I shall conclude this Epilogue by paying a little attention to the general character of my attitude to ordinary language. In order to fulfill this task, I should say something about what was possibly the most notable corporate achievement of my philosophical early middle age, namely the so-called method of linguistic botanizing, treated, as it often was in Oxford at the time, as a foundation for conceptual analysis in general and philosophical analysis in particular. Philosophers have not seldom proclaimed the close connection between philosophy and linguistic analysis, but so far as I know, the ruthless and unswerving association of philosophy with the study of ordinary language was peculiar to the Oxford scene, and has never been seen anywhere before or since, except as an application of the methods of philosophizing which originated in Oxford. A classic miniature example of this kind of procedure was Austin's request to Warnock to tell him the difference between playing golf correctly and playing golf properly. But also the method was commonly deployed not merely as a tool for reaching conceptual "fine-tuning" with regard to pairs of expressions or ideas, but in larger-scale attempts to systematize the range of concepts which appear in a certain conceptual region. It may well be the case that these concepts all fall under a single overarching concept, while it is at the same time true that there is no single word or phrase which gives linguistic expression to just this concept; and one goal of linguistic botanizing may be to make this concept explicit and to show how the various subordinate concepts fall under it. This program is closely linked with Austin's ideas about the desirability of ture of the method is that no initial assumptions are made about the subdivisions involved in subordinate lexical entries united by a single word; "true friends," "true statements," "true beliefs," "true bills,"

"true measuring instruments," "true singing voices" will not be initially distinguished from one another as involving different uses of the word "true"; that is a matter which may or may not be the outcome of the operation of linguistic botanizing; subordinations and subdivisions are not given in advance. It seems plausible to suppose that among the things which are being looked for are linguistic proprieties and improprieties: and these may be of several different kinds; so one question which will call for decision will be an identification of the variety of different ways in which proprieties and improprieties may be characterized and organized. Contradictions, incoherences, and a wealth of other forms of unsuitability will appear among the out-comes, not the starting points, of linguistic botanizing, and the nature of these outcomes will need careful consideration. Not only may single words involve a multitude of lexical entries, but different idioms and syntactical constructions appearing within the domain of a single lexical entry may still be a proper subject for even more specific linguistic botanizing. Syntax must not be ignored in the study of se-mantics.

At this point we are faced with two distinct problems. The first arises from the fact that my purpose here is not to give a historically correct account of philosophical events which actually took place in Oxford some forty years ago but rather to characterize and as far as possible to justify a certain distinctive philosophical methodology.

Now there is little doubt that those who were engaged in and possibly even dedicated to the practice of the prevailing Oxonian methodol-ogy, such persons as Austin, Ryle, Strawson, Hampshire, Urmson, Warnock, and others (including myself) had a pretty good idea of the nature of the procedures which they were putting into operation; indeed it is logically difficult to see how anyone outside this group could have had a better idea than the members of the group since the procedures are identifiable only as the procedures which these people were seeking to deploy. Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether the course of actual discussions in every way embodied the authentic methodology, for a fully adequate implementation of that methodology requires a good and clear representation of the methodology itself; the more fragmentary the representation the greater the chance of inadequate implementation; and it must be admitted

"going through the dictionary." In some cases, this may be quite a long job, as for example in the case of the word "true"; for one fea-that the ability of many of us to say at the time what it was that we were doing was fragmentary in the extreme. This may be an insoluble problem in the characterization of this kind of theoretical activity; to say what such an activity is presupposes the ability to perform the activity in question; and this in turn presupposes the ability to say what the activity in question is.

The second and quite different problem is that some of the critics of Oxonian philosophizing like Russell, Quine and others have exhibited strong hostility not indeed in every case to the idea that a study of language is a prime concern of philosophy, but rather to the idea that it should be a primary concern of philosophy to study ordinary language. Philosophy finds employment as part of, possibly indeed just as an auxiliary of, Science; and the thinking of the layman is what scientific thinking is supposed to supersede, not what it is supposed to be founded on. The issues are obscure, but whether or not we like scientism, we had better be clear about what it entails.

Part of the trouble may arise from an improperly conceived proposition in the minds of some self-appointed experts between "we" and "they"; between, that is, the privileged and enlightened, on the one hand, and the rabble on the other. But that is by no means the only possible stance which the learned might adopt toward the vul-gar; they might think of themselves as qualified by extended application and education to pursue further and to handle better just those interests which they devise for themselves in their salad days; after all, most professionals begin as amateurs. Or they might think of themselves as advancing in one region, on behalf of the human race, the achievements and culture of that race which other members of it perhaps enhance in other directions and which many members of it, unfortunately for them perhaps, are not equipped to advance at all. In any case, to recognize the rights of the majority to direct the efforts of the minority which forms the cultured elite is quite distinct from treating the majority as themselves constituting a cultured elite.

Perhaps the balance might be somewhat redressed if we pay attention to the striking parallels which seem to exist between the Oxford which received such a mixed reception in the mid-twentieth century, and what I might make so bold as to call that other Oxford which, more than two thousand three hundred years earlier, achieved not merely fame but veneration as the cradle of our discipline. The following is a short and maybe somewhat tendentious summary of that earlier Athenian dialectic, with details drawn mostly from Aristotle but also to some extent from Plato and, through Plato, from Socrates himself. In Aristotle's writing the main sources are the beginning of the Topics, the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, and the end of the Posterior Analytics.

1. We should distinguish two kinds of knowledge, knowledge of fact and knowledge of reasons, where what the reasons account for are the facts.
2. Knowledge proper involves both facts to be accounted for and reasons which account for them; for this reason Socrates claimed to know nothing; when we start to research, we may or may not be familiar with many facts, but whether this is so or not we cannot tell until explanations and reasons begin to become available.
3. For explanations and reasons to be available, they must derive ultimately from first principles, but these first principles do not come ready-made; they have to be devised by the inquirer, and how this is done itself needs explanation.
4. It is not done in one fell swoop; at any given stage researchers build on the work of their predecessors right back to their earliest predecessors who are lay inquirers. Such progressive scrutiny is called

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

1. Among the methods used in dialectic (or "argumentation") is system-building, which in its turn involves higher and higher levels of abstraction. So first principles will be, roughly speaking, the smallest and most conceptually economical principles which will account for the data which the theory has to explain.
2. The progress toward an acceptable body of first principles is not always tranquil; disputes, paradoxes, and obstructions to progress abound, and when they are reached, recognizable types of emendation are called upon to restore progress.
3. So the continuation of progress depends to a large extent on the possibility of "saving the phenomena," and the phenomena consist primarily of what is said, or thought, by the Wise and, before them, the Many.

I find it tempting to suppose that similar ideas underlie the twen-tieth-century Oxonian dialectic; the appeal to ordinary language might be viewed as an appeal to the ultimate source of one, though not of every, kind of human knowledge. It would indeed not be surprising were this to be so, since two senior Oxonians (Ryle and Aus-tin) were both skilled and enthusiastic students of Greek philosophy.

But this initially appealing comparison between what I have been calling Oxonian Dialectic and Athenian Dialectic encounters a serious objection, connected with such phrases as "what is said" (ta le-gomena, ta heyóuena). The phrase "what is said" may be interpreted in either of two ways. (I) It may refer to a class of beliefs or opinions which are commonly or generally held, in which case it would mean much the same as such a phrase as "what is ordinarily thought." (II) It may refer to a class of ways of talking or locutions, in which case it will mean much the same as "ways in which ordinary people ordinarily talk." In the Athenian Dialectic we find the phrase used in both of these senses; sometimes, for example, Aristotle seems to be talking about locutions, as when he points out that while it is legitimate to speak of "running quickly" or "running slowly," it is not legitimate to speak of "being pleased quickly" or "being pleased slowly"; from which he draws the philosophical conclusion that running is, while pleasure is not (despite the opinions of some philosophers), a process as distinct from an activity. At other times he uses the phrase "what is said" to refer to certain generally or vulgarly held beliefs which are systematically threatened by a projected direction of philosophical theory, as the platitude that people sometimes behave incontinently seems to be threatened by a particular philosophical analysis of Will, or the near-platitude that friends are worth having for their own sake seems to be threatened by the seemingly equally platitudinous thesis that the Good Life is self-sufficient and lacking in nothing. In the Athenian Dialectic, moreover, though both interpretations are needed, the dominant one seems to be that in which what is being talked about is common opinions, not commonly used locutions or modes of speech. In the Oxonian Dialectic, on the other hand, precisely the reverse situation seems to obtain. Though some philoso-phers, most notably G. E. Moore, have maintained that certain commonly held beliefs cannot but be correct and though versions of such a thesis are discernible in certain Oxonian quarters, for example in Urmson's treatment of Paradigm Case Arguments, no general characterization of the Method of "Linguistic Botanizing" carries with it any claim about the truth-value of any of the specimens which might be subjected to Linguistic Botanizing; nor, I think, would any such characterization be improved by the incorporation of an emendation in this connection. So the harmony introduced by an assimilation of the two Dialectics seems to be delusive.

I am, however, reluctant to abandon the proposed comparison be-tween Oxonian and Athenian Dialectic quite so quickly. I would begin by recalling that as a matter of historical fact Austin professed a strong admiration for G. E. Moore. "Some like Witters" he once said,

"but Moore is my man." It is not recorded what aspects of Moore's philosophy particularly appealed to him, but the contrast with Wittgenstein strongly suggests that Moore primarily appealed to him as a champion of Common Sense, and of philosophy as the source of the analysis of Common Sense beliefs, a position for which Moore was especially famous, in contrast with the succession of less sharply defined positions about the role of philosophy taken up at various times by Wittgenstein. The question which now exercises me is why Moore's stand on this matter should have specially aroused Austin's respect, for what Moore said on this matter seems to me to be plainly inferior in quality, and indeed to be the kind of thing which Austin was more than capable of tearing to shreds had he encountered it in somebody else. Moore's treatments of this topic seem to me to suffer from two glaring defects and one important lacuna. The two glaring defects are: (1) he nowhere attempts to characterize for us the conditions which have to be satisfied by a generally held belief to make it part of a "Common Sense view of the world"; (2) even if we overlook this complaint, there is the further complaint that nowhere, so far as I know, does Moore justify the claim that the Common Sense view of the world is at least in certain respects unquestionably correct. The important lacuna is that Moore considers only one possible position about the relation between such specific statements as that "Here is one human hand and here is another" and the seemingly general philosophical statement that material objects exist. Moore takes it for granted that the statement about the human hands entails the general statement that material objects exist; but as Wittgenstein remarked,

"Surely those who deny the reality of the material world do not wish to deny that underneath my trousers I wear underpants." Moore was by no means certainly wrong on this matter, but the question which comes first, interpretation or the assessment of truth-value, is an important methodological question which Moore should have taken more seriously.

My explanation of part of Austin's by no means wholly characteristic charity lies in my conjecture that Austin saw, or thought he saw, the right reply to these complaints and mistakenly assumed that Moore himself had also seen how to reply to them. I shall develop this suggestion with the aid of a fairy tale about the philosophical Never-Never Land which is inhabited by philosophical fairy god-mothers. Initially we distinguish three of these fairy godmothers, M*, Moore's fairy godmother, A*, Austin's fairy godmother, and G*, Grice's fairy godmother. The common characteristic of fairy godmothers is that they harbor explicitly all the views, whether explicit or implicit, of their godchildren. G* reports to Grice that A* mistakenly attributes to M* a distinction between two different kinds of subjects of belief, a distinction between personal believers who are individual persons or groups of persons, and nonpersonal believers who are this or that kind of abstraction, like the spirit of a particular language or even the spirit of language as such, the Common Man, the inventor of the analytic/synthetic distinction (who is distinct from Leibniz) and so forth. A distinction is now suggested between the Athenian Dialectic, the primary concern of which was to trace the development of more and more accomplished personal believers, and a different dialectic which would be focused on nonpersonal believ-ers. Since nonpersonal believers are not historical persons, their beliefs cannot be identified from their expression in any historical debates or disputes. They can be identified only from the part which they play in the practice of particular languages, or even of languages in general.

So what G* suggested to Grice ran approximately as follows. A*, with or without the concurrence of the mundane Austin, attributed to Moore the recognition of a distinction between personal and non-personal, common or general beliefs, together with the idea that a Common Sense view of the world contains just those nonpersonal beliefs which could be correctly attributed to some favored nonper-sonal abstraction, such as the Common Man. More would of course need to be said about the precise nature of the distinction between the Common Man and other abstractions; but once a distinction has been recognized between personal and nonpersonal believers, at least the beginnings are visible of a road which also finds room for (1) the association of nonpersonal beliefs, or a particular variety of nonper-sonal beliefs, with the philosophical tool or instrument called Common Sense, and for (2) the appeal to the structure and content of languages, or language as such, as a key to unlock the storehouse of Common Sense, and also for (3) the demand for Oxonian Dialectic as a supplementation of Athenian Dialectic, which was directed toward personal rather than nonpersonal beliefs. G* conjectured that this represented Austin's own position about the function of Linguis-tic Botanizing, or even if this were not so, it would have been a good position for Austin to adopt about the philosophical role of Linguistic Botanizing; it would be a position very much in line with Austin's known wonder and appreciation with regard to the richness, subtlety, and ingenuity of the instrument of language. It was however also G*'s view that the attribution of such reflections to Moore would have involved the giving of credit where credit was not due; this kind of picture of ordinary language may have been Austin's but was certainly not Moore's; his conception of Common Sense was deserving of no special praise.

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

Apart from the production, on occasion, of the somewhat opaque suggestion that the grounds for questioning a commonsense belief will always be more questionable than the belief itself, he seems to do little beyond asserting (1) that he himself knows for certain to be true the members of an open-ended list of commonsense beliefs, (2) that he knows for certain that others know for certain that these beliefs are true. But this is precisely the point at which many of his oppo-nents, for example Russell, would be ready to join issue with him.

It might here be instructive to compare Moore with another perhaps equally uncompromising defender of knowledge with certainty, namely Cook Wilson. Cook Wilson took the view that the very nature of knowledge was such that items which were objects of knowledge could not be false; the nature of knowledge guaranteed, perhaps logically guaranteed, the truth of its object. The difficulty here is to explain how a state of mind can in such a way guarantee the possession of a particular truth-value on the part of its object. This difficulty is severe enough to ensure that Cook Wilson's position must be rejected; for if it is accepted no room is left for the possibility of thinking that we know p when in fact it is not the case that p. This difficulty led Cook Wilson and his followers to the admission of a state of "taking for granted," which supposedly is subjectively indistinguishable from ‹nowledge but unlike knowledge carries no guarantee of truth. Bui his modification amounts to surrender; for what enables us to den that all of our so-called knowledge is really only "taking for granted"? But while Cook Wilson finds himself landed with bad an-swers, it seems to me that Moore has no answers at all, good or bad; and whether nonanswers are superior or inferior to bad answers seems to me a question hardly worth debating.

It is in any case my firm belief that Austin would not have been sympathetic toward the attempts made by Moore and some of his followers to attribute to the deliverances of common sense, whatever these deliverances are supposed to be, any guaranteed immunity from error. I think, moreover, that he would have been right in withholding his support at this point, and we may notice that had he withheld support, he would have been at variance with some of his own junior colleagues at Oxford, particularly with philosophers like Urmson who, at least at one time, showed a disposition, which as far as I know Austin never did, to rely on so-called Arguments from Paradigm Cases. I think Austin might have thought, rightly, that those who espoused such arguments were attempting to replace by a dogmatic thesis something which they already had, which was, further-more, adequate to all legitimate philosophical needs. Austin plainly viewed ordinary language as a wonderfully subtle and well-contrived instrument, one which is fashioned not for idle display but for serious (and nonserious) use. So while there is no guarantee of immunity from error, if one is minded to find error embedded in ordinary modes of speech, one had better have a solid reason behind one. That which must be assumed to hold (other things being equal) can be legitimately rejected only if there are grounds for saying that other things are not, or may not be, equal.

At this point, we introduce a further inhabitant of the philosophical Never-Never Land, namely R* who turns out to be Ryle's fairy godmother. She propounds the idea that, far from being a basis for rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction, opposition to the idea that there are initially two distinct bundles of statements, bearing the labels "analytic" and "synthetic," lying around in the world of thought waiting to be noticed, provides us with the key to making the ana-lytic/synthetic distinction acceptable. The proper view will be that analytic propositions are among the inventions of theorists who are seeking, in one way or another, to organize and systematize an initially undifferentiated corpus of human knowledge. Success in this area is a matter of intellectual vision, not of good eyesight. As Plato once remarked, the ability to see horses without seeing horseness is a mark of stupidity. Such considerations as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A*, and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day. H. P.  Grice