored the republic, oppressed by a faction’s domination, to liberty.”

G.: “Me own say-so” is better than he deserves.

M.: It is better than some politicians deserve. Still, we shall keep it for the moment. Grice?

G.: The first amusement is exercitum comparavi. Shropshire says “an army,” and the English article makes it sound almost casual, as if he were ordering boots. But the Latin does not say merely some army happened into existence. It is his army by initiative, expense, and subsequent narrative possession.

Shropshire.: I did say “me own pocket.”

G.: Yes, but not “my own army.”

M.: Latin often leaves the possessive to good sense and circumstance. Comparavi already has a proprietor’s air.

Shropshire.: So not “I found an army,” but “I got one together.”

M.: Better.

G.: And already the utterer wishes the addressee to hear proprietorship without the vulgarity of saying meum.

M.: Good. Utterer, addressee, explicitum, implicitum. Keep all three in view.

Shropshire.: He’s the utterer, we’re the addressees, and the significatio is “I were only nineteen and already up to state-saving.”

G.: Very nearly.

M.: More carefully.

G.: The significatum explicitum is that at nineteen he raised an army by private decision and private expense, and by means of it restored the republic to liberty.

Shropshire.: And the significatum implicitum is that it all came off rather well.

M.: Exactly. Nobody reading the opening is meant to wonder whether the next clause will be “whereupon I was promptly killed.”

G.: That is the first point of rhetorical structure. The army is introduced only under the victorious description. It is not “I rashly assembled some armed men and the thing went badly.” The army enters already teleologically, per quem.

Shropshire.: “By means of which.”

M.: Yes. Instrumentality with a destination attached.

G.: It is almost indecently compressed. The phrase builds success into the grammar.

Shropshire.: So if I say, “At nineteen I raised a farm on me own initiative, by means of which I restored my grandfather’s business,” that sounds factive too.

M.: Good. Explain.

Shropshire.: Because if I say “by means of which I restored,” I don’t leave open whether the farm actually did the restoring. I present the restoration as accomplished.

G.: Strictly, one should be careful with “factive.” But as a schoolroom point, yes: the clause presents the restoration as achieved, not merely intended.

M.: Quite. The content of vindicavi is asserted, not floated as a possibility.

G.: And more than asserted. It is made to look as though the army were the sufficient instrument.

M.: There you may sharpen.

G.: He says per quem, “by means of which,” without adding “among many other useful contingencies, favourable winds, money, defections, assassinations, and luck.”

Shropshire.: Nor “with a bit o’ help from friends and dead uncles.”

M.: The dead uncle is not wholly absent from the scene, however.

G.: Precisely why privato consilio is amusing.

Shropshire.: “On my own initiative.”

M.: Translate it, then.

Shropshire.: “By me own decision,” “off me own bat,” if one wants it flatter.

G.: “Off me own bat” is vulgar enough for public school truth.

M.: But now the difficulty.

G.: Yes. “On my own initiative” sounds morally splendid until one remembers he was nineteen and recently adopted by Julius Caesar’s papers, clients, name, fortune, and corpse.

Shropshire.: So not exactly a chap from nowhere.

M.: Quite. The phrase invites autonomy while standing in a web of inheritance.

G.: It reminds one of Ryle’s sort of sentence: “I sat on the chair on my own initiative.” As if the point of sitting were moral self-legislation.

M.: And as if there were some risk that one had been sat by another.

Shropshire.: At nineteen, one often is.

G.: Indeed. “Privato consilio” leaves out every uncle, patron, veteran, creditor, and conspirator who might diminish the heroism of youth.

M.: Yet it is not false.

G.: Worse. It is adroit.

Shropshire.: So the emissum is tidy and the implicatum grand.

M.: Good. Define your terms.

Shropshire.: The emissum is the sentence as uttered. The significatum explicitum is what the Latin says. The significatum implicitum is what it leads us to gather.

G.: And the implicatum here is not only “I succeeded,” but “I succeeded by precocious independent virtue.”

M.: Very good.

Shropshire.: Also “look what sort of nineteen-year-old I was.”

G.: Yes, the age does not diminish responsibility; it magnifies distinction.

M.: Annos undeviginti natus. Why put the age first?

Shropshire.: To make it sound all the more startling.

G.: Exactly. It is youth as credential, not excuse.

M.: Would a common soldier hearing it think, “Poor lad”?

Shropshire.: No, sir. More like, “Well, he were summat special.”

G.: Or “special by advertisement.”

M.: Dry enough. Now, rem publicam.

Shropshire.: “The republic.”

G.: Here the English is almost too obedient.

M.: Explain.

G.: Because “the republic” in English invites constitutional naïveté. Augustus says rem publicam without quotation marks, as though the thing restored were exactly the old free commonwealth.

Shropshire.: Which it weren’t.

M.: Grammatically, of course, res publica means the public thing, the commonwealth, the state in public aspect.

G.: Yes, and that is precisely why he prefers it. It lets him occupy Roman political language without saying “I restored the old republican constitution, clause by clause, untouched.”

Shropshire.: He says the republic were oppressed, not dead.

M.: Good. Oppressam.

G.: That is the next cunning adjective. If it is oppressed, it still exists. One cannot restore a corpse to liberty in the same way. One can only revive it, resurrect it, or replace it.

Shropshire.: So he don’t say he brought the republic back from the dead. He says he got it out from under.

M.: Exactly.

G.: Which is why “restored” in English needs care. To restore may suggest replacement of a lost state. Here the republic is represented as continuing under pressure.

M.: Hence in libertatem vindicavi.

Shropshire.: “I vindicated it into liberty.”

G.: A barbarous but useful literalism.

M.: Continue with the thought.

G.: He does not say simply rem publicam vindicavi. He says in libertatem vindicavi. The republic was there, but not free. His claim is not resurrection simpliciter, but liberation.

Shropshire.: Like moving summat from one condition into another.

M.: Yes. The preposition matters.

G.: And it helps him avoid an obvious contradiction. If the republic still stood, though oppressed, he need not explain how his later arrangements ceased to be republican in the stricter sense. He only says he moved the existing public thing from oppression to liberty.

Shropshire.: While standing on it rather heavily himself.

M.: That is the commoner’s afterthought, and not an unimportant one.

G.: Then a further implicatum: if I restored the republic to liberty, anyone opposing me belongs with oppression.

M.: Quite. Political morals by grammar.

Shropshire.: And “dominatione factionis.”

G.: There the sentence grows delicious.

M.: Translate first.

Shropshire.: “From the domination of a faction.”

G.: Singular, observe.

Shropshire.: Aye, one faction.

M.: Does singular simplify too much?

G.: Entirely. Civil war is reduced to one oppressive faction, as though there were only one culprit and not a field of mutually armed Roman aristocrats, many of them Stoics, anti-Stoics, opportunists, debtors, patriots, and murderers.

Shropshire.: So at least two factions if there’s a civil war worth the name.

M.: Or more. But the singular lets him moralise asymmetrically.

G.: Yes. “Faction” becomes the bad collective noun into which all his enemies may be poured.

Shropshire.: And his own side isn’t a faction?

M.: Not in his prose.

G.: In his prose his side is instrumentum libertatis.

Shropshire.: An army, by means of which.

M.: There, exactly. One side gets to be a faction, the other a means of liberty.

G.: The implicature is clear: force on their side is domination, force on mine is rescue.

Shropshire.: Same swords, different nouns.

M.: Very good.

G.: This is where conversational analysis becomes useful. The utterer gives the addressee the explicit wording, but expects him to accept a whole political arrangement of descriptions.

M.: Put it more formally.

G.: The emissor, Augustus, offers an explicit significatum: at nineteen I raised an army and freed the republic from factional domination. The implicatum is that my force was uniquely legitimate, that the republic was worth preserving as then described, that my enemies were merely factional, and that success vindicates initiative.

Shropshire.: Also that dead Romans don’t count in the opening sentence.

M.: Yes, Shropshire, the Great War again.

Shropshire.: Well, sir, “by means of which” is rather clean. Armies tend to mean widows as well.

G.: Quite. The contextual indeterminacy is not innocent. We are expected to know enough of the history to be impressed, but not so much as to begin counting corpses.

M.: And are we told what battle?

Shropshire.: No, sir.

M.: Then what does “by means of which” conceal?

G.: A whole stretch of violence, alliances, payments, defections, propaganda, fear, and good fortune, compressed into one instrumental relative clause.

Shropshire.: Like saying, “By means of which I sorted out the estate,” when what happened were three lawsuits, two bankrupt cousins, and a barn fire.

M.: A useful domestic analogy.

G.: And one sees why the sentence wants us to forget contingency. Instrumentality is represented as direct and singular.

M.: Give me a non-factive contrast, Grice.

G.: “At nineteen I tried to raise an army, hoping by means of it to restore the republic.” There the outcome is left open.

M.: Good.

Shropshire.: Or “At nineteen I raised an army, intending to restore the republic,” which leaves room for being flattened.

G.: Exactly. Augustus gives us neither hoping nor intending. He gives us comparavi … vindicavi.

M.: Verbs of act and accomplished result.

Shropshire.: No scare quotes round republic either.

G.: A pity for truth, a triumph for style.

M.: Dryly.

G.: “Rem publicam” is one of those expressions which do better without punctuation and worse with history.

Shropshire.: So when he says republic, the addressee is meant to hear “our proper commonwealth,” not “the constitutional form now being delicately repurposed.”

M.: Precisely.

G.: And “oppressam” helps. If the republic is oppressed, then one may rescue it without defining it too tightly.

Shropshire.: Oppressed is convenient. Dead would be harder.

M.: Yes. Oppression is a figurative condition that may be relieved by the right victor.

G.: While “restored to liberty” lets him seem conservative and heroic at once.

Shropshire.: Conservative in the object, heroic in the motion.

M.: Better than some printed histories.

G.: The sentence is a masterpiece of managed explicitness. What is said is compact and apparently transparent. What is meant is larger, more flattering, and dependent on the addressee’s willingness to supply the right politics.

Shropshire.: Which is why we’re made to translate it into English and not merely salute it in Latin.

M.: Though one might wonder whether English improves it.

G.: It exposes him a little. Latin smooths the joints. “By means of which I vindicated the republic into liberty” sounds foreign enough to make one look again.

Shropshire.: And “on my own initiative” sounds like a prefect reporting chapel attendance.

M.: Yet we must not make it too ridiculous. The sentence works.

G.: Oh, magnificently. That is precisely why it deserves suspicion.

M.: Now, second sentence, if only briefly.

G.: Qui parentem meum trucidaverunt, eos in exilium expuli iudiciis legitimis ultus eorum facinus, et postea bellum inferentis rei publicae vici bis acie.

Shropshire.: “Those who murdered my father, I drove into exile by lawful judgments, avenging their crime, and afterwards, when they made war on the republic, I beat them twice in battle.”

M.: Again, the order.

G.: Yes. “My father,” not “my adoptive father whose murder proved politically useful to me.” The lawful judgments come wonderfully before the battles.

Shropshire.: As if first it were all proper legal business, and only then proper slaughter.

M.: Good.

G.: The pattern repeats: explicit legality, implicit necessity, suppressed mess.

Shropshire.: And always the republic in the background, being harmed by the wrong people and helped by the right one.

M.: Which is why this is excellent material for a lesson on explicitum and implicatum.

G.: Indeed. Augustus writes as utterer to a very broad addressee and expects Rome, and then empire, to complete the significance correctly.

Shropshire.: Or obediently.

M.: Or both.

G.: The explicitum is scarcely enough to explain the success of the text. Its power lies in what a trained addressee is expected to gather: youth, legitimacy, necessity, singular agency, public-mindedness, legality, and victory.

Shropshire.: Also “Don’t ask how many of your countrymen died while I was restoring liberty.”

M.: Yes.

G.: There is a final joke in this. The republic oppressed by factional domination is restored to liberty by means of an army. One almost hears a schoolboy ask whether liberty commonly arrives under military escort.

Shropshire.: At C., sir, mostly with canes.

M.: Outrageous, but not wholly false. Now write this down: explicit wording, implicit political arrangement, instrumental clause as narrative compression, and oppressed as the adjective that saves the constitution from having died too early.

Shropshire.: In English, sir?

M.: In English, since I have suffered enough good Latin for one period.

G.: That is rather like Augustus himself.

M.: Meaning?

G.: He too preferred the effect in Latin and the consequences in everything else.

Shropshire.: Dry enough?

M.: For Somerset, barely.

 

 

GRICEVS: O OTTAVIANE, princeps (si placet) et philosophus (si audes), dic mihi: quid est ratio conversationalis in saeculo tuo aureo—cum aurea verba saepe ferrum tegant?

OTTAVIANVS: GRICE, si populus pacem audit, potestatem saepe intellegit: haec est ipsa implicatura. Ego “Res Gestae” in parietibus incidere iussi: scriptum est quasi memoria, subauditum est quasi imperium.

GRICEVS: Optime: tu in marmore loqueris, sed auditor in foro complet. At cave: si “nihil adiciam” dicis, addis; si “princeps tantum sum” dicis, rex videris—et hoc est, fateor, elegantissimum.

OTTAVIANVS: Ita vero. Et tu, Oxoniensis moderatus, prius Latina vincis quam philosophiam: ergo mihi non alienus es. Sed age—si quis roget “quid reliquisti?”, respondeo: tres volumina; tu respondebis: “plus reliqui quam dixi.”

 

 

Verbali: Ovidio

 

Grice: Permettimi, caro Ovidio, di rivolgermi a te senza il ‘d’, come il GRANDE Ovidio, quello i cui versi ho imparato a memoria a Clifton! Spero mi perdonerai questa confidenza, ma la tua opera ha segnato la mia formazione.

Ovidio: Grice, nessuna offesa! Mi onora sapere che i miei versi abbiano varcato confini e abbiano avuto un ruolo persino nella tua formazione inglese. La poesia non ha barriere, nemmeno quelle del cognome.

Grice: La tua eleganza letteraria e il rigore critico sono stati fonte d'ispirazione anche nei miei studi filosofici. Hai sempre saputo unire il buon senso pratico alla profondità, come ha riconosciuto persino Croce, seppur con ironia!

Ovidio: Ti ringrazio, Grice. È vero, ho cercato sempre di trasmettere la lingua e il pensiero con equilibrio, seguendo Manzoni ma senza dimenticare la tradizione. La filosofia e la letteratura, in fondo, sono sorelle: si nutrono l'una dell'altra, e la conversazione tra noi ne è la prova.

 

Verbali: Ovidio

 

M.: Boys, since the rain has rendered cricket metaphysical, we shall turn to Ovid.

G.: A better use of weather.

Shropshire.: Better nor cricket, sir. Cricket’s only Latin when they score.

M.: Quite. Our question is not what Ovid wrote best, but what he wrote first.

G.: Or at least first datably.

M.: Just so. We are not in search of a printer, only of chronology.

Shropshire.: So not first published, sir, but first one as can be pinned down.

M.: Precisely. And pinned down by evidence, not by enthusiasm.

G.: Then the obvious starting-point is his own autobiography.

M.: Yes. Tristia 4.10.

Shropshire.: That’s the one where he tells us about himself after everyone has stopped enjoying him.

G.: A fair summary of exile literature.

M.: Ovid says there, in effect, that his poems on Corinna were his earliest work.

G.: Which makes the Amores, in some form, the earliest datable composition.

Shropshire.: “Poems on Corinna” sounds a bit tidier than love elegy in installments.

M.: It usually is tidier than the poems themselves.

G.: The complication being that the surviving Amores are a second edition.

M.: Exactly. First in five books, later reduced to three.

Shropshire.: Cut down, like school pudding.

G.: Or improved, which is the editorial superstition.

M.: Quite. So the earliest datable composition is not necessarily the surviving first poem in our present text, but the earliest phase of the Amores.

G.: And the date usually proposed is around 25 or 26 before Christ.

Shropshire.: Before Christ, sir, or before collections?

M.: Do not become jocular about chronology.

G.: One should rather say, if one is to sound Roman, around 729 or 728 ab urbe condita.

Shropshire.: There he goes.

M.: And he is right to go. If boys insist on speaking of Romans, they should sometimes date like Romans.

Shropshire.: Very well, sir. Seven hundred and twenty-eight or twenty-nine from t’ founding.

G.: Do not flatten the city before we have founded it.

M.: Let us keep both systems in view. Ovid born in 43 B.C., that is 711 A.U.C., and if he began the earliest Amores at seventeen or eighteen, the date comes out around 729 or 728 A.U.C., that is 25 or 26 B.C.

Shropshire.: I can do the Christian one easier.

G.: Which is exactly why you should be made to do the Roman one.

M.: Now, titles.

G.: I distrust titles.

M.: We know.

Shropshire.: He distrusts everything till it’s in Latin and declining.

G.: Titles are often posterity in a wig.

M.: Still, Amores is at least useful.

G.: Only as a shelf-label. What I want is the incipit.

M.: Naturally.

Shropshire.: He wants the first line, sir. Says it catches the poet before editors start dressing him.

G.: A good incipit is less diplomatic than a title-page.

M.: Then the surviving opening of Amores 1.1 is where we begin.

G.: Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam.

Shropshire.: In the vernacular, sir?

M.: Yes, since you are here as our provincial conscience.

Shropshire.: “I were settin’ to do arms and them violent wars in a proper heavy metre.”

G.: It is comforting that Augustus conquered the world for that.

M.: Continue.

G.: Edere, materia conveniente modis.

M.: And the sense?

G.: “I was preparing to set forth arms and violent wars in weighty verse, with subject matching measure.”

Shropshire.: “I were goin’ to write about fightin’ proper, in t’ right sort o’ beat for it.”

M.: Better than I feared.

G.: Then Cupid steals a foot, and the whole martial pretension collapses into elegy.

M.: Exactly. Which is one reason the incipit matters. It gives us not merely a beginning, but a programmatic false beginning.

Shropshire.: He starts like Virgil and ends up mooning after Corinna.

G.: A useful career summary.

M.: Now, the incipit belongs to the surviving edition. Does that prove it was the very first thing he ever composed?

G.: No.

M.: Good. It proves only that the extant Amores begin there.

Shropshire.: So there may’ve been earlier bits in the old five-book version.

G.: Or indeed some juvenile piece now lost, like the famous Gigantomachia half-promised by scholars and never met in the street.

M.: Just so. There is vague evidence of youthful exercises, but the first secure datable composition remains the early Amores.

G.: “Poems on Corinna,” as the autobiographical testimony has it.

Shropshire.: Corinna again. She gets in earlier than history.

M.: Love often does.

G.: Then perhaps the earliest datable composition in the strictest sense is the original five-book Amores.

M.: Yes, or the earliest strata of them.

Shropshire.: Strata sounds geological. As if he were quarried.

G.: Poetry is usually sediment once enough grammarians have walked over it.

M.: Now, if we want a date, we must be careful. We can date the beginning approximately, but not assign a day and month to the first elegiac couplet.

G.: Quite. Chronology here is by life-stage, not by docket.

Shropshire.: So “about twenty-five before Christ,” or “about seven hundred and twenty-nine from t’ city,” and leave it at that.

M.: Leave it with dignity, yes.

G.: I would prefer 729 A.U.C. as the classroom formula.

Shropshire.: Because it makes it sound as if Rome mattered more than Bethlehem.

G.: In Roman poetry, it generally did.

M.: Enough. Let us return to the incipit.

G.: Very well. Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam.

M.: What do we learn from it, besides the fact that Ovid is teasing epic?

G.: That he announces the generic temptation before surrendering to Cupid.

Shropshire.: He starts off all helmet and no discipline.

M.: More soberly, he places himself against the epic tradition, only to decline from it by metrical violence.

G.: Or metrical theft.

M.: Quite. Cupid steals a foot. A splendidly technical myth.

Shropshire.: That bit I like. God of love as petty thief from t’ prosody cupboard.

G.: A commoner’s insight, but not a bad one.

M.: Then if we are dating the earliest datable composition, we date not merely a love poem, but the beginning of Ovid’s career-long habit of opening by generic disturbance.

G.: That is well put.

Shropshire.: He likes beginning by pretending to begin something else.

M.: Exactly. That is why the incipit matters.

G.: And why titles matter less.

M.: Less, yes, but not not at all.

Shropshire.: That’s nearly English.

G.: It is Roman enough if doubled properly.

M.: Now, other titles and dates, for order’s sake. Heroides come after the earliest Amores.

G.: As Ovid himself indicates in Amores 2.18.

M.: Yes. Tragedy is also mentioned as an intervening aspiration.

Shropshire.: He nearly went tragic before settling for women with stationery.

G.: A useful description of the Heroides.

M.: Then later come the Ars, the Remedia, and so on.

G.: But none of these dislodge the autobiographical priority of the Corinna poems.

M.: Correct.

Shropshire.: So if a master were cruel enough to ask, “What is Ovid’s earliest datable composition?” we say—

G.: The earliest phase of the Amores, the poems on Corinna, composed when he was about seventeen or eighteen.

M.: And if the same master were crueller and asked for a date?

Shropshire.: About 25 or 26 B.C.

G.: Or 729 or 728 A.U.C.

M.: Very good. And if he asked for the surviving incipit?

G.: Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam.

Shropshire.: “I were set to do war in a proper grand metre,” until Cupid pinched a foot and turned it into dalliance.

M.: That last part is not the incipit.

Shropshire.: No, sir, but it’s what happens to it.

G.: Which is more than can be said for many school translations.

M.: Now, before we close, Mr Grice wished to say something absurd about the gens Ovidia.

G.: Only that Ovidia sounds alarmingly like ovum.

Shropshire.: Egg, sir.

M.: Thank you, Mr Shropshire. We have Latin in the room.

G.: I do not propose a serious etymology. Only that to an inattentive ear Ovidii sound as if they ought to hatch.

Shropshire.: Poet comes out of an egg and starts on Corinna.

M.: You will not write that in an essay.

Shropshire.: No, sir. Only in memory.

G.: Quite right. The nomen is Ovidius; the gens Ovidia; any resemblance to breakfast is accidental.

M.: A relief to philology.

Shropshire.: Though Naso doesn’t help much either.

G.: No. One gets either eggs or noses, and neither quite produces Sulmo.

M.: Boys, Roman names are not to be reconstructed from schoolboy zoology.

Shropshire.: No, sir. Only gently mocked by it.

G.: As all noble nomenclature ought to be.

M.: One final matter. If we give the date A.U.C., what Roman numeral would you write for 729?

Shropshire.: DCCXXIX.

G.: And 728 is DCCXXVIII.

M.: Correct. So the classroom answer, in its most Roman dress, would be: Ovid’s earliest datable composition is the earliest phase of the Amores, the poems on Corinna, composed about DCCXXVIII–DCCXXIX A.U.C.

Shropshire.: Which in the Christian calendar is 26–25 before Christ.

G.: There is something indecent in making Ovid answer to the Christian calendar.

M.: History has many indecencies. Schoolmasters must survive them.

Shropshire.: Like cricket in rain.

G.: Or titles without incipits.

M.: Enough. Write down the Latin, both dates, and one sentence on why the incipit matters more than the title.

Shropshire.: In English or Latin, sir?

M.: In English. I have suffered enough vernacular for one hour.

G.: That is an incipit of a schoolmaster if ever there was one.

M.: Out.

 

 

GRICEVS: O OVIDI, Sulmo tua me docet: non omne quod dicitur, dicitur; saepe plus subauditur quam sonat. Num id vocas implicaturam conversationalem, an tantum urbanitatem Romanam?

OVIDIVS: Urbanitas, mi Grice, est ars tacendi loquaciter. Ego enim, cum scribo “Nescio quid”, omnibus persuadeo me scire—et tamen nihil dixi: pura implicatura, sine periculo.

GRICEVS: Pulchre! At quid si quis roget: “Amasne?”—et tu respondeas: “Roma calida est”? Ego dicerem: maximam Relationis violas… nisi amor ipse sit res meteorologica.

OVIDIVS: Violo? immo salvo. Nam si dico “amo”, capior; si dico “Roma calida est”, intellegunt “ego ardeo”—et nemo potest me in ius vocare. Sic Sulmonensis philosophia: dicere minus, efficere plus.