Grice concludes the Epilogue by paying a little attention to the general character of Grice’s attitude to “ordinary language,” as Austin called it.

In order to fulfill this task, Grice feels he should say something about what is possibly the most notable *corporate* achievement of Grice’s philosophy, namely the so-called method of linguistic botany, treated, as it often is at Oxford, as a foundation for conceptual analysis in general and *philosophical analysis* in particular. 

Philosophers have not seldom proclaimed the close connection between philosophy and ‘linguistic’ analysis.

So far as Grice knows, however, the ruthless and unswerving association of philosophy with the study of ‘ordinary’ language was peculiar to the Oxford scene, and has never been seen anywhere  — before, — or since, except as an application of the methods of philosophizing which originated at Oxford.

 A classic miniature example of this kind of procedure was Austin's request to Warnock to tell him the difference between playing golf *correctly* — Cicero: correctum — and playing golf *properly.* — Cicero: proprium.

This method is also commonly deployed not merely as a tool for reaching conceptual "fine-tuning" with regard to pairs of expressions or ideas, but in a larger-scale attempt to systematize the range of concepts which appear in a certain conceptual region. Consider: signification in conversation.

It may well be the case that these concepts all fall under a single overarching concept, while it is at the same time true that there is no single word or phrase — or EXPRESSION — which gives linguistic, er, expression or manifestation, to just this concept.

One goal of linguistic botaniy may be to make this or that concept explicit and to show how various subordinate concepts fall under it. 

This programme is closely linked with Austin's — but not Ryle’s — ideas about the desirability of

"going through the dictionary." — The Little Oxford Dictionary.

In some cases, this may be quite a long job, as for example in the case of the  "true".

For one feature of the method is that no initial assumption is to be made by the philosopher — who KNOWS — about any subdivision that may be involved in any subordinate lexical entry united by a single expression; 

true friend

true statement," 

true belief

true bill

"true measuring instrument

," "true singing voice

" will not be initially distinguished from one another as involving a different use of “true"; 

that is a matter which may or may not be the outcome of the operation of linguistic botany; 

subordination and subdivision is not given in advance. 

It seems plausible to suppose that among the things which are being looked for are linguistic ‘proprieties’ and improprieties: 

and these may be of several different kinds; 

so one question which will call for decision will be an identification of the variety of different ways in which any propriety or lack of it may be characterized and organized. 

A Contradiction, an incoherence, and a wealth of other forms of unsuitability will appear among the out-comes, not the starting points, of linguistic botany.

and the nature of these outcomes will need careful consideration. 

Not only may a single exoression involve a multitude of lexical entries, but 

An idioms or a syntactical construction appearing within the domain of a single lexical entry may still be a proper subject for even more specific linguistic botany.

Syntax must not be ignored in the study of ‘semantics.’

At this point we are faced with two distinct problems. 

The first arises from the fact that Grice’s purpose here is not to give a historically correct account of philosophical events which actually take place iat Oxford 

but 

rather 

to characterize and as far as possible to justify a certain distinctive philosophical method.

Now there is little doubt that those who were engaged in and possibly even dedicated to the practice of the prevailing Oxonian method — such philosophers as in order of seniority 

Ryle, 

Austin, 

Grice, 

Hampshire, 

Urmson, 

Strawson, and 

Warnock — 

had a pretty good idea of the nature of the procedures which they were putting into operation; 

indeed it is logically difficult to see how anyone outside this set could have had a better idea than the members of the set since the procedures are identifiable only as the procedure which *these* philosophers are seeking to deploy. 

Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether the course of actual discussions in every way embodied the authentic method, 

for a fully adequate implementation of that method requires a good and clear representation of the method itself; 

the more ‘fragmentary’ — to use Bradley’s idiom — the representation the greater the chance of inadequate implementation; 

and it must be admitted

that the ability of many of us to say what it is that we are doing is fragmentary in the extreme. 

This may be an insoluble problem in the characterization of this kind of theoretical activity; 

to say what such an activity *is* presupposes the ability to perform the activity in question; and 

this in turn 

presupposes the ability to _say_ or demonstrate, successfully, what the activity in question is.

A second and quite different problem is that some of the critics of Oxonian philosophizing — like Russell and others — have exhibited a strong hostility not indeed in every case to the idea that a study of language is a prime concern of philosophy, but rather to the idea that it should be a primary concern of philosophy to study *ordinary* language. — the silly things silly people say.

Philosophy finds employment as part of, possibly indeed just as an auxiliary of, Science; and 

the thinking of the lay is what the learned, scientific thinking, is supposed to supersede, not what it is supposed to be founded on. 

The issues are obscure, but whether or not we like this devilish scientism, we had better be clear about what it entails.

Part of the trouble may arise from an improperly conceived proposition in the minds of some self-appointed expert between "us” and "them.”

between, that is, the privileged and enlightened, on the one hand, and the riff raff rabble on the other. 

But that is by no means the only possible stance which the learned might adopt toward the vul-gar; 

they might think of themselves as qualified, by extended application and education, to pursue further, and to handle better, just those interests which they devise for themselves in their salad days; 

after all, a ‘professional’ usually begins as a amateur — gone wrong!

Or he might think of himself as advancing in one region, on behalf of the human race, the achievements and culture of that race which other members of it perhaps enhance in other directions and which many members of it, unfortunately for them perhaps, are not equipped to advance at all. 

In any case, to recognize the alleged right of the majority to direct the efforts of the minority — which forms the cultured elite — is quite distinct from treating the majority as itself constituting a cultured elite.

Perhaps the balance might be somewhat redressed if we pay attention to the striking parallel which seems to exist between the Oxford which received such a mixed reception and what I might make so bold as to call that other Oxford which, more than two thousand three hundred years earlier, achieved not merely fame but veneration as the cradle of the discipline of philosophy.

The following is a short and maybe somewhat tendentious summary of the Athenian dialectic, with details drawn mostly from Aristotle but also to some extent from Plato and, through Plato, from Socrates himself. 

In Aristotle, the main sources are 

the Topics, 

the Nicomachean Ethics, and 

the Posterior Analytics.

We should distinguish two kinds of knowledge, the knowledge of a fact and the knowledge of a reason, where what the reason account for is the fact.

Knowledge proper involves both a fact to be accounted for and a reason which account for it; 

for this reason Socrates claims to know nothing; 

when we start to research, we may or may not be familiar with the fact, but whether this is so or not we cannot tell until the explanation and the reason begin to become available.

For the explanation and the reason to be available, they must derive ultimately from a principle, but this principle does not come ready-made; 

It has to be devised by the inquirer, and how this is done itself needs explanation.



The principle is not devised by the philosopher in one fell swoop; 

at any given stage a researcher build on the work of his predecessor right back to the earliest predecessor who is a LAY inquirer. The Stone Age metaphysician who was Thales.

Such progressive scrutiny is called

"dialectic,"

 starts with the ideas of the Many and ends (if it ever ends) with the ideas of the Wise.

Among the methods used in dialectic (or "argumentation") is system-building, which in its turn involves higher and higher levels of abstraction. 

So the principle will be, roughly speaking, the smallest and conceptually most economical item which will account for the data, the fact, which the theory has to explain.

This progress toward an acceptable principle is not always tranquil; 

disputes, paradoxes, aporiae, and obstructions to progress abound, and when they are reached, recognizable types of emendation are called upon to restore progress.

So the continuation of progress depends to a large extent on the possibility of "saving the phenomena," and the phenomena consist primarily of what is said, or thought, by the Wise and, before them, the Many.

Grice finds it tempting to suppose that similar ideas underlie Oxonian dialectic; 

the appeal to ‘ordinary’ language might be viewed as an appeal to the ultimate source of one, though not of every, kind of human knowledge. 

It would indeed not be surprising were this to be so, since two senior Oxonians (Ryle and Aus-tin) are both skilled and enthusiastic students of Ancient philosophy.

But this initially appealing comparison between what Grice has been calling Oxonian Dialectic and Athenian Dialectic encounters a serious objection, connected with such phrases as ta heyóuena.

The phrase ta legomena may be interpreted in either of two ways. 

Ta legomena may refer to a class of beliefs or opinions which are commonly or generally held, in which case it would mean much the same as such a phrase as "what is ordinarily thought." 

But ta legomena may refer to a class of ways of talking or locutions, in which case it will mean much the same as "ways in which ordinary people ordinarily talk." — their careless chatter.

 In the Athenian Dialectic we find the phrase used in both of these ways; 

sometimes, for example, Aristotle seems to be talking about locutions, as when he points out that while it is legitimate to speak of "running” “quickly" or "slowly," it is not legitimate or appropriate or polite to speak of "being pleased”  “quickly" — a quickie — or "slowly"; 

from which he draws the philosophical conclusion that 

running is, while being pleased is not 

— despite the opinions of some philosophers, obviously — a process as distinct from an activity. 

At other times, however, Aristotle uses the phrase "ta legomena" to refer to certain generally or vulgarly held beliefs which are systematically threatened by a projected direction of philosophical theory, as the platitude that 

people sometimes behave incontinently 

seems to be threatened by a particular philosophical analysis of the Will, or the near-platitude that 

friends are worth having for their own sake 

seems to be threatened by the seemingly equally platitudinous thesis that the Good Life is self-sufficient and lacking in nothing. 

In the Athenian Dialectic, moreover, though both interpretations are needed, the dominant one seems to be that in which what is being talked about is common opinions, not commonly used locutions or modes of speech. 

In the Oxonian Dialectic, on the other hand, precisely the reverse situation seems to obtain. 

Though some philoso-phers, most notably Moore at Cambridge have maintained that certain commonly held beliefs cannot but be correct and though versions of such a thesis are discernible in certain Oxonian quarters, for example in Urmson's or Grice’s pupil Flew’s treatment of a Paradigm Case Arguments, no general characterization of the Method of "Linguistic Botany” carries with it any claim about the truth-value of any of the specimens which might be subjected to Linguistic Botanizing; nor, Grice thinks, would any such characterization be improved by the incorporation of an emendation in this connection.

Was the truth-value True taken for granted as per some form of transcendental argument?

 So the harmony introduced by an assimilation of the two Dialectics seems to be delusive.

Grice is however, reluctant to abandon the proposed comparison between Oxonian and Athenian Dialectic quite so quickly. 

Grice would begin by recalling that as a matter of historical fact Austin professed a strong admiration fMoore. 

Some like Witters" Austin would say, 

"but Moore’s MY man." 

It is not recorded what aspect of Moore's philosophy particularly appeals to Austin, but the contrast with Witters strongly suggests that Moore primarily appeals to Austin as a champion of Common Sense, and of philosophy as the source of the analysis of Common Sense beliefs, a position for which Moore is especially infamous, in contrast with the succession of less sharply defined positions about the role of philosophy taken up at various times by Witters. 

Oddly, Grice’s collaborator, Pears, would say: Some like Augustine, but Witters’s MY man.

The question which now exercises Grice is why Moore's stand on this matter should have specially aroused Austin's respect, for what Moore says on this matter seems to me to be *plainly* inferior in quality, and indeed to be the kind of thing which Austin was more than capable of tearing to shreds had he encountered it in somebody else. 

Was it just a dismissing of the Witters?

Moore's treatments — and worse, Malcolm’s — of this topic seem to Grice to suffer from two glaring defects and one important lacuna. 

The two glaring defects are: (

1) Moore nowhere attempts to characterize for us the conditions which have to be satisfied by a generally held belief to make it part of a "Common Sense view of the world"; 

even if we overlook this complaint, there is the further complaint that nowhere, so far as Grice knows, does apostolic Moore justify the claim that the Common Sense view of the world is at least in certain respects unquestionably correct. 

The important lacuna is that Moore considers only one possible position about the relation between such specific statements as that 

"Here is one hand and here is another" 

and the seemingly general philosophical statement that a thing exists.

Moore takes it for granted that the statement about his hands entails the general statement that a thing exists, but as Witters

 remarked,

"He who denies the reality of the material world may not wish to deny that he wears underpants underneath his trousers.

Moore was by no means *certainly* wrong, mistaken, or confused, on this matter, but the question which comes first, 

interpretation 

or 

the assessment of truth-value

, is an important methodological question which Moore should have taken more seriously.

Grice’s explanation of part of Austin's by no means wholly characteristic *charity* towards Moore lies in Grice’s conjecture that Austin saw, or thought he saw, the right reply to these complaints and mistakenly assumed that Moore himself had also seen how to reply to them. 

I shall develop this suggestion with the aid of a fairy tale about the philosophical Never-Never Land which is inhabited by philosophical fairy god-mothers. 

Initially we distinguish three of these fairy godmothers, M*, Moore's fairy godmother, A*, Austin's fairy godmother, and G*, Grice's fairy godmother.

 The common characteristic of fairy godmothers is that they harbour explicitly all the views, whether explicit or implicit, of their godchildren. 

G* reports to Grice that A* mistakenly attributes to M* a distinction between two different kinds of subjects of belief, a distinction between personal believers who are individual persons or groups of persons, and nonpersonal believers who are this or that kind of abstraction, like 

the spirit — or genio — of a particular language or even 

the spirit of language as such, the Common Man, 

the inventor of the analytic/synthetic distinction (who is distinct from Leibniz) and so forth. 

A distinction is now suggested between the Athenian Dialectic, the primary concern of which was to trace the development of more and more accomplished personal believers, and a different dialectic which would be focused on nonpersonal believ-ers. 

Since nonpersonal believers are not historical persons, their beliefs cannot be identified from their expression in any historical debates or disputes.

 They can be identified only from the part which they play in the practice of particular languages, or even of languages in general.

So what G* suggests to Grice ran approximately as follows. 

A*, with or without the concurrence of the mundane Austin, attributed to Moore the recognition of a distinction between personal and non-personal, common or general beliefs, together with the idea that a Common Sense view of the world contains just those nonpersonal beliefs which could be correctly attributed to some favored nonper-sonal abstraction, such as The Common Man. 

More would of course need to be said about the precise nature of the distinction between The Common Man and other abstractions; 

but once a distinction has been recognized between personal and nonpersonal believers, at least the beginnings are visible of a road which also finds room for (1) 

the association of nonpersonal beliefs, or a particular variety of nonper-sonal beliefs, with the philosophical tool or instrument called Common Sense, and for (2)

 the appeal to the structure — and content  — of languages, or language as such, as a key to unlock the storehouse of Common Sense, and also for 

(3) the demand for Oxonian Dialectic as a supplementation of Athenian Dialectic, 

which was directed toward personal rather than nonpersonal beliefs. 

G* conjectures that this represented Austin's own position about the function of Linguis-tic Botany, or even if this were not so, it would have been a good position for Austin to adopt about the philosophical role of Linguistic Botany; 

it would be a position very much in line with Austin's known wonder and appreciation with regard to the richness, subtlety, and ingenuity — cleverness — of the instrument of language.

 It was however also G*'s view that the attribution of such reflections to Moore would have involved the giving of credit where credit was not due; 

this kind of picture of ordinary language may have been Austin's but was certainly not Moore's; 

his conception of Common Sense was deserving of no special praise.

We also have to consider the strength or weakness of my second charge against Moore, namely that whether or not he has succeede in providing or indeed has even attempted to provide a characterization of commonsense beliefs, he has nowhere offered us a justification of the idea that commonsense beliefs are matters of knowledge with certainty or indeed possess any special degree or kind of credibility.

Apart from the production, on occasion, of the somewhat opaque suggestion that the grounds for questioning a commonsense belief will always be more questionable than the belief itself, he seems to do little beyond asserting

 (1) that he himself knows for certain to be true the members of an open-ended list of commonsense beliefs, 

2) that he knows for certain that others know for certain that these beliefs are true. 

But this is precisely the point at which many of his oppo-nents, for example Russell, would be ready to join issue with him.

It might here be instructive to compare Moore with another perhaps equally uncompromising defender at OXFORD of knowledge with certainty, namely Wilson. 

Wilson takes the view that the very nature of knowledge is such that items which is an object of knowledge could not be false; 

the nature of knowledge guaranteed, perhaps logically guaranteed, the truth of its object. 

The difficulty here is to explain how a state of mind can in such a way guarantee the possession of a particular truth-value on the part of its object. 

This difficulty is severe enough to ensure that Wilson's position must be rejected; 

for if it is accepted no room is left for the possibility of thinking that we know p when in fact it is not the case that p. 

This difficulty led Wilson and his followers to the admission of a state of "taking for granted," which supposedly is subjectively indistinguishable from ‹knowledge but unlike knowledge carries no guarantee of truth. 

Bui his modification amounts to surrender; for what enables us to deny that all of our so-called knowledge is really only "taking for granted"? 

But while Wilson finds himself landed with bad an-swers, it seems to me that Moore has no answers at all, good or bad; 

and whether nonanswers are superior or inferior to a bad answer seems to me a question hardly worth debating.

It is in any case Grice’s firm belief that Austin would not have been sympathetic toward the attempts made by Moore and some of his followers to attribute to the deliverances of common sense, whatever these deliverances are supposed to be, any guaranteed immunity from error. 

Grice thinks, moreover, that Austin would have been right in withholding his support at this point, and we may notice that had he withheld support, he would have been at variance with some of his own junior colleagues at Oxford, particularly with philosophers like Urmson of Grice’s pupil Flew who, at least at one time, showed a disposition, which as far as Grice knows Austin never did, to rely on so-called Arguments from Paradigm Cases.

 Grice thinks Austin might have thought, rightly, that those who espoused such arguments are attempting to replace by a dogmatic thesis something which they already had, which was, further-more, adequate to all legitimate philosophical needs. 

Austin plainly views ordinary language as a wonderfully subtle and well-contrived instrument, one which is fashioned not for idle display but for serious (and nonserious) use. 

So while there is no guarantee of immunity from error, if one is minded to find error embedded in ordinary modes of speech, one had better have a solid reason behind one. 

That which must be assumed to hold (other things being equal) can be legitimately rejected only if there are grounds for saying that other things are not, or may not be, equal.

At this point, we introduce a further inhabitant of the philosophical Never-Never Land, namely R* who turns out to be Ryle's fairy godmother. 

She propounds the idea that, far from being a basis for rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction, opposition to the idea that there are initially two distinct bundles of statements, bearing the labels "analytic" and "synthetic," lying around in the world of thought waiting to be noticed, provides us with the key to making the ana-lytic/synthetic distinction acceptable. 

The proper view will be that an analytic proposition is among the inventions of theorists who are seeking, in one way or another, to organize and systematize an initially undifferentiated corpus of human knowledge. 

Success in this area is a matter of intellectual vision, not of good eyesight. 

As Socrates once remarked, the ability to see horses without seeing horseness is a mark of stupidity. 

Such considerations as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A*, and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day. H. P.  Grice