Grice is greatly honoured, and much moved, by the fact that such a distinguished company of philosophers should have contributed to this volume work of such quality as a compliment to him.

Grice is especially pleased that the authors of this work are not just a haphazard band of professional colleagues.

Every one of them is a personal friend of Grice, though I have to confess that some of them Grice sees, these days, less frequently than Grice used to, and *much* less frequently than Grice _should_ like to. 

So this collection provides Grice with a vivid reminder that philosophy is, at its *best*, a friendly subject.

Grice wishes that he could respond individually to each contribution; but he does not regard that as feasible, and any selective procedure would be invidious.

Fortunately an alternative is open to Grice.

 The editors of the volume contribute an editorial which provides a synoptic view of Grice’s work; 

in view of the fact that the number of Grice’s publications is greatly exceeded by the number of his *unpublications* — read: teaching material qua tutorial fellow —  and that even my publications include some items which are not easily accessible — who reads Butler? — the editors’s undertaking fulfills a crying need. 

But it does more than that; 

it presents a most perceptive and *sympathetic* picture or portrayal of the spirit which lies behind the parts of Grice’s work which it discusses; 

and it is Grice’s feeling that few have been as fortunate in their contemporary commentators as I have been in mine. Think Heidegger!

So Grice goes on to make his own contribution a response to theirs, though before replying directly to them Grice allows himself to indulge in a modicum of philosophical autobiography, which in its own turn leads into a display of philosophical prejudices and predilections. 

For convenience Grice fuses the editors into a multiple personality,  whose multiplicity is marked by the

use of plural pronouns and verb-forms.

As Grice looks back upon his former self, it seems to Grice that when he does begin his ‘serious’ (if that’s the word) study of philosophy, the temperament with which he approaches this enterprise is one of what he might call dissenting rationalism.

The rationalism is probably just the interest in looking for this or that reason;

Grice’s tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, Grice’s father. 

Grice’s father was a gentle person.

Grice’s father, being English, exercised little *personal* influence over Grice 

But Grice’s father exercised quite a good deal of *cultural* or intellectual  influence.

Grice’s father was an obdurate — ‘tenacious to the point of perversity’ — liberal non-conformist.

Grice witnesses almost daily, if without involvement — children should be seen — the spectacle of his father’s religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household: Grice’s mother, who is heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who is a Catholic convert. 

But whatever their origins in Grice’s case, I do not regard either of the elements in his dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at his stage of intellectual development. 

And recall, he wasn’t involved!

Grice mention the rationalism and the dissent more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance.

It seems to me that the rationalism and the dissent have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded!

And this Grice is inclined to regard as a more curious phenomenon.

Grice counts hinself — as Oxford goes — wonderfully fortunate, as a Scholar at Corpus, to have been adjudicated as tutor W. F. R. Hardie, the author of a recognised masterpiece on PLATO, and whose study on ARISTOTLE’s Nicomachean Ethics, in an incarnation as a set of notes to this or that lecture, sees Grice through this or that term of himself lecturing — with Austin and Hare — on the topic.

It seems to Grice that he learnt from his tutor just about every little thing which one can be taught by someone else, as distinct from the things which one has to teach oneself — as Mill did!

More specifically, Gricd’s rationalism was developed under his tutor’s guidance into a tenacity to the point of perversity and the belief that this or that philosophical question is to be answered with an appeal to reason — Grice’s own — that is to say by argument.

Grice also learns from his tutor *how* to argue alla Hardie, and in learning how to argue alla Hardie — and not the OTHER tutor who complained about Grice’s tenacity to the point of perversity — Grice comes to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than

As Grice re-reads what he finds myself to have written, Grice also find himself ready to expand this description to read 

1

irreverent,

2  conservative - not liberal, like Herbert Grice — 

3 dissenting 

4 rationalism'.

an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised). 

Grice comes also to see that, although philosophical progress is very difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after agonising labours — recall Socrates’s midwifery! — it is worth achieving; 

and that the difficulties involved in achieving philosophical progress offer no kind of an excuse for a lowering of standards, or for substituting for the goals of philosophical truth some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like — to echo Searle, an American then studying at Oxford — rabble-rousing, or hamburgers! 

The methods of Grice’s tutor for those four years are too austere for some,

 in particular his tutor’s very long silences in tutorials are found distressing by some other pupils (though as the four years go by, Grice feelsthe tempo speeded up quite a bit

There is a story, which Grice is sure that he believes, that at one point in one tutorial a very long silence developed when it was the tutor’s turn to speak, which is at long last broken by the tutor asking his pupil:

And what did you mean by "of"*? 

There is another story, which Grice thinks he does believe, according to which Isaiah Berlin, an expatriate Hebrew from Russia, who was a pupil of Grice’s tutor three years before Grice, decides that the next time a silence develops during a tutorial, Berlin was NOT going to be the one to break it.

Games Russians play.

 In the next tutorial, after Berlin did finish reading his essay, there follows a silence which lasted exactly twenty-four minutes, and 32 seconds — at which point Berlin could stand it no longer, and said something.

“I need to use the rest-room.”

Grice’s tutor’s tutorial rigours never quite bothered Grice.

If philosophising is a difficult operation (as it plainly is)  sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a move (as  to change the idiom, chess-players are only too well aware). 

The idea that a philosopher such as Socrates, or Thales, or Kant — well, Grice is less sure about Kant, ‘being a Hun’ — should either have already solved or answered satisfactorily every question — which is impossible - or should be equipped to solve or answer duccessfukly every problem or question immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpoy ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess. 

Grice enjoys the slow pace of discussion with his tutor; 

He lenjoyed the breath-laden "Ooohhh!" which Grice’s tutor would sometimes emit when he catches the pupil in, or even perversely pushes his pupil, into, a patently untenable position (though Grice preferred it when this ejaculation was directed at someone other than myself): 

and Grice liked his tutor’s resourcefulness in the defence of difficult positions, a characteristic illustrated by the foilowing incident which Grice’s tutor once told Grice about himself. 

Grice’s tumor had, not long since, parked his car and gone to a cinema. 

Unfortunately he had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights are controlled by the passing traffic; as a result, the lights were jammed and it required four policemen to lift his car off the strip.

The Oxford police decided to prosecute. 

Grice indicated to his tutor that this didn'tsurprise Gricd at all and asked him how he fared. 'Oh', he said, 'I got off.’

Grice asks his tutor how on earth he managed that. 

‘Quite simply," he answered, I just invoked Mill's Method of Difference, 

They charged me with causing an obstruction at 4,00 p.m.; and the tutor answers, sophistically, that since his car had been parked at 2.00 p.m., it couldn't have been his car which caused the obstruction.

Gricd’s tutor never disclosed his own views to Grice, no doubt wishing a Grice  to think his own thoughts (however flawed) rather than his tutor’s! It happens! Witness some of Grice’s OWN pupils — from Unger to Nozick and back! Never mind Strawson!

When Grice did succeed, usually with considerable diffi-culty, in eliciting from him an expression of manifestation of his own position, what Grice gets is liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly CONSERVATIVE in tone - in a Scots sort of fashion —; not surprisingly, what Grice gets would not contain much in the way of a battle-cry or a piece of campaign-material. 

An Aspiring knight-errant requires more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic: he also requires  a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of this or that Damsel in Distress.

And then, talking of Hebrews, Oxford was rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by a Cockney surnamed Ayer, — a village in Switzerland, he claimed — at that time philosophy’s enfant terrible at Oxford.

Not a few philosophers, including Grice, disllay rather an initial interest by this Viennese method, this or that Viennese theses, and this of that Viennese problem which were on display.

Some — and English too — were, at least momentarily, ‘inspired’ by what they saw and heard from this bit of an outsider!

For Grice’s part, Grice’s reservations are never laid to rest.

The cruditiy and the dogmatism seem too pervasive. 

And then everything is brought to a halt by the war.

After the war, the picture was quite different, as a result of 

— the dramatic rise in the influence of J. L. Austin, 

— the rapid growth of Oxford as a centre of philosophy, due largely to the efforts of Ryle, who atrociously had ‘tutored’ the Viennese refugee —  and 

— the extraordinarily high quality of the many philosophers who appeared on the Oxford scene. 

Grice’s own life in this period involved at least two especially important aspects of facets.

 The first is Grice’s prolonged collaboration with his own pupil, for one term, and for the PPE logic paper — Mabbott shared the tutelage — Strawson.

Paul’s and Peter’s robbing one to pay the other — efforts are partly directed towards the giving of this or that joint seminars.

Grice and Strawson stage a number of these seminars on topics related to the notions of meaning, of categories, and of logical form. 

But our association is much more than an alliance for the purposes of teaching. — Strawson had become a university lecturer, too.

Grice and Strawson consume vast quantities of time in systematic and unsystematic philosophical exploration.

From these discussions — a joint seminar attended by the culprit — springs their  joint “In Defense of a Dogma,” — a counterattack on Manx Quine’s moxie to claim Empiricism bore a dogma or two — and 

also a long uncompletedwork on predication and pretty much Aristotelian or Kantotelian categories, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's essay in descriptive metaphysics  pompously titled Individuals.

— that memorable Third programme ending with revisionary metaphysics only!

 

Grice’s and Strawson’s method of composition is laborious in the extreme: and no time of the day excluded!

work is constructed together, sentence by sentence, nothing being written down — usually by Strawson — until agreement had been reached — or if Quine was attending the Monday seminar, in which case Strawson finished it off on the previous Sunday — which often takes quite a time.

 The rigours of this procedure eventually leads to its demise. Plus, Strawson had Galen!

During this period of collaboration Gricd and Strawson of course developed a considerable corpus of common opinions;

 but to Gricd’s mind a more important aspect of it was the extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which we developed; — except on the topic of truth value gaps and the conventional implicature of “so”

other philosophers would sometimes complain that Grice’s and Strawson’s mutual exchanges were liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to a third party. — unless it was Strawson’s dog! 

The potentialities of such joint endeavours continue to lure Grice

 the collaboration with Strawson is followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, with (for example) 

Austin on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione, 

Austin and Hard on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea

with Warnock and Quinton on the philosophy perception, and with Pears and with Thomson on philosophy of action

Such is the importance which Grice adjudicates to this mode of philosophical activity: the Oxford joint seminar, open to every member of the university that cares to attend! Pupils NEED to attend three per week!

The other prominent feature of this period in Grice’s philosophical life was participation in the discussions which take place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which are conducted by a number of Oxford philosophers under the leadership of Austin.

This

group  continues in fact to meet up to, and indeed for some years after, Austin's death 

It was christened by Grice and Hampshire The New Play Group', — the old Play Group was pre-war, and Hampshire, but not Grice (having born on the wrong side of the tracks) attended it — and was often so referred to, though so far as Grice sudoects, never by, or in the presence of the kindergarten master himself!

Grice has little doubt that the new play group is often thought of outside of without 

Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps even inside or within Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what became known as

*’Ordinary’ Language Philosophy, or even *The Oxford School of ‘Ordinary’-Language Philosophy' — a joke usually well taken, even at Cambridge!

As such a core or hot-bed, the new play group no doubt absorbs its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon this 'School' by so many people, like for example a Hebrew from France, Gellner — Austin’s pupil — and like Gustav Bergmann who (it was said), when asked whether he was going to hear a paper delivered on a visit by an eminent British philosopher, replied with characteristic charm that he did not propose to waste his time on any English Futilitarian.

Yet, as Grice looks back on our activities, I find it difficult to discern any feature of them which merited this kind of opprobrium.

 To begin with,there was more than one group or ill-defined association of Oxford philosophers who are concerned, in one way or another, with

'ordinary' linguistic usage; 

besides those who, initially at least — until Grice replaced Austin upon Austin’s death — gravitated towards Austin,

 there were those who drew special illumination from Ryle,

 and others (better disciplined perhaps) who looked to Wittgenstein; 

and the philosophical gait of people belonging to one of these groups would, characteristically, be markedly different from that of people belonging to another. 

But even within the new Play Group, great diversity is visible, as one would expect of an association containing philosophers with the ability and independence of mind of 

Austin, 

Strawson, 

Hampshire, 

Paul, 

Pears, 

Warnock, and 

Hare 

(to name a few).

— very few!

 There was no 'School'; 

there were no dogmas which united us, in the way, for example, that an unflinching (or almost unflinching) opposition to abstract entities unified and inspired what I might call the American School of Latter-day Nominalists, or that 

an unrelenting (or almost unrelenting) determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable united the School of Logical Positivism. 

It has, Grice thinks, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which united us was that of the need to restrict philosophical attention to 'ordinary" language, in a sense which would disqualify the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which would seem to put a stranglehold on any philosophical theory-construction. 

It is true that many, even all, of us would have objected (and rightly objected) to the introduction of technical apparatus before the ground had been properly laid.

The sorry story of deontic logic shows what may happen when technologists rush in where a well-conducted elephant would fear to tread.

 We would also (as some of us did from time to time) have objected to the covert introduction of jargon, the use of seemingly innocent expressions whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay (as perhaps has occurred with words like 'sensation' or 'volition).

 But one glance at 'How to talk: Some Simple Ways', or at "How to Do Things with Words' should be enough to dispel the idea that there was a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if certain individuals at some moments may have strayed in that direction.

Another dogma to which some may have supposed us to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacro-sanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgement or world-picture may be identified as underlying ordinary discourse.

 Such a dogma would, I imagine, be some kind of counterpart of Moore's 'Defence of Common Sense.’

It is true thatAustin had a high respect for Moore. 

‘Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man', Grice once heard Austin say: 

and it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of the group, as Priscianus did, thought that some sort of metaphysic *is* embedded in ‘ordinary’ language.

 But to regard such a 'natural metaphysic' as present and as being worthy of examination stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or acceptable. 

Any such further step would need justification by argument.

In fact, the only position which to Grice’s mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking; 

and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from philosopher to philosopher, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses. 

It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive examination of linguistic phenomena was not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct approach to philosophy.

Austin's expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involved some irony) was that we 'philosophical hacks' spent the week making. for the benefit of our pupils, direct attacks on philosophical issues. and that we needed to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen 'para-philosophy' in which certain *non*-philosophical conceptions were to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency.

 It was in this spirit that in early days they investigate rules of games (with an eye towards questions about meaning or signification.

 Only later did we turn our microscopic eyes more directly upon philosophical questions.

It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called

'ordinary’language philosophy' may have come from people who saw this 'movement' as a sinister attempt on the part of a decaying intellectual establishment, an establishment whose home lay within the ancient walls of Oxford and Cambridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose upbringing is founded on a classical education, to preserve control of philosophy by gearing philosophical practice to the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage.

 It is, I think, certain that among the enemies of the new philosophical style are to be found defenders of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality, not with the character of language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality. 

Such persons do, to Grice’s mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply. 

Either the conclusions which 'ordinary language philosophers' draw from linguistic data are also linguistic in character, in which case the contents of philosophy are trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusions are not linguistic in character, in which case the nature of the step from linguistic premisses to non-linguistic conclusions is mysterious. 

The traditionalists, however, seem to have no stronger reason for objecting to 'ordinary language philosophy than to forms of linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ordinary language, such as that espoused by logical positivists.

But, to Grice’s mind, much the most significant opposition came from those who felt that 'ordinary language philosophy* was an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regarded its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, once called 'stone-age metaphysics'.

That would be the best that could be dredged up from a 'philosophical' study of ordinary language. 

Among such assailants were to be found those who, in effect, were ready to go along with the old description of philosophy as the queen of the sciences', but only under a reinterpretation of this phrase. '

Queen' must be understood to mean not

*sovereign queen, like Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II, but

"queen consort', like Queen Alexandra or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: 

and the sovereign of which philosophy is the queen-consort might turn out to be either science in general or just physical science.

The primary service which would be expected of philosophy as a consort would be to provide the scientist with a pure or purified language for him to use on formal occasions (should there be such occasions). 

Some, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of 'ordinary language philosophy is in any case doomed, since it presupposes the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.

The issues raised in this attack are both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space. 

Grice has three comments.

The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics' may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.

Certainly 'stone-age' physics, if by that we mean a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might(conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in ordinary language, would not be a proper object for first-order devotion.

But this fact would not prevent something derivable or extractable from stone-age physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research; 

for this extractable characterization might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, Eddington’s physics. 

Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ‘ordinary’ language (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any *belief* about how the world goes — which such ‘ordinary’ language reflects; 

The metaphysic might, for example, be derived somehow from the *categorial* structure of the language. Aristotle: kata agora.

Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in physical science.

A  rationally organized and systematized study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise; 

so might some highly general theory in formal ‘semantics’ — Aristotle, semein, signify.

 though it might of course be a serious question whether these two candidates are identical:

To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of 'ordinary’ language philosophy such as that practised by Ryle, Austin, or Grice — to narrow down to Oxonian dialectic vintage — might have to press into service the argument which Grice represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct. 

The anti-Oxonian might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general ‘semantic’ theory based squarely on data provided by ‘ordinary’ discourse — ta legomena — by arguing. or asserting. that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of Leibniz’s unforgettable invention: the analytic/synthetic distinction.

With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-d-vis science — or some particular favoured science — Grice should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner is such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions.

Grice should start with a lively expectation that this would NOT be the case. 

But even if this negative expectation is disappointed. Grice should next enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist. 

If those standards of purity are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so NOT dictated by Eddington and the scientists, there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy —or the métier of such a philosopher as Grice — might be to discover or devise a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary' language — only it would include wavicles, whattings, izzings and hazzings!

And even if the requisite kind of purity of the language were to consist in what Grice might term such logico-methodological virtues — such as consistency and systematicity —  which are also those looked for in scientific theories, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ‘ordinary’ language? 

How clever language is — and Grice didn’t mean Eddington’s!

In which case, an ‘ordinary’-language philosopher such as Grice would be back in business. 

So far as Grice can see, once again the enemy of ‘ordinary’-language philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ‘ordinary’ language would have to presuppose the viability of (originally) Leibniz’s  analytic/synthetic distinction.

With regard to Leibniz’s analytic/synthetic distinction itself, Grice first remarks that it is his view that neither party, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory — a knock-down argument, that is!

For example, Quine's original argument against Leibniz that every attempt, since Leibniz — Quine has no German — to define 'analytic' ends up in a hopelessly circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to Grice’s mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not be the right procedure to follow an idea which I shall

expand in a moment. 

And, on the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Grice and Strawson to defend Leibniz’s dogma of the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of Paradigm Case argument fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such types of argument, namely that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by an individual such as Leibniz - or a population of Leibnizisns — speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question survives a rigorous theoretical scrutiny. 

To Grice’s mind, the mistake made by both parties — the anti-Leibnizians and the Leibnizisns — has been to try to support, or to discredit, the analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of a natural language such as Leibniz’s native Teutonick — only he wrote in Gallic!

it would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the "family circle' of this or that concept — signify —  pointed to by Quine, and to regard Leibniz’s analytic/synthetic distinction not as a (supposedly) detectable element in a natural language such as Gallic, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of a natural language, such as Gallic!

The viability of Leibniz’s analytic-synthetic distinction, then, would be a theoretical question which,so far as Grice can see, remains to be decided; 

The decision is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of such a distinction, should it find a home.

Two further comments seem to Grice relevant and important. 

A common though perhaps not universally adopted practice among

"ordinary

language philosophers' is to treat as acceptable the forms of ‘ordinary’ discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it. 

A common alternative proposed by this or that enemy of Oxonian dialectic or

*ordinary language philosophy has been that of a rational reconstruction of ‘ordinary’ language; 

in the words of that wise Irishman, Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with the vulgar but think with the learned.

But why should the Bishop’s vulgarities be retained?

 Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with ‘the learned’?

Is that an Irishism?

After all, if Grice’s house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that he needs another one, it is not essential that Grice construct the new house within the outer shell of his old house, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper — or aesthetically preferable?

This happened to Peano — who moved from a nice villa in the Piedmont to a literal shack — or was it the other way round?

An attachment to the form or frame of ordinary discourse even when the substance or matter is discarded suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for ‘ordinary’ discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies such as the Irish bishop — it may be claimed that he claimed that he was, like Warnock, an ANGLO-Irish!

Second, whether or not a viable Leibnizian analytic/synthetic distinction exists, Grice is not happy with the claim that ‘ordinary’ language philosophy presupposes the existence of such a distinction, or of the present king of France!

 It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ‘ordinary usage would incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which could be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable:

 but in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfied the standards which a theory is supposed to satisfy, it would appear that the analytic/synthetic distinction would NOT be pre-supposed, even by Collingwood’s substandards — Leibniz’s distinction, and therefore Leibniz himself, would be VINDICATED!

For Leibniz’s distinction to be *entailed* — to use another Irishism, Moore’s! — by the execution of a programme is plainly not the same as it to be Collingwoodisnly presupposed by that programme. 

For, if it IS to be presupposed by the programme of "ordinary language philosophy, it would, Grice imagines, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction; 

— and how this allegation could be made out Grice cannot for the life of him discover.

Cf Owen on existence of pigs presupposing that pigs exist!

Grice turns now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which — especially subsequently — are to Grice, but not Nowell-Smith — to be particularly appealing. 

First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). 

Grice was once dining with Strawson at Strawson’s college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was a scholar, sat at the tutorial feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.

Grice asks him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. 

This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth;

Grice realizes that mirth was quite inappropriate.

 Indeed the message is  a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: 

for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. 

Austin's message is another platitude;

 it in effect says that, if in accordance with prevailing fashion, one wants to say that every philosophical proposition is ultimately about ‘usage’ — never signification -/ one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what that usage — never signification — is and of what lies behind it. 

A principle of conversation as rational co-operation!

Sophisticated but remorseless literalism is typical of Austin.

When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American (of course — what else are they good at?) logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's see if we can play it':

 with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each Saturday morning to play that Saturday’s improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (Grice suspects) of less thrilling ancestors of the game later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'

Another appealing element is the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument.

 By this Grice does not mean merely that Austin saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules.

 Austin may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualI 

Holy of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive discipline of preliminary linguistic studies. 

What Grice imputes to Austin is a belief in our everyday language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose or métier as Leibniz typically put it in Gallic; a belief in it as something whose intricacies and distinctions are not idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in communica-tion.

 It is not surprising, therefore, that our discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the purpose, or point, as Winch preferred  of this or that feature of ordinary discourse.

When put to work, this purposeful  finalist, conception of ‘ordinary’ language seems to offer fresh and manageable approaches to philosophical ideas and problems or aporiae, the appeal of which approaches, in Grice’s eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between them on the one hand and, on the other, the professions and practice of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in relation to Eleatic to rà Xeyouera.

When properly regulated and directed, this botany of uses' seems to Grice to provide a valuable initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts. 

Indeed, Grice will go further, and proclaim it as his belief that a botany of usage is indis-pensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that at Oxford — never mind Athens — this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned. 

That is not to say, of course, the very obvious idea that Grice ever subscribed to the full Austin-ian prescription for a botany of usage, namely (as one might put it) to go through the Little Oxford dictionary and to believe everything it tells you. It has an entry for ‘pirot’!

Indeed, Austin once remarked to him in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent) that I personally didn't give a hoot what the little Oxford dictionary said, and drew the rebuke from Austin: “And that is, Grice, where you keep making your gross mistake!’

Of course, not all these explorations are successful; 

The play group once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word 'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of the word 'highly" (as in

"very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very depressed" or

"very wicked'): and we reached no conclusion.

 This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity; but that response was as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, 'How many angels can sit on the point of a pin?' 

For much as this medieval question was raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so our discussion was directed, in response to a worry from Grice, no less, towards an examina-tion, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which was generallyagreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical ‘importance,’with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries. 

Unfortunately the desired results were not forthcoming.

Little did Grice cared that Austin found importance UNimportant!

Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding to, the finer points of usage, provides a splendid and instructive example to those who were concerned to include a botany of usage in his armoury. 

Grice recounts three authentic anecdotes in support of this claim. 

Warnock was being dined at Austin's college with a view to election to a Fellowship, and was much disconcerted — he is a practical Irishman —  even though he was already acquainted with Austin, when Austin's *first* remark to him was not ‘Pleased to see you’ (Boring) but:

“What would you say the difference lies between my saying to you that someone is not playing golf correctly and that he is not playing golf properly?' 

On a certain occasion the play group is discussing the notion of a principle, and (in this connection) the conditions for appropriate use of the phrase ‘on principle'. 

Nowell- Smith recalls that a pupil of Gardiner, who was Greck, wanting permission for an overnight visit to London, had come to Gardiner and offered him some money, saying *I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach'. 

At this point, Nowell Smith suggested, Gardiner might well have replied, 

‘1 do not take bribes on principle.' 

Austin responded by saying 

'1 would never have gone into the trouble! 

 "No, thanks" seems more than enough — and surely less offensive.

On another occasion, Nowell Smith (again cast in the role of straight man) offers as an example of non-understandable propositio  an extract from a sonnet of Donne:

From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.

Austin said, '

nay. PERFECTLY intelligible, our Donne

Donne means, but it wouldn’t scan, 

angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth"."

These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why Grice should have turned away from this style of philosophy. 

Well, as Gricd hasalready indicated, in a certain sense Gricd never have turned away, in that he continues to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing; 

for *just how* much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer.

 That linguistic information should not be just a quantity of collector's items, but should on occasion at least, provide linguistic Nature's answers to questions which we put to her, and that such questioning is impossible without hypotheses set in an at least embryonic THEORY of conversation as rational cooperation, is a proposition which would, Grice suspects, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent; 

the trouble begins when one asked, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory of conversation as rational cooperation this underlying theory of conversation as rational cooperation should be. 

The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which Grice has already mentioned; 

by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ordinary discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not. 

It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to this problem would be couched in terms of a special generality which attaches to philosophical but not to non-philosophical questions; 

but whether this generality would be simply a matter of degree, or whether it would have to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of a category — kata agora — , remains to be determined.

 At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by Grice;

if it is necessary to invoke the notion of a category — kata agora — . are we to suppose these to be this or that category of conversation or expression — a conversational category — or a metaphysical or ontological category (this or that category of this or that thing — substance and attributes — a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ordinary discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent — not just Oxonian —  ‘semantic’ theory — of signification — or a metaphysical

theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these possibilities are distinct. 

Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory or theories behind ordinary discourse do not seem too bright. 

In Grice’s own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory of conversation as rational cooperation underlying ordinary discourse comes from my work on the idea of Conversational significance, which emphasises the radical importance of FOCUSING on what a *conversationalist* attempts to communicate in uttering his conversational moves.

Grice’s own efforts allowed him to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of  on conversational phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford the group is concerned. 

Grice felt like throwing light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and attempted to reach the virtues of a strong methodology; 

Grice aldo wanted to show vividly the kind of way in which a region for long found theoretically intractable by scholars of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control. 

During this time Grice’s philosophizing developed a distinct tendency to appear in analytically formal dress; 

Work in this formal analytical style  — Austin dead — was directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, the shntax of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell's words, a pretty good guide to what Russell at Cambridge called “logical form,” — Grice prefers ‘semantic representation’ — or to a suitable representation of logical form via semantic representation.

 This undertaking involved the construction, for a language — System G of Deutero-Esperanto — with quantification, of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-‘semantics’ which makes minimal use of transformations.

 This project is not fully finished and has not so far been published, though its material is  presented in lectures  seminars, and colloquia - some of them pretty memorable (for those who were into that kind of thing).

An interest in analytic formalistic philosophizing seems to Grice to have more than one

source. 

It may arise from a desire to ensure that the philosophical ideas which one deploys are capable of full and coherent development; 

not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system.

 Grice has never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate calculus, together with set theory

in any case this kind of analytical blue-collared formal enterprise would overtax the meagre technical equipment of Gricd who had proudly earned at Oxford via a Clifton scholarship a privileged CLASSICAL education, rather!

It may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of a notational device together with sketchy indications of the law or principle to be looked for in a system or theory incorporating these devices;

 the object of the exercise being to seek out a hitherto unrecognized analogiy and to attain a higher level of generality. 

This latter kind of interest is the one which engages Grice, and will, he thinks, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.

It is nevertheless true that in recent years Grice’s disposition to resort to analytical formalism has markedly diminished.

 This retreat may well have been accelerated when some Oxoniansremarked to me that Grice was TOO formal; but its main source lay in the fact that Grice began to devote the bulk of his attentions to areas of philosophy other than semantics — to philosophical psychology, seen as an off. shoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics — ontology and eschatology — and to ethics, in which Grice’s pre-existing interest was much enlivened by an inborn capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples in such an otherwise dull field!

Such areas of philosophy — especially biological philosophy - seem, at least at present, much less amenable to an analytical formalistic treatment.

 Grice has  little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by technology;

 to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism. 

But the development of this theme will best be deferred until the next sub-section.

The opinions which Grice voices are all be general in character: 

they relate to such things as what he might call, for want of a better term, style in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology. 

He reserves for the next section anything hd might have to say about his views on the specific philosophical topic of Minimalism, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.

Grice first proclaims it as his belief that doing philosophy ought to be fun.

 He would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny. 

One should of course be serious about philosophy: 

but being serious does not require one to be solemn.

Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philo-sophy; 

there have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church. 

The prime source of this belief is no doubt the wanton disposition which nature gave Grice

but it has been reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; 

each one — Austin, Strawson, Warnock, Pears, Thompson, Hare, … has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit and stimulated the intellect.

 To Grice’s mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth;

 and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors published or unpublished — with Strawson and Pears  and Warnock— then so much the better.

But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in Oxford’s philosophical world. 

It was said of the Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of midwifery; 

he sought to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.

Though this comment referred to his proper severity in tutorials, Joseph was in fact, in concert with the much more formidable Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with his scholars; 

philosophical productivity among his contemporaries in Oxford was low, 

and one philosopher of considerable ability even managed to complete a lifetime without publishing a single word. He unpublished quite a few, though!

Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the scholars of his college once crucified him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.

 The tradition does not die with Joseph; 

to take just one example, Grice has never been as happy about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia as with Austen’s eponym, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality —- it’s all about Ayer and Berkeley — and two Penguin books, too — , but *more* because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant. 

. So far as Grice knows, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes. 

There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.

Though it is no doubt plain that Grice is not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, he has to confess when it comes to Witters that Grice is not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus. 

The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending: 

indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher such as Witters is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims.

 To Grice’s stomach it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person like Witters or a philosophical creed like Wittersianism.

zealotry and bandwagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship. 

Rational and *dispassionate* commendation or criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth: 

but passion directed towards either philosophers like Witters or philosophies like Wittersianism is out of place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured.

 What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.

Grice has little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement. 

But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution. 

One of these factors is, Gricd suspects   a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.

It is, Grice is inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or aporia or raises a certain question. 

At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it; 

and the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rivals, characteristically by the detection of counter-examples.

Think signification — think rule utilitarianism! Think Gettier!

Philosophical theses are supported by elimination of alternative theses.

It is, however, Grice’s hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, theses can be established by direct evidence in their favour, not just by elimination of their rivals.

 I shall refer to this issue again later when I come to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument. The kind of metaphysical argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a 'diagogic' as opposed to 'epago-gic' or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation. Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of rivals, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people; and perhaps a greater emphasis on 'diagogic' procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.

A second possible source of atmospherie amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry. An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (how-ever difficult the realization of this index might be to determine). Of course one must try to be right, but even so I doubt whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of "for the right reasons. An eminent topologist whom I knew was regarded withsomething approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake. Though he was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.

The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar. Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.

(I) The cause which I have just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy. There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which I also believe. These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline: the first I shall call the latitudinal unity of philosophy, and the second, its longitudinal unity. With regard to the first, it is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline. By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemological classification of a priori knowledge, I mean (or hope I mean) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the

others; to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and occasionally happens) L am introduced to, 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy (or in 'Nineteenth-century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. At this point, however, I must admit a double embarassment; I do not know exactly what the thesis is which I want to maintain, and I do not know how to prove it, though I am fairly sure that my thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarass-ments may not be independent of one another. So the best 1 can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.

(i) It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter ofof a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry. On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S. (ii) There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines. (iii) Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline. For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics; some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking: some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology: and so on. All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.

(iv) It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature. But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments; each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.

(v) There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline. There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual. This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain. (Suggestion (v) may well be close to suggestion (ii).) (III) In speaking of the 'Longitudinal Unity of Philosophy', I am referring to the unity of Philosophy through time. Any Oxford philosophy tutor who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his pupils, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and articles from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries; and it is only a little less obvious that often substantiallysimilar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates. Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another, for example between Western European and Indian philosophy. If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of outstanding philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead. And when I say proper consideration I am not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame; I mean rather that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now; and, further, that in order to do this we should do our best to 'introject' ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking: indeed to rethink their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers: and then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves. I might add at this point that it seems to me that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection lies in the region of methodology. By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists; indeed. I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers. So whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.

Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such 'introjection' may be neither possible nor worth-while; but with Aristotle and Kant, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding. But such an introjection is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from person to person; and in this enterprise of introjection transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.This reflection leads me to one of my favourite fantasies. Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for 2 millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved. As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else. My fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark; in fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times; that it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems. The solutions are inscribed in the records of our subject; but what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright. Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact; but to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.

(IV) As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positiv-ism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physical-ism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey. The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.

There are many persons, for example, who view naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting nominalism; and it is not easy to see how any one could couple support for phenomenalism with support for physicalism.

After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age. I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.

But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?

The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelvefold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies. To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which secks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertized philosophical commodity, suchas abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth. In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character, in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.

In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of "desert landscapes'. But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate; we are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape; we are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer. To change the image some-what, what bothers me about what I am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.

I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these bétes noires seem to possess. Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission: they limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.

They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation; some prima facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away; and they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs. My own instinets operate in a reverse direction from this. I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.

I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.

This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic; but all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack. I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism'; the best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which 1 should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject. My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that Because it is redis no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called

"Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.

I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of ais no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called

"Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.

I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of a29,000 foot mountain. (8) If aj and a z are vacuous, then the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set @: (B) 'is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope, and (Ps) 'is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29.000 foot mountain. (y) Provided

'R, and 'R,' are suitably interpreted, the predicates A, and , may be treated as coextensive respectively with the following revised predicates

(y) Stands in R, to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and (72) 'stands in Rz to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees'. (8) We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates o1 and a2, respectively, the following sequences derived from 7, and Yz: (S,) the sequence composed of the relation R, (taken in extension), the set married to, the set daughters, the set English queens, and the set popes: and (&2) the sequence composed of the relation Rz, the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees. These sequences are certainly distinet, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates a, and a2.

My chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposingin advance a limitation on the character of explanations.

For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using vacuous predicates in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being correlated with a sequence of non-empty sets.

This is a condition which, I suspect, might not be met by every vacuous predicate. But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of would-be explanatory terms.

The second suggested way of avoiding the unwanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first; it certainly seems simpler. The admissibility of vacuous predicates in explanations of possible but non-actual phenomena (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition. And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, wouldcertainly be trivial. Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if (1) they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and (2) these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifies whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of non-vacuous predicates.

The explanatory opportunities for vacuous predicates depend on their embodiment in a system.

My doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.

I conjecture, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which that science provides. But now a problem arises: the preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability scems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact. It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense. But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom I know or know of have not seemed anxious to confer. But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege? (If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embel-lishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it into a necessity.)

I have, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted; I have been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed. I should be less than honest if I pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained. I should, however, also be less than honest if I concealed the fact that, should I be left without an argument, it is very likely that I should not be very greatly disturbed. For my antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experiencein a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimal. ists to be mistaken.

(VI) But at this point some people, I think, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way. For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with me, for whatever reasons, in opposition to exten-sionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with me. Now I certainly do wish to affirm, under some interpretation, 'the objectivity of value, and I also wish to maintain, again under some interpretation, 'the presence of finality in nature'.

But perhaps I had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.

(1) I believe (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of rational beings, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.

I also believe that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.

1. | believe that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a realist approach to value. Only if value is in a suitable sense 'instituted by us' can it exhibit the aforesaid combination.
2. The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in nature (the admissibility of final causes).
3. The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere:
4. The adoption of a constructivist approach

makes possible,

perhaps even demands, the adoption of a stronger rather than merely a weaker version of rationalism. That is to say, we can regard ourselves, qua rational beings, as called upon not merely to have reasons for our beliefs (rationes cognoscendi) and also for other attitudes like desires and intentions, but to allow and to search for, reasons for things to bethe case (at least in that area of reality which is constructed). Such reasons will be rationes essendi.

It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure. Any elucidation of it, and any defence of the claims involved which I shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait until the second main section of this Reply: for I shall need to invoke specifie theses within particular departments of philosophy. I hope to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.

B. COMMENTARY ON RICHARDS

Richards devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to three or four topics which they feel to be specially prominent in my work; to questions about meaning, to questions in and about philosophical psychology, rationality, and metaphysics, and finally to questions about value, including ethical questions. I shall first comment on what they have to say about meaning, and then in my concluding section I turn to the remaining topics.

B1. Meaning

In the course of a penetrating treatment of the development of my views on this topic, they list, in connection with what they see as the third stage of this development three problems or objections to which my work might be thought to give rise. I shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order; I shall also add a fourth problem which I know some people have regarded as acute, and I shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in my thinking, which Richards have presented and which may not be generally familiar.

As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, I may remark that the treatment of the topic by Richards seems to offer strong support to my thesis about the unity (latitudinal unity) of philo-sophy: for the problems which emerge about meaning are plainly problems in psychology and metaphysics, and I hope that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value.

(1) The first difficulty relates to the alleged ly dubious admissibility of propositions as entities: 'In the explication of utterance-type meaning. what does the variable "p" take as values? The values of "p" are theobjects of meaning, intention, and belief-propositions, to call them by their traditional name. But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory of meaning to give an account of what propositions are?.. + Much of the recent history of philosophy of language consists of attacks on or defences of various conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the relation of thought and language to reality... How can Grice offer an explication of utterance-type meaning that simply takes the notion of a proposition more or less for granted?'

A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition of meaning which I would be willing to countenance, the letters 'p', q', etc. operate simply as 'gap signs; if they appear in a definiendum they will reappear in the corresponding definiens. If someone were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to feel F is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is or might be F. it would surely be ridiculous to criticize him on the grounds that he had saddled himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. If quantifiers are covertly involved at all, they will only be universal quantifiers which could in such a case as this be adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. My situation vis-a-vis propositions is in no way different.

Moreover, if this last part of the cited objection is to be understood as suggesting that philosophers have been most concerned with the characterization of the nature of propositions with a view to using them, in this or that way, as a key to the relationships between language. thought, and reality, I rather doubt whether this claim is true, and if it is true, I would regard any attempt to use propositions in such a manner as a mistake to which I have never subscribed. Propositions should not, I think, be viewed as tools, gimmicks, or bits of apparatus designed to pull off the metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality. The furthest I would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a proposition, and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of propositions would undermine the enterprise within which they made an appearance.

It is, however, not apparent to me that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over my head. In my most recently published work onmeaning (Meaning Revisited, 1981), I do in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for between language, thought, and reality, and offer three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, rational enterprises could be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences between the members of any pair selected from this trio. I suggest that without correspondences between thought and reality, individual members of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, or function of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another; that, without correspondences between language and thought, communication, and so the rational conduct of life, would be eliminated; and that without direct correspondence between language and reality over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for beliefs to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us. So far as I can see, the foregoing justification of this acceptance of the correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the reality of propositions; and should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption

—then the very surreptitiousness of the commitment would indicate to me the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.

Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to propositions in no way frightens me or repels me; and if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what propositions are, 1 think this obligation could be discharged. It might, indeed, be possible to discharge it in more than one way. One way would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of simple statements, the formulation of which would involve no connectives or quantifiers, and treating each of these as 'expressing' a propositional complex, which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be first a general item (a set, or an attribute, according to preference) and second a sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item. Thus the propositional complex associated with the sentence, John is wise', might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first (general' member would be the set of wise persons, or (alternatively) the attribute wisdom, and whose second('instantial' or 'particular") member would be John or the singleton of John; and the sentence, 'Martha detests Mary', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is detestation (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of Martha and Mary, in that order. We can define a property of factivity which will be closely allied to the notion of truth! a (simple) propositional complex will be factive just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate predication relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.

Propositions may now be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes, and the conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context, This idea will in a moment be expanded.

The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise will begin with the problems of handling connectives and of handling quantification. In the present truncated context I shall leave the first problem on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification. A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object; to the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as the altogether grasshopper [boy, girl| and the one-al-a-time grasshopper [boy, girlf. We shall now stipulate that an

'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate. So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green, and we can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respec-lively) the statement that all grasshoppers are green and the statement that some grasshopper is green.

The apparatus which I have just sketched is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification. Itwill not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification; it will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement

'Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant. To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for semantic purposes, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl; and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems not to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its semantic function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value. But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus; it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quanti-fiers. The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects which it invokes as metaphysically disreputable.

Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, I think that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available. The one which I have immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme. The new proposal, like its predeces-sor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a subject-item and a predicate-item, and will, there-fore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification. Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow individual objects, like grasshoppers, girls, and boys, to appear as elements in propositional complexes, such elements will always be sets or attributes, Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, I think, available, I shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.

According to this version, we associate with the subject-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order. If thesubject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name. The treatment of singular terms which are not names will be parallel, but is here omitted. If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the predicate to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper. If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached; thus the correlate of the phrase

'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.

Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions. It now remains to specify the predication-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be factive. A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element; so if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), then the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence every grasshopper is green') will be factive.

A dozen years or so ago, I devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and 1 convinced myself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of 'mixed' quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which I shall not here discuss. Before moving on, however, I might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal. First, employing a strategy which

might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements. Second, individual names are in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic. Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions:as I envisage them, propositions will be regarded as families of propositional complexes. Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinet from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence Not every grasshopper is not witty'; indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex.

The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine propositional identity remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose.

It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched. We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of propositions used to be that propositions are needed to give us something for logic to be about; sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of language.

Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards propositions if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.

If our thought proceeds along these lines, propositions might be needed not just as pegs (so to speak) for logical laws to hang from, but as things whose nature determines the content of the logical system. It might even be possible (as George Myro has suggested to me) to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of propositions; perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display propositions as the bearers of logical properties and another to display them in their role as contents, or objects of propositional attitudes. How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear; but whatever might be the difficulties of implementa-tion, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, "What are propositions?", not by identificatory dissec tion but rather by pointing to the work that propositions of their very nature do.

1 have little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on somefundamental issues in metaphysical methodology. What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respect-ability? What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing? What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output? Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?

Two further objections cited by Richards may be presented together (in reverse order), since they both relate to my treatment of the idea of linguistic procedures'. One of these objections disputes my right, as a philosopher, to trespass on the province of linguists by attempting to deliver judgement, either in specific cases or even generally, on the existence of basic procedures underlying other semantic procedures which are, supposedly, derivative from them. The other objection starts from the observation that my account of linguistic communication

involves the attribution to communicators of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning the procedures possessed and utilized by their conversational partners, notes that these steps and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness, and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit rather than explicit. Richards suggest that answers to these objections can be found in my published and unpublished work.

Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to me with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reason-ing. which Richards illustrate by drawing on as yet unpublished work, is involved in meaning, is something which can be made plausible by philosophical methods-by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we talk and think' (p. 13 of this book). Now I certainly hope that philosophical methods can be effective in the suggested direction, which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered. But I think that I would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines. Certainly the specification of some particular set of procedures as the set which governs the use of some particular langauge, or even as a set which participates in the governance of some group of languages, is a matter for linguists except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principles. But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do,and indeed must, operate in the use of any language whatsoever. Now one might argue for the existence of such a body of principles on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible linguistic performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of primitive procedures in accordance with the general principles in question.

One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in these general principles, is guaranteed by metaphysical considerations, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between

linguistic categories on the one hand and metaphysical, or real categories on the other. I will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.

As regards the second objection, I must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply Richards envisage me as wishing to make, but I will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of their view. They first very properly refer to my discussion of 'incomplete reasoning in my John Locke Lectures, and discover there some suggestions which, whether or not they supply necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition; the suggested conditions are that the implicit reasoner intends that there should be some valid supplementation of the explicitly present material which would justify the 'conclusion' of the incomplete reasoning, together perhaps with a further desire or intention that the first intention should be causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner's belief in the aforementioned conclusion.

Richards are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for implicit reasoning has been provided; indeed, I never supposed that 1 had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of my John Locke Lectures is published. Richards then bring to bear some further material from my writings, and sketch, on my behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern: (I) That we should be equipped to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions is something which could be given a genitorial justification; if the Genitor were constructing human beings with an eye to their own good, the institution in us of a capacity to deployM-intentions would be regarded by him with favour. (2) We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions.

1. The attribution of M-intentions to others will at least sometimes have explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum.
2. The exercise of rationality takes place primarily or predominantly in the confirmation or revision of previously established beliefs or practices; so it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal or optimal to be standard procedure in rational beings. (5) We have, in our repertoire of procedures available to us in the conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal or optimum as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal or optimum in question.

So (6) it is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way. We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the 'primitive step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the 'approximators' as implicit rather than explicit.

Now whether or not it was something of this sort which Richards had it in mind to attribute to me, the argument as I have sketched it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration; it brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of mine, and exerts upon me at least, some degree of seductive appeal. But whether I would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, I am not sure. There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought. Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to the reader to judge how closely what I say when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of Richards. I would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.

(1) There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the casethat, typically, one first learns what it is to be a @ and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good o from a @ which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good o, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good o will qualify an item as a p; if the gap between some item x and good ps is sufficently horrendous, then x is debarred from counting as a @ at all, even as a bad p. I have elsewhere called concepts which exhibit this feature value-oriented concepts. One example of a value-oriented concept is the concept of reasoning: another, I now suggest, is that of sentence.

(2) It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts

(Ф.. Ф2. ...Ф.) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts (Фі, Ф2.. + • n), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept a if and only if a satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept '. We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another.

1. If p is value-oriented concept then a potentiality for making or producing ds is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ps, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity; it may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives. like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess.
2. I am strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Such a principle would state that where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcomes, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, will involve an expenditure of time and energy, then if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcomes as the ratiocinative procedure, then provided the stakes are not too high it will be rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination. I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise.
3. On the assumption that it is characteristic of reason to operate on pre-rational states which reason confirms, revises, or even (some-times) eradicates, such opportunities will arise, provided the rational creatures can, as we can, be trained to modify the relevant pre-rational states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creatures

can be more or less reliably led by those pre-rational states to the thoughts or actions which reason would endorse were it invoked; with the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, the voice of reason being heard. Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence: The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician. Similar considerations apply to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory. In both cases the excellence which 1 exhibit is a form of judgement: I am a good judge of mathematical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.

1. That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form; it requires at most that our propensity to produce such transitions be dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly, Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a subterranean ratiocination to account for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a rule-governed language. There are two kinds of magic travel. In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles; in the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go. The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first: but may also be routeless like the second.
2. But problems still remain. Deductive systems concocted by professional logicians vary a good deal as regards their intuitiveness: but with respect to some of them (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case could be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors the procedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases. But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances.

They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences, together with acceptable interpretations ofeach (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the produc tion of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.

That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select. and criticize linguistic performances; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.

There is one further objection, not mentioned by Richards, which seems to me to be one to which I must respond. It may be stated thus:

One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning Is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances; there are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning was designed to allow for the possibility that non-linguistic and indeed non-conventional 'utterances', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do. To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending. should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language. Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending. Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day; but unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough. For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of Schifferian counter-examples. I have been led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to M-intentions; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature. So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison-d'etre of the campaign.

A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and innocuous circularity, to which I shall refer again a little later. According to my most recent speculations about meaning, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nestedM-intention which is deemed to be present). The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto; in which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose. At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise. Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language. But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about.

B2. Metaphysies, Philosophical Psychology, and Value

In this final section of my Reply to Richards, I shall take up, or take off from, a few of the things which they have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of this section. I shall be concerned less with the details of their account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them. Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal; in any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings. I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines. I might add that something has already been said in the previous section of this Reply about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my 1983 Carus lectures. So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here 1 concentrate primarily on metaphysics. I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.At the outset of their comments on my views concerning meta-physics, Richards say, 'Grice's ontological views are at least liberal'; and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.' I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima. The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology. Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology? Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term "metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?

If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it. That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical under-taking, which I will with striking originality call First Philosophy, is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate, and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics! I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another. One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory. The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might

• In these reflections I have derived much benefit from discussions with Alan Code.turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics. It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.

A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us. We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us. Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on.

I have at this point three comments to make. First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogi-cal in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus, In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.

Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.

Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained.

Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, forexample, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded. But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion, Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics. But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality. In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics. Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics. It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics.

The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach. The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements. That is, of course, a rhetorical plea. but perhaps such pleas have their place.

But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties. Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? *We"? But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way? And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often? These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not. I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless. How could such entities have construction dates?

Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towardsthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.

Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.

gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are notthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.

Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.

gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are nottwo parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones.

Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory develop-ment. A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call overlaps'. It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers. But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap. Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory. We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes; we can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories.

Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics. One can only reach a proper understanding of metaphysical concepts like law or cause if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between natural laws and non-natural laws (like those of legality or morality). "How is such and such a range of uses of the word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking.

I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago. Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to con-structivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, unconstructed section? I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question. The forthright contention that if there is a realm of constructs there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it. But I am by no means sure that it is correct. I am led to this uncertainty initially by thefact that when I ask myself what classes of entities I would be happy to regard as original and unconstructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer. Certainly not common objects like tables and chairs; but would I feel better about stuffs like rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof? I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic yes!' Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-construets. It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call ontological schemes in which categories of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within two different schemes with different ordering, what is primitive in one scheme being non-primitive in the other, and that this might occur whether the ordering relations employed in the construction of the two schemes were the same or different. We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness. All we would use would be the relative notion of primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme. There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality: but the application of this concept would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme. I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines.

The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, unconstructed, area of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysics are likely to be peppered with allegations of circu-larity: and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysics who gave serious attention to the methodology of his discipline. Where are the first principles of First Philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast. In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of real or apparent circularity, and to distinguish those forms, if any, which are innocuous from those which are deadly.

To this end I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of priority with a view to deciding when the suppositionthat A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of priority.

Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include logical priority. definitional or conceptual priority, epistemic priority, and priority in respect of value. I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prioritym of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorityn of B to A. It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of conceptual priority, the legal concept of right is prior to the moral concept of right: the moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept. But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valua-tionally prior to the legal concept; the range of application of the legal concept ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the moral concept. Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions. It might be, perhaps, that the properties of sense-data, like colours (and so sense-data themselves), are posterior in one sense to corresponding properties of material things, (and so to material things themselves); properties of material things, perhaps, render the properties of sense-data intelligible by providing a paradigm for them. But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of material things and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally explicable in terms of sense-data and their properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the aforementioned conceptual priority in the reverse direction. It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed in the business of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as Bootstrap. The principle laid down that when one is introducing the primitive concepts of a theory formulated in an object language, one has freedom to use any battery of concepts expressible in the meta-language, subject to the condition that counterparts of such concepts are subsequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language. So the more economically one introduces the primitive object-language concepts, the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow.

I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question ofhow metaphysical principles are ultimately to be established. A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argu-ment, one that has been called by Kant and by various other philosophers since Kant a transcendental argument. Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argu-ment. Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis or category of items as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep; and the practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or (the existence of) language, perhaps lends some colour to this approach. My view (and my view of Kant) takes a different tack. One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that Transcendental Argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such an argument aims at establishing. Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of rationality, or the notion of a rational being.

Precisely what remedy I should propose for these omissions is far from clear to me; I have to confess that my ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state. But I will do the best I can.

I suspect that there is no single characterization of Transcendental Arguments which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind; indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of Transcendental.

(1) One pattern fits Descartes's cogito argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic. This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt; and it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self. destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that he does not exist), and on the other hand the possession by his act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character (being the expression of a doubt) which it not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have. It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression ofdoubt the exercise of rationality will be impossible; but while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument.

1. Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what I might call 'epistemological nominalism'; that is against someone who proposes to admit ys but not xs on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys but not for anything like xs, which supposedly go beyond ys; we can, for example, allow sense-data but not material objects, if they are thought of as 'over and above' sense-data; we can allow particular events but not, except on some minimal interpretation, causal connections between events. The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy; that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure; if material objects or causes go, sense-data and datable events go too. In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of the third pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of rationality will have to go.
2. A third pattern of argument might contend from the outset that if such-and-such a target of the sceptic were allowed to fall, then something else would have to fall which is a pre-condition of the exercise of rationality; it might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever.

It is plain that arguments of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-conditon of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic. But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect. Some less ambitious arguments might threaten a local breakdown of rationality, a breakdown in some particular area. It might hold, for instance, that certain sceptical positions would preclude the possibility of the exercise of rationality in the practical domain. While such arguments may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality; he may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason from the area of action. The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of rationality; and here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail.A very important feature of these varieties of 'transcendental argument (though I would prefer to abandon the term 'transcendental and just call them 'metaphysical arguments') may be their connection with practical argument. In a broadened sense of 'practical', which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any attitude or stance which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted; alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain or likely to be true. But sometimes we are led to rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by considerations other than the likelihood of its truth. Things that are matters of faith of one sort of another, like fidelity of one's wife or the justice of one's country's cause, are typically not accepted on evidential grounds but as demands imposed by loyalty or patriotism; and the arguments produced by those who wish us to have such faith may well not be silent about this fact. Metaphysical argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with these examples of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith. In the metaphysical region, too, the practical aspect may come first; we must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of rationality. But in the case of metaphysical argument the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability. Proof of the pudding comes from the need to eat it, not vice versa. These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some people, including myself, have felt with respect to transcendental arguments. It has seemed to me, in at least some cases, that the most that such arguments could hope to show is that rationality demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis.

This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted.

It is now time for me to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical construction is effected, and I shall attempt to sketch three of these. But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such construction routines. It is pretty obvious that metaphysical construction needs to be disciplined, but this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all. The list of available routines determines what metaphysical construction is; so it is no accident that itemploys these routines. This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to me, and to others, as a difficult problem in the methodology of metaphysics, namely, how are we to distinguish metaphysical construction from scientific construction of such entities as electrons or quarks? What is the difference between hypostasis and hypothesis?

Tha answer may lie in the idea that in metaphysical construction, including hypostasis, we reach new entities (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose them to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical construction; when we are scientists and hypothesize, we do not rely on these routines at least in the first instance; if at a later stage we shift our ground, that is a major theoreti. cal change.

I shall first introduce two of these construction routines; before I introduce the third I shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to my task in other ways. The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call Humean Projection.

Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about "the mind's propensity to spread itself on objects'; but he seems to regard it as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, our nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason. In my version of the routine, one can distinguish four real or apparent stages, the first of which, perhaps, is not always present. At this first stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by the word 'or' or "not', or (to take a concept relevant to my present under-takings) the concept of value. We can think of these initial items as, at this stage, intuitive and unclarified elements in our conceptual vocabu-lary. At the second stage we reach a specific mental state, in the specification of which it is possible though maybe not necessary to use the name of the initial concept as an adverbial modifier, we come to 'or-thinking' (or disjoining), "not-thinking' (or rejecting, or denying), and

'value-thinking' (or valuing, or approving). These specific states may be thought of bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concepts. At the third stage, reference to these specific states is replaced by a general (or more general) psychologial verb together with an operator corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in sub-clauses. So we find reference to "thinking p or q' or 'thinking it valuable to learn Greek'. At the fourth and last stage, the restriction imposedby the demand that the operators at stage three should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb is removed; there is no limitation on the appearance of the operation in subordinate clauses.

With regard to this routine I would make five observations:

1. The employment of this routine may be expected to deliver for us, as its end-result, concepts (in something like a Fregean sense of the word) rather than objects. To generate objects we must look to other routines.
2. The provision, at the fourth stage, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operators which correspond to the initial concepts is possible only via the provision of truth-conditions, or of some different but analogous valuations, for statements within which the operators appear. Only thus can the permissible complexities be made intelligible.
3. Because of (2), the difference between the second and third stages is apparent rather than real. The third stage provides only a notational variant of the second stage, at least unless stage four is also reached.
4. It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine must not be merely formal or arbitrary. The invocation of a subsequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for.
5. Subject to these provisos, application of this routine to our initial concept (putting it through the mangle') does furnish one with a metaphysical reconstruction of that concept; or, if the first stage is missing, we are given a metaphysical construction of a new concept.

The second construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and categories, and I will present my version of it as briefly as I can. Perhaps its most proper title would be Category Shift, but since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing new objects, new subjects of discourse, by a procedure reminiscent of the linguists' operation of nominalization, I might also refer to it as sub-jectification (or, for that matter, objectification). Given a class of primary subjects of discourse, namely substances, there are a number of

*slots' (categories) into which predicates of these primary subjects may fit; one is substance itself (secondary substance), in which case the predication is intra-categorial and essential; and there are others into which the predicates assigned in non-essential or accidental predication may fall; the list of these would resemble Aristotle's list of quality,quantity, and so forth. It might be, however, that the members of my list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, would not be fully co-ordinate: the development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows; we might for example have to develop first the category of arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to (quantity) and non-quantitative attribute (quality), or again the category of event before the subordinate category of action.

Now though substances are to be the primary subjects of predication, they will not be the only subjects. Derivatives of, or conversions of, items which start life (so to speak) as predicable, in one non-substantial slot or another, of substances, may themselves come to occupy the first slot; they will be qualities of, or quantities of, a particular type or token of substantials: not being qualities or quantities of substances, they will not be qualities or quantities simpliciter. (It is my suspicion that only for substances, as subjects, are all the slots filled by predicable items.) Some of these substantials which are not substances may derive from a plurality of items from different original categories; events, for example, might be complex substantials deriving from a substance, an attribute, and a time.

My position with regard to the second routine runs parallel to my position with regard to the first, in that here too I hold strongly to the opinion that the introduction of a new category of entities must not be arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely a way of speaking. What sort of motivation is called for is not immediately clear; one strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up new applications for existing modes of explanation: it may be, for example, that the substantial introduction of abstract entities, like properties, makes possible the application to what Kneale called secondary induc-tion' (Probability and Induction, p. 104 for example), the principles at work in primary induction. But it is not only the sort but the degree of motivation which is in question. When I discussed metaphysical argument, it seemed that to achieve reality the acceptance of a category of entities had to be mandatory: whereas the recent discussion has suggested that apart from conformity to construction-routines, all that is required is that the acceptance be well-motivated? Which view would be correct? Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency? Or is there just one sort of admission require-ment, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?Before characterizing my third construction-routine I must say a brief word about essential properties and about finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular, but for which I want to find metaphysical room. In their logical dress, essential properties would appear either as properties which are constitutive or definitive of a given, usually substantial, kind; or as individuating properties of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would lose its identity, its existence, and indeed itself. It is clear that if a property is one of the properties which define a kind, it is also an individuating property of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist. (A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the third construction routine might require, we subscribed to the Grice-Myro view of identity.) Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio temporal continuity as a definitive property for substantial kinds, indeed for all substantial kinds.

But there is another more metaphysical dress which essential properties may wear. They may appear as Keynesian generator-properties,

*core' properties of a substantive kind which co-operate to explain the phenomenal and dispositional features of members of that kind. On the face of it this is a quite different approach; but on reflection I find myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear. Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorizing which is not too sophisticated and mathematicized, as maybe these days the physical sciences are, the logically essential properties and the fundamentally explanatory properties of a substantial kind come together; substances are essentially (in the logical' sense) things such that in circumstances C they manifest feature F, where the gap-signs are replaced in such a way as to display the most basic laws of the theory.

So perhaps, at this level of theory, substances require theories to give expression to their nature, and theories require substances to govern them.

Finality, particularly detached finality (functions or purposes which do not require sanction from purposers or users), is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with final causes. I am somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of superstitions and priesteraft. That, in my view, it is certainly not; the concepts andvocabulary of finality, operating as if they were detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedures for recognizing and describing what goes on around us. This point is forcibly illustrated by William Golding in The Inheritors. There he describes, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people. In the description functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age couple is vividly shared by the reader. Now finality is sometimes active rather than passive; the finality of a thing then consists in what it is supposed to do rather than in what it is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not dependent on some ulterior end which the thing is envisaged as realizing. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous to the thing. And sometimes the finality of a thing is not subordinate to the finality of some whole of which the thing is a component, as the finality of an eye or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which it belongs. When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these overlapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality; and I shall also on occasion call it a métier. I will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous finality, which may attach to sub-stances, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous, and which will attach to the conception of kinds of substance or of other constructed entities. The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manœuvre. It is this latter kind of finality which I have been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of construction-routines.

Now it is my position that what I might call finality-features, at least if they consist in the possession of autonomous finality, may find a place within the essential properties of at least some kinds of substances (for example, persons). Some substances may be essentially 'for doing such and such'. Indeed I suspect we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous finality not merely can fall within a substances essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature. If a substance has a certain métier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier, but it does have to be equipped with the motivation to fulfil the métier

should it choose to follow that motivation. And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, that motivation must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the métier would be in line with its own essential nature. But however that may be, once we have finality features enrolled among the essential properties of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory or system of conduct for that kind of substance, which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's essential descriptive properties.

I can now give a brief characterization of my third construction-

routine,

which is called Metaphysical Transubstantiation. Let us suppose that the Genitor has sanctioned the appearance of a biological type called Humans, into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called Rationality, perhaps on the grounds that this would greatly assist its possessors in coping speedily and resourcefully with survival problems posed by a wide range of environments, which they would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain themselves in. But, perhaps unwittingly, he will thereby have created a breed of potential metaphysicians; and what they do is (so to speak) to reconstitute themselves. They do not alter the totality of attributes which each of them as humans possess, but they redistribute them; properties which they possess essentially as humans become properties which as substances of a new psychological type called persons they possess accidentally; and the property or properties called rationality, which attaches only accidentally to humans, attaches essentially to persons. While each human is standardly coincident with a particular person (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that person are no longer identical, when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist. But though logic is insufficient, it may be that other theories will remedy the deficiency. Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the humans (or persons) should have wanted to bring off this feat of transubstantiation will have to be left open until my final section, which I have now reached.

My final undertaking will be an attempt to sketch a way of providing metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which I have been presenting, for a reasonably unimpoverished theory of value;

I shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with unsolvedproblems and unformulated supporting arguments. What I have to offer will be close to and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as the content of my third Carus Lecture (original version, 1983). Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle, It involves six stages.

(1) The details of the logic of value-concepts and of their possible relativizations are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog; so I shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, I regard as two distinct dichotomies. First, there is a dichotomy between value-concepts which are relativized to some focus of relativization and those which are not so relativized, which are absolute. If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a typewriter is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type. With regard to this dichotomy I am inclined to accept the following principles. First, the presence in me of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a

"bite" on me, that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value-concept to me does, or should, carry weight for me; only if I care for my aunt can I be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden. Second, the fact that a relativized value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on my part for the focus of relativization, engages me does not imply that the original relativization has been cancelled, or rendered absolute. If my concern for your health stimulates in me a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medica-tion, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still relativized to your health; without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a transmitting relation which links thecurrent bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants'. In the case of the transmission of relativized value-concepts, the transmitting relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the relation which is embodied in the relativization, The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to promise-keeping or to my keeping a promise, and to attach indirectly or by transmission to my digging your garden for you, should that be something which I have promised to do; it would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and indirectly or by transmission to the payment of doctor's bills, an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativizing relation are one and the same.

(2) The second stage of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention.

It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value then the notion of finality would be in a certain sense dispensable; and further, that if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of attributions of relativized value, is mechanistic-ally substitutable'; that is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics and on the fact that the non-pursuit of certain goals such as survival and reproduction is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanations are replaceable by, or reinterpretable as, explanations of a sort congenial to mechanists.

But if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwick-ian in character, then it is required that it be supported by a kind of finality which extends beyond the 'overlap' with mechanistically substitutable finality; autonomous finality will be demanded and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so, as will shortly be indicated, he is committed to a denial of absolute value.

(3) That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand. To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion, though it makes a move in that direction. It is rather to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be true that the notion is acceptable. There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this desire. It might be that we feel a need to appeal to absolute value in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (forexample) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself.

Or again, it might be that, by Leibnizian standards for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires relatively simple principles, is richer and so better than one which does not.

But granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limits are imposed by metaphysical constructions already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimize the conception of absolute value; what it is proper to believe to be true may depend in part on what one would like to be true. Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of positive freedom, a dignity which as rational beings we enjoy, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of rationality, to fix its rules as well. In any case a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safeguard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one. I have some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with my earlier ideas about the quasi-practical character of metaphysical argument.

1. On the assumption that the operation of Metaphysical Transub-stantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of biological creatures has been 'invented' into a class of psychological substances, namely persons, who possess as part of their essential nature a certain métier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of rationality, and who have only to recognize and respect a certain law of their nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realize their métier. The degree to which they fulfil that métier will constitute them good persons (good qua' persons); and while the reference to the substantial kind persons undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization.
2. Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of substances, the way is opened for the appearance of transmitting relationships which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to suitably qualified non-substantial aspects if members of a kind, such as actions and characteristies. While it cannot be assumed that persons will be the only original instances of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instances there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Humean

Projection. It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Humean Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in Aristotelian style, to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge; and a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating in conditions of freedom. Cats, adorable as they may be, will be less productive sources of such extension than persons.

(6) In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to persons as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value. Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements.

Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems. I do not find this thought daunting.

If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same old problems it would not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries  up. H. P. Grice.